I got lots of advice when I was starting my first business, and a lot of it was crap, but that’s okay. I was asking crappy questions; I was a neophyte, that’s what neophytes do. Plus, I was 21, and what does anyone know when they’re 21? Years have passed and it’s not like I morphed into Startup Yoda, but I compare who I am now to the 21-year-old I was when this photo was taken, and I realize that through all the startups and projects I’ve worked with since then, I’ve definitely refined my bullshit radar.

I’m continuing to do that every year and maybe that’s all I ever set out to do in the first place. Bukowski was referring to women, but this line describes how I feel about startups: “The more rivers you crossed, the more you knew about rivers – that is, if you survived the white water and hidden rocks.” There’s a certain sense of faux maturity/accomplishment from being able to look back at certain myths you once accepted as truth and to know that you’ve comfortably outgrown taking them at face value.

Myth 1: Starting a business is for everyone – and it’s fun!

I stopped attending startup workshops because being at them started to feel like I was reading Cosmo: reality is often spliced up as glossy and digestible as opposed to a complicated mess that’s unique and painful and beautiful. I got sick of the fairy-tale that seems so interwoven into the zeitgeist… it’s now annoyingly fashionable to start something, to become someone, to follow the entrepreneurial path as if everyone is suited to it. I really disagree with the notion of, “Just come up with an idea, find customers, and bang! Move over, Zuckerberg!” Few facilitators talk about the realities I’ve witnessed through getting to know Escape members, as well as having experienced some of them myself.

Starting your own venture is meaningful, hell yes, but meaningful pursuits aren’t always fun. You get panic attacks at 3am about money; you sometimes grow apart from people you were once close to; maybe you even have to rely on your parents in a way that makes you uncomfortable. You can find yourself questioning why you’re choosing to take this rocky, wobbly dirt path instead of just hopping on the highway like everyone else. So why do we start businesses? (Well, why do we start any kind of relationship?) I think learning to answer that question (truthfully) is a huge part of the process itself.

Myth 2: If you try hard enough, it’ll work. So just keep persevering!

We’ve all heard that it took Thomas Edison a gazillion attempts before he invented the light bulb, and yeah, good things take time. BUT pursuing a flawed idea and getting dismal results but CONTINUING to pursue the flawed idea without changing course is foolish.

Just because you want something to work, that doesn’t mean that it will work. When you’ve been to private schools your whole life, where everyone’s bending over backwards to make sure you succeed (I went to private schools, so I’m counting myself in that category of the artificially entitled), it can be hard to accept that sometimes, no matter how much you try (or spend)… your attempts still aren’t enough to swing reality your way.

I believe in committing to a vision but iterating the course it takes to get there. This often means swallowing your pride, accepting your limits, and relying on a mixture of data and intuition. There are data-driven methodologies to embarking upon enlightened business model development, as opposed to ‘just sticking with it’ because of a pig-headed determination to succeed at all costs. Those methodologies are outlined in the lean principles made popular by Eric Ries and Steve Blank. Not everyone’s a lean fan, but I certainly am.

Myth 3: If your business plan is strong enough, you can’t fail…

The truth is, no matter what you do, you can still fail. And no amount of conversation or knowledge or love can protect you from that. You can be smart as hell – that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to fail. Business plans and forecasts are guesses. You can refine your accuracy through trial and error, but the key word there is error. You will try things, you will make errors, and that will inform your intelligence.

Your first business plan is unlikely to work out. But your seventeenth, or your twenty-second – that one’s much more likely to be accurate. It took me a few years of working in startups to realize that having a failed startup idea behind you is a badge of honor. (I realize that’s very un-British and hey, I’m not British, so maybe it’s just easier for me to accept that.)

Amateurs are blank slates. Professionals have battle scars. Those battle scars don’t mean that you’re an idiot who couldn’t figure out how to make a business work: they mean that you’ve got guts, that you’ve actually attempted shit, instead of just talking about it, that you’re way more likely to succeed later down the track, because you’ve been humbled and brought down to size.

