No overnight success

Past the first anniversary of this little venture I have invested my whole life into, Sarjana.co.id, I am scared to death. Scared that it stays little, or that keeping it running would be like feeding a person in a comma with a tube. Sometimes it feels like I am doing everything that I can, but it is still not enough. Some nights, after a full day of "conventional" work, I would stay up re-assessing all the strategies I have implemented and then working on the one that I felt most effective on that night. Waking up the next morning, I knew I had overdone it. 

So all this hard work, that I know will pay off, is really about my too high of expectation for market buy-in. I always thought of Sarjana as a trailblazer that would go out to meet clients where they are and offer services at a very, VERY affordable rates to help them advance in achieving their mission. But of course, my being away from the market for years, with a touch of idealism, has not helped me. Sarjana's good intentions are met with skepticism. 

When I drew a sketch of the business model, I was meeting a huge gap in the market and many unmet needs. These needs as it turns out are not something that the market players realize, and therefore, it has taken us much, much investment in educating the market that the needs exist and that investing in meeting these unrealized needs is crucial not only for themselves, but the future of the market. There are also many reasons why the market gap has persisted for so long; one of them is that it is the education sector, the one sector is that probably the most resistant to change. This sector, in my experience, has always looked back at what has been done and presumably worked.  So buy-in is no child's play!

I found this new journal called Build, 'The Catalog of Ideas', and it's a new fascinating, honest, sharp resource for me. Reality check:

"To achieve even a mere 2 percent market penetration, it typically takes more than five years. .... In Japan, the mean time to takeoff is 5.4 years. In the United States, it's 6.2 years. In China, it's 13.9 years. ..."

Now these figures are for consumer goods. But who am I trying to defy gravity and expect Sarjana to come out on top just in the beginning of year 2?

So the lessons of this reflection are patience (which really means bootstrapping longer) and that "entrepreneurship is not for sissies!". 

Was I ready for this when I started? No way! But this "jadedness" is the fuel for year 2, hopefully through to year 3, during which there will be no overnight success.