How to build a business: Have Fun

Unfortunately, this is one thing many entrepreneurs tend to ignore or completely forget about. Either they take their jobs too seriously or feel that work should not be fun at all. All of the challenges of business building aside, we only have one life. If you aren’t having fun doing what you are doing, you will start to feel bored, exhausted, frustrated, and even angry at work. And since Entrepreneurs tend to spend many hours on their businesses, it’s a terrible way to go through life.

Find more ways to have fun in your business. Remember why you’re doing it in the first place. Here are a bunch of factors to help you determine whether you are having fun at your job:

Are you excited about what you are working on?

This is probably the most important thing when you are trying to work on your business. You need to be really excited about it.

You might be developing a solution to a problem you’ve faced yourself. One of the most popular software people use, Dropbox, was built the for that reason.

Drew used to commute on a bus and would struggle with keeping files synced across his computers. Many SaaS (Software as a service) companies have been created the same way, where founders faced an annoying issue and then decided to build a company around solving that specific problem. Uber was formed founded because Travis couldn’t hail a taxi when he was in Paris.

This doesn’t apply just to Technology sector, it works all over. For example, the popular mattress company Tuft and Needle was formed because the founders were frustrated with the high prices and shoddy quality of mattresses on the market.

Perhaps you relate to a problem facing other people. Many times workers in a given industry realize an issue their customers are facing, so they go ahead and create a separate company which solves those specific problems. Salesforce is one example of this.

Before starting Salesforce, Marc Benioff was a star executive at Oracle but he grew tired of the big company culture and saw that customer needs could be served better by a different company. That led to him starting Salesforce which is now worth more than 50 billion dollars.

Another case is people working with low-income groups coming up with solutions to improves their lives. An example would be Arunachalam Muruganantham from India who was from a poor background and discovered his wife couldn’t afford sanitary napkins, so she used rags and newspapers. Through his research, he found sanitary napkins cost as much as 40 times the value of the raw materials used to make them. So, he set out to build a low-cost manufacturing process to dramatically reduce the costs. He never would have done this had he not faced the problem in his family, especially for subject a taboo subject in India.

Do you enjoy the day-to-day tasks?

For a technology entrepreneur, this could mean the languages and frameworks that they are using. Developers tend to be opinionated on this front and if they do not like the language or framework they are using, they might hate their job.

If the business is building restaurants, this might mean the kind of food they like to cook. If they love BBQ, they might hate making pancakes.

Someone who likes meeting people might like a business that involves a lot of face time with clients over being stuck in a cubicle.

Make sure you’re building a business around day-to-day tasks you actually enjoy doing.

Do you like the people you are working with?

This may sound obvious, but when you are spending a big part of your productive time with someone, it makes a major difference if you actually like them. If there are unnecessary conflicts, a lack of trust, or they make it very difficult to focus on work, I recommend looking into a new partnership. I will touch on building your founding team a bit more later on.