Myth 4: You need funding to get going.

Unless you’re going into an incubator, your best bet is to bootstrap. Angels and VCs aren’t money-trees and you often need to not need them in order to be considered by them. Bootstrapping means developing a prototype and then using that prototype to independently build an early revenue stream.

If nobody’s pre-ordering or paying you for what you’re trying to sell, and you can’t find early customers, maybe it’s not that the marketing needs tweaking – maybe the customer pain just isn’t what you thought it was. That’s fine. It is what it is. Either change the offering, or change the course you’re on, or change the target customers. I’m pretty sure I read, “Nothing changes if nothing changes” on a running blog, and it was such a simple piece of common sense, but as Carrie-Bradshaw as it sounds, sometimes it’s the most obvious advice that’s the hardest to absorb.

This is part of an ongoing Escape warm-up for our Startup 101 courses – the first ones are on Feb 19th and Feb 25th – check the rest out here. Our courses are delivered by industry leaders from the London startup scene (including venture capitalists, startup lawyers, and practicing entrepreneurs), curated from experience, backed up by loads of reading materials, and created specifically for the Escape community. We’re using online tools to introduce you to classmates before and after the course. We also realize that the price limits some people, so there ARE promo codes and discounts available – any questions, just email me directly: adele@escapethecity.org

Related posts:

1. Last year / this year
2. 10 Tests for your Startup
3. Why is Matthias coming to our startup course?

[Post by Rob Symington (@escroberto), co-founder of Escape the City.]

Friday 17th July 2009 was the last day of my corporate life. 3 years ago today I walked out of the revolving doors at More London Place for the very final time.

I had spent my notice period working on various short-term projects for people (no one wants a consultant who is on their way out to join their project). On the Wednesday night I had worked until 3 am finishing some PowerPoint slides that no doubt never saw the light of day (just in case I was tempted to turn back!).

I resigned with some savings and two plans: 1) to go to Australia and do a wine-making masters (which I couldn’t afford and wasn’t qualified for). And 2) to see if my friend (and colleague) Dom and I could turn an idea called EsctheCity (a community of corporate escapees) into a business.

Later that summer (you’ve got to have some time off don’t you?!) we started this very blog that you’re reading. And three years later, here we are: +75,000 members, a book deal, a base in New York, £600,000 crowdfunded from 385 Escape members, a team of 8 people in a pimp office, and big plans for the future.

Three years ago I would have laughed at you if you’d have told me where we’d be today. I’m writing this post to 1) show you that it is possible and 2) to share what I’ve learnt in this 3-year journey from corporate fugitive to entrepreneur.

What have I learnt over the past 1095 days?

A few of these lessons are applicable for anyone looking to leave their corporate job no matter what their Escape Route (new job, starting a business, big adventure) but most are specifically about building a business.

1. You spend what you have

When I was on a corporate salary I spent what I had each month. When I was existing on savings and part-time tutoring I spent just that. As my salary from Escape the City has (gradually!) increased my spending has more or less kept track. Some people are better with money than me but I’ve found that you spend what you can afford to spend.

2. Fulfilment is stronger than money

I was going to write that “money does not equal happiness” but I don’t think that’s completely true. However, what I have realised from my experience of working in the corporate world (and having more money than ever before) and working as a bootstrapping entrepreneur (and having less money than I did when I was 20) is that working on something that really matters to you can outweigh not having as much money as you did previously.

 3. You’ll never switch off

One of the few mercies of working in a big company is that (by-and-large) you can switch off at the end of the day / week. Yes you might have significant responsibilities, but usually the buck stops with someone else. You just don’t care about a corporate job like you do about your business idea. If you’re mad enough to start a business you’re probably in love with the idea. Be prepared to NEVER stop thinking about it.

4. Be prepared to be bored by your own elevator pitch

The elevator pitch… those three lines that you’re meant to spin off the tongue every time someone asks you the question ‘what do you do?’ You’ll repeat these few words so many times that they’ll cease to have real meaning for you. You’ll get good at it regardless. Sometimes some wanker will trip you up on it. But by and large you’ll become a pro at answering everyone’s questions. It comes with the territory. The alternative is to just say “I’m an accountant” – that usually shuts them up.

5. You’ll have genuine high-five moments

In the early days of starting a business every little victory is worth celebrating. The moment you register with Companies house. The first time someone pays you for something. The first time a stranger emails you out of the blue. Your first bit of press. I personally never had moments like these in corporate land. There is nothing quite like those genuine punch-the-air moments. It feels like anything is possible. It’s nice to have someone to share the joy with too!

6. PR will not make your business

When we started Escape the City we naively thought that if we could ‘just get on page 3 of the Metro’ then we’d be made. 50,000 people would sign up overnight and the business would take off. Over the past three years we’ve been in Forbes, Evening Standard, Time, Business Week, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Times, The Sunday Times, Wired, Fast Company… etc. Yes you sometimes get a good spike in traffic (from online press) but by and large this exposure doesn’t change anything much. It does help credentialise your business and you can add the logos to your home page. That’s about it.

7. There’s no such thing as overnight success

Often people who have recently discovered Escape say to me ‘wow you guys have shot out of nowhere – you must be really pleased’. The reality is that three years of hard graft have got us to where we are today (and there’s still a very long way to go). Many businesses that you know and love today trundled along in relative obscurity for a long time before ‘making it’. I find this reassuring.

8. Saying ‘no’ is really hard

In the early days you’ll be so thrilled to receive emails that you’ll reply to junk-mail. At that stage you’ll follow up every lead and have time to speak to anyone – no matter how tenuous the link to your business. I spent a lot of time fielding phone calls from people trying to buy farms in Wales through Escape the City (it’s still not a bad idea!). However, as you get to a stage where you have clear priorities and more work than you can do in any given day you need to start saying no. Saying no politely but firmly is so much better than saying yes, over-committing and then under-delivering.

9. Look after yourself

This is true for anyone – whether they work in a corporate company or are out there starting their own thing. The bottom line is that our bodies are capable of a lot of hard work if we look after them well. This means getting enough sleep, not handicapping ourselves with hangovers, exercising, eating well, and taking time out. I’ve learnt this the hard way over the past few years with a few moments of exhaustion and burnout. The irony of working harder building Escape the City than we ever did in the corporate world hasn’t escaped us!

10. It’s a very personal journey

I had wrongly assumed that starting a business is a professional / work-related challenge. You have an idea, you work your butt off, you try and turn it into a reality.  The truth is that starting any business is a really personal experience. Try as you might, you’ll identify very closely with your business. It’s your baby, your idea. So when someone criticises it or something goes wrong – you’ll feel like you’re being criticised or something is wrong with you. There’s not much you can do here other than be aware that you’ll learn as much about yourself as you will about business. And to try not to take it personally.

11. Hustle, blag, charm (but keep your integrity)

Starting a business is really fun. You feel like it’s you against the world. Few resources, small team, big idea that you’re passionate about. It’s the classic underdog scenario. It’s also the ideal time to practice all those hustling skills that you never had to learn through your education and career. The ability to ‘Act As If’. Can you sell something you don’t have and then peddle damn hard to deliver it? Use your size as an advantage. You can change direction much faster than your competitors. See it as a game. But never overstep the mark and always tell the truth.

12. Get going with what you’ve got

This is linked to the previous idea but is a really important point so I’ve put it separately. The temptation is always to say ‘oh let’s just wait until we’ve got that bit built’ or ‘we’ll be ready when x, y, or z happens’. The tech version of this advice is ‘Launch Fast Then Iterate’. I think the really important thing is to accept that nothing is going to be perfect and you can usually always change things. Escape the City will probably not ‘be ready’ for the next 10 years. There’s always another improvement. Fight your natural perfectionism and get stuff out there. You’ll fix things quicker if they’re already in public.

13. Get someone to pay you for something

The sooner you can get someone to pay you the better. It doesn’t matter if it’s not in your world-beating business plan. As long as you have enough revenues to cover your base costs (and keep your costs really low) your business won’t die. Isn’t that an exciting thought? Escape the City has enough revenue that we could carry on doing what we’re doing forever (admittedly we probably wouldn’t grow very fast but we’re now potentially infinitely sustainable). So get working towards that first invoice and feel the satisfaction of not needing anyone’s permission to keep going.

14. Absorb as much information as you can

When we were planning our escapes (and after we had made them) we read everything start-up related we could get our hands on. Blogs, books, twitter, movies, events. We immersed ourselves in our subject matter. This did two things: 1) it gave us lots of knowledge to make the many decisions we would have to make and 2) far more importantly, it gave us the confidence that we could actually turn this idea into a success.

15. Go on an information diet if necessary

Having said that, there is a delicate turning point – and you have to really watch out for it – where all the external information can become too much. All the noise and advice can get demoralising. You’ve read everything there is to read and all you want to do is execute on your plans but you’re feeling stuck in a whirlpool of success stories and gurus offering their two cents worth. When this happens just unplug from everything and carry on with your plans.

16. Protect yourself

Linked to the previous point… the world is full of all different types of people. It’s one of the reasons why life is so exciting. Optimists and pessimists, cynics and enthusiasts. I’m sure you know where I’m heading with this one. When you’re starting a business (or making any big life change for that matter) you really need to surround yourself with glass-half-full people. You need all the buoyancy you can get. The tricky thing is that often those closest to you will be the ones telling you that your plans are a bad idea. There’s very little you can do other than tell them that you’re really excited about your plans and that you’d appreciate their support.

17. Don’t just create another job

Enjoy yourself. Presumably you’re quitting your corporate job because you want to do work that matters to you, build something for yourself, and generally appreciate life more. It is very very easy (that easy yes) to fall into your old ways of working. Before you know it you’ve essentially created a job for yourself. Only difference is that your new job sees you sitting at your kitchen table in your pyjamas staring at a brand new Macbook Pro. Give yourself a break. Work from wherever you want. Take random days off just because you can. Work all night and then sleep till lunchtime. Don’t just act like another corporate drone!

18. Accept uncertainty

Those who know me will laugh at the inclusion of this point because I’m not very good at dealing with uncertainty. The good side of this is that I’m always anticipating scenarios and planning. The bad side is that when you take the big leap into the unknown you just can’t know how things are going to turn out. Actually the title of this point shouldn’t be ‘accept uncertainty’ but ‘enjoy uncertainty. Presumably you want to escape a big company because you want excitement and dynamism… you’re fed up with bureaucracy and process? In that case, accept that you can’t control everything. Enjoy the ride.

19. Focus on the next task

From where you’re sitting (or from where I’m sitting)… the thought of ever reaching the point that you’re aiming at (whatever you have defined ‘success’ as) can be very daunting. How many thousands of emails and millions of seconds will have to pass before you have achieved your goals? The best thing to do when you’re taken over by ‘Oh my god this is madness, we’ll never be able to pull this off’ is to focus on the next thing on your to-do list. Actually, before that, make sure you have the right to-do list (it’s so easy to waste time on the wrong things). Be strict with yourself. Then just bash through the tasks.

20. You’ll achieve less in a week than you expect. More in a year.

Someone said this to me a while ago. Can’t remember who so I’ll just have to claim it as my own. It’s very true. I never get through my weekly to-do list. I barely even achieve half of it. Urgent stuff always gets in the way (PS. It’s never usually urgent). However, when you look at where you were a year ago you can feel dizzy with how much things have moved on. The same is true in jobs and careers. Week-by-week you are slowly pushing the big boulder up the hill. Stop and have a think about how far you’ve come… I think you’ll be surprised.

21. Solve a problem.

(Stolen from 5 Made-Up ‘Rules’ For Starting A Business With Little Money & No Relevant Experience): You don’t have to invent the next Dyson hoover to come up with a good business idea. We started Esc on the hunch that people would like it. How did we hope / know people would like it? Because we were our own ideal clients. Scratch your own itch. Another interesting idea is that your business idea should sit at the intersection of 1. Stuff that you enjoy doing, 2. Stuff that you’re good at, and 3. Stuff that people are prepared to pay you for.

22. Do it for ‘Love’ and do it for ‘Freedom’.

It’s all about loving what you do and having the freedom to do it on your own terms. When we escaped we had spent enough time jumping through hoops to realise that we wanted our time to be our own. The only way we could work out how to do this whilst also paying the bills was by starting a business and controlling the means of our own income. Besides, you have to love what you do otherwise you would be able to grit your teeth and get through all the tough times involved with building a business.

23. Define Success

When you’re building a business it’s easy to lose sight of the small victories and the progress that you’re making. The more you achieve / build / survive the more your aspirations accelerate away from you. Every now and then you have to remind yourself what your definition of success is and celebrate the small victories along the way.

24. Make decisions quickly

It’s really easy to agonise over decisions. Sometimes they are worth agonising over. Sometimes you need more information, advice or events need to take place in order for you to make a decision. A few things worth bearing in mind: there is rarely a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decision… there are just different (often multiple) paths that you could take. I suppose this is true for life as well as in business. We’ve found that it’s far better to make a decision and get on with the plan (without looking over your shoulder) than to waste too much time trying to figure out what to do.

25. There is never a right time

You’re either too young and haven’t got enough experience, contacts or money yet. Or you’re too old and you’ve got too many responsibilities, children, a mortgage, and it’s too late to change. Boring!! I’d rather make a bold move and it not work out than regret. OK, I’m paraphrasing Gilbert E. Kaplan: “How much better to know that we have dared to live our dreams than to live our lives in a lethargy of regret.” People will tell you it’s not the right time or you’re not the right person. Ignore them. Embrace the possibility of failure. If not now then when? If not you then who?

 26. Building a life on your own terms is really really really hard

What do you expect? If it was easy everyone would be doing it. ”Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Wise man that Thomas Edison. Keep pushing. If I can do it you can do it.

Thanks for reading this far…

If you’ve read this far I hope you’ve enjoyed the post. Whether or not Escape the City succeeds or fails over the coming years (define success, define failure) it will have been worth it. Aside from all the obvious benefits and experiences… it will have been worth it just for the pure joy of temporarily calling the shots in my own life. We spend so much of our time doing what other people tell us to do. Have you spied an opportunity to live a life on your own terms? Take it.

“You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?” George Monbiot - http://www.monbiot.com/career-advice/

[Got a question? Ask Rob in the comments or ping him on Twitter: @escroberto]

Related posts:

1. 3 things I wish I’d known before escaping
2. What does escaping the city mean to you?
3. Listen up soldier! 3 Army lessons on Escaping the City

5 Things Adele Learned from Last Night’s Esc Wednesday:  ‘How we built our careers around our passions’

Last night deep underground in London’s Adam Street Club, Ben Keene and Dave Cornthwaite, told us their stories.

One of them rented a Fijian island. The other skateboarded from one coast of Australia to another. As you do.

I doubt I was alone in feeling extremely boring in comparison to last night’s awesomely special guest speakers.

[Scroll to the bottom to see details for how to enter the 'Escape List' Adam Street free evening membership life-changing competition!]

Escape the City, Escape Wednesdays from Step One on Vimeo.

So who are these characters?

Ben founded Tribewanted (Fiji and Sierra Leone) – their mission is to build sustainable communities in amazing places that benefit locals and visiting members; inspiring positive change within and far beyond the village. Ben’s website and his Esc Hero profile.

Dave is a world record-breaking adventurer, author, and motivational speaker. He is four journeys into his £1,000,000 Expedition1000 project: 25 x 1000+ mile journeys, each using a different form of non-motorised transport Dave’s website and his Esc Hero profile.

This is what I learnt:

1. You can’t just stumble upon your passion.

Dave talked about how we all have passions. Often, it’s just difficult to figure out what they are. Remaining in the same environment doesn’t bring you different results – you need exposure to the world in order to figure out your place in it. When Dave was 25, he had a house, girlfriend, cat, steady job – but he could help but feel like there was more to life. He had no idea what he was passionate about, but it was travel that changed him.

2. Comfort kills ambition like nothing else.

Dave had studied Maths, gone to university, and was comfortable in his mortgage and with a steady pay cheque – but he soon realised that he had never asked himself what he wanted out of life, what made him happy. Being happy and being comfortable are not the same thing.

3. These things don’t happen overnight.

We all need money to live. Developing your passion and turning it into sustainable revenue is a process that can take years, not months. Dave had been skateboarding for 18 months, from one end to Australia to the other, but had no idea what to do the day after he finished.

Ben: “You can have cool ideas but not know where they’re going… [taking the leap] is the only way you find out. Just by following something and sticking with it… opportunities arise.”

4. Being brave doesn’t protect you from disaster.

Ben had a crazy story about his first three months with Tribewanted – in summary, there was a fire, cyclone, scam accusation, and coup. However, he and the business made it through – and now the episode is a story that he tells at events like last night’s…

I was marvelling at how he just talked about ‘raising finance’ and renting an island’ as if it was as easy as anything else. Then I realised, a lot of things ARE very easy – they’re practical things and can be broken down into steps that need to be taken. It’s emotional fear that gets in our way or makes us think that things are harder than they actually are.

5. Belonging is a human need.

Ben talked about how Tribewanted created a different ‘scene’ in Fiji, one where evenings were spent sitting around the fire, sharing stories and playing guitar and drinking kava. All tourists who came, he said, fell in love with romanticism of belonging to community.

Community – feel like you really belong somewhere and playing your little part. Can live sustainably because you can see it. Idea of belonging was really strong. Different from scene of western definition of Fiji. Real Fiji.

Massive thank you to Ben and Dave for last night’s talk. The Esc team were gutted to have missed it. Looking forward to plenty more in 2012. And thanks to Adele for a great review. Keep an eye on our Events page for 2012′s calendar of events.

How to enter our Escape List competition.

noun - esc·ape list  [esc-ape list, free-dom; Fr. le-escape]

Definition: Product of soul-searching and reflection on personal goals. Separate from ‘bucket list’ concept through the fact that the core objective is to complete tasks on list now, not just before you kick the bucket. An Escape List should be a minimum of ten dreams long, there is no maximum. Thought of each item on list should make list creator smile. Completion of full list should be sufficient to fundamentally shift perspective / make corporate escape a reality.

Each item on list should fall within following categories:

1. Financial: not an amount to earn, but an amount to save to afford item in question. E.g. Ben worked hard and saved enough money to visit a Tribe in Fiji.

2. Physical: opportunity to develop/ continue health and fitness driven by an end goal involving physical challenge. E.g. Dave trained for days in order to skateboard across Australia.

3. Psychological: little to no impact on physical health or financial stability, a psychological item simply offers the list creator a chance to vacate his/her comfort zone. E.g. Seb stayed awake for 72 Hours, just to see if he could.

The rules of the game

UPDATED RULES!! You don’t win by completing your list (although that is the ultimate objective) – post your Escape List below by Friday 9th December and Ben and Dave will decide on the 5 best ones…

1. Post your Escape List in the comments below.
2. Publicly commit to completing the list.
3. Ask for and receive help from the Esc tribe where relevant.
4. Return when list is completed to glory and applause – proof would be nice.
5. Dave & Ben will choose 5 lists to win a year’s free evening membership at Adam Street Club.

A fun way to round off the competition would be to write a guest blog post for Escape the City summarising your experiences in taking on this challenge.

Thanks and good luck! Any questions ping @benkeene, @davecorn or @escthecity on Twitter. Or come leave a message on Facebook. Or comment below.

Related posts:

1. Please come to November’s Esc Wednesday – ‘How we built our careers around our passions’
2. Lessons from Rework
3. Lessons from our speakers – SSYL

All our life we jump through hoops.

Often without asking why.

It’s easy to feel stuck – a small cog in a big machine.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Don’t waste your life living someone else’s.

Don’t wait for permission.

Life is too short to do work that doesn’t matter to you.

Want your memoirs to be worth reading?

Make your choices your own. Be brave. Be inquisitive.

Stop using lack of money or experience as an excuse.

You don’t have to risk it all to explore new options.

You owe it to yourself to find work that makes you tick.

Our world is changing. Careers are changing.

Take advantage or keep your head down. You choose.

The winners are building lives on their own terms.

Take small leaps. Meet people. Ask for help. Save. Plan.

Change jobs. Build businesses. Go on BIG adventures.

Start Something You Love. It’s not easy. Push. Sweat.

No one ever changed the world by toeing the line.

You are capable of more than you realise.

This is no dress rehearsal. Make it count.

There will never be a perfect time.

And the first step is often the hardest.

So Stop Dreaming and Start Planning.

Do Something Different!

————————————

Escape the City

www.escapethecity.org

Related posts:

1. The Escape Manifesto – Discussion #1: An Esc Manifesto (in draft)
2. The Escape Manifesto – Discussion #2: Big Corporates & Fulfilling Work
3. The Escape Manifesto – Discussion #4: Please help us with our book introduction and objectives.

So we’ve now been in New York for a week. It’s pretty surreal and extremely exciting. We’ll be here until Christmas – helping Mikey grow the US escapee community and working our behinds off on the website.

I thought I would write a quick post reflecting on what it feels like to have started a business from our kitchen table that now sees us living in one of the most exciting cities in the world to launch a new arm of our business.

The first thing that struck Dom and me as we waited for a cab at Newark airport (having braved the scary immigration officials) was that when we started Esc we would never have believed someone if they told us that we would be in a position to run Esc from New York within 2 years.

You can do a lot in a year

I think that we often overestimate what we can achieve in any given week but underestimate what we can achieve in a year. When you’re starting your own business the progress that you make on a daily basis often feels painfully slow, and it’s all too easy for the random and minute tasks to absorb your entire focus (and you can easily lose sight of the bigger picture).

Two years ago today Dom was still working as a management consultant, furiously saving as much of his salary for his impending escape. I was just finishing working the wine harvest in Portugal. Escape the City was nothing more than a free blog with a few posts on it. The newsletter was about to be born.

Even one year ago we were in a very different position to where we are now. We had only 16,000 members (compared to almost 45,000 today) and we were still working from our kitchen table (as opposed to the swanky offices we just vacated in Kings Cross). We were still getting to grips with our business model (selling exciting job listings) and wondering whether Esc had legs for the long-term.

Bravery & Rewards

The last thing Dom, Mikey and I ever want to do is sound smug (and the choices that we’ve made to escape the city mean that often it is our friends and ex-colleagues who are better off than us in terms of security and financial stability) but the fact that we have come to work in New York under our own steam is the direct result of a naïve, brave, idealistic and hopeful decision that we made on a park bench in Wimbledon over two years ago.

There are all sorts of cheesy, inspirational quotes about risk vs reward and a ‘just do it’ mentality that often over-simplify complex decision-making processes. However it is true that you’ve got to be in it to win it and the simple fact is that if we hadn’t made the mad/brave/exciting decision to pursue an unrealistic dream – living a life on our own terms whilst building something that helps other people do the same – we wouldn’t be in New York today.

The goon squad - Mikey & Dom outside our local coffee shop

A business is where you design your perfect world.

Like Mikey, I’ve recently really enjoyed reading ‘Anything You Want’ by Derek Sivers and was struck by this line…

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.

It’s true. You get to play and work on your own terms. No more booking in a limited amount of holidays with HR far in advance. No more being held to arbitrary deadlines by senior managers. No more seeing your evenings disappear waiting for a busy partner to ask you to make formatting changes to a PowerPoint deck.

Screenshot - Anything You Want - by Derek Sivers

You get to work on what you want, when you want. You get to say no to some projects and yes to others. You can work till 3 am on a Monday night if you want. But equally you can take a random Wednesday morning off with no guilt. You live life on your own terms.

Make no mistakes – it’s tough.

Don’t get me wrong – while this is the dream, the reality of getting to this point is tough. And we’ve got a long way to go before we have properly finished building our business (and the financial stability that hopefully comes with it).

For all our enthusiastic start-up evangelism… building a business is hard. Really hard. Harder than we realised!

The single biggest challenge with starting your own company is that you accept ultimate responsibility for your income – rather than living under the addictive duvet of a monthly salary.

But all the financial anxiety and hard graft of the past two years is worth it for the prize of living life on our own terms. And moving to New York really feels like a reward at this stage in the journey.

——————————————

All 3 Escape the City team members are now based in New York.

If you feel like helping us out in the Big Apple, or even meeting for a beer, just email us – team@escapethecity.org or let us know via this form.

Going to check out the #occupywallstreet movement this week – blog post to follow.

No related posts.

This is the 15-min talk that I gave last night at the Adam Street Club for Tomax’s ‘From Bathtub to Boardroom’ talk. It was a lot of fun (especially hearing Simon Woodroffe’s story) and I thought I would share my notes with you here. Apparently the guys filmed the evening so I’m sure there’ll be some embarrassing videos being shared in due course.

5 Made-Up ‘Rules’ For Starting A Business With Little Money & No Relevant Experience

Why made-up rules? Because this quote from Al Humphreys is spot on: “Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men” - and we’ve learnt that there is no set way for building a business. Do it your own way.

One of the most rewarding things about starting Escape the City are the amazing messages we get from people who like what we’re doing. We got this one yesterday:

“I have been receiving the Monday morning email updates for a few weeks now and find them really helpful; the ever burgeoning resource of the internet can be so difficult to navigate at times that finding pertinent data can take an age. The top 10 email, apart from reminding me that I need to leave this office malarkey, gives that valuable insight from people who have made the leap and taken the risk. This delivers enough of a prod at the beginning of seemingly endless week ahead to ‘keep the faith’  and attempt to navigate away from being any sort of fish in any size of pond, to become a happy individual who doesn’t compare their life to a dank, dark, and murky volume of water. So in short…thanks!”

Sounds really worthy but actually Escape the City started as a much more selfish endeavour. We had had enough of working in the corporate world. That’s a separate – more ranty – talk than this one. But the bottom line was that when we looked at our manager’s job, our director’s job, and the partner’s job we realised that we didn’t want to continue our careers in the corporate mainstream.

So the starting point for Esc was wanting to solve our own problem by escaping our jobs.

It was only when we realised that this was a problem that lots of people shared that we realised were faced with an idea that could become a business… But by building a company aimed at solving a problem (and it being a problem that was shared by masses of people) we knew that if we got the platform and product right – people would like it.

So what is this all about? Esc & Our Story:

Escape the City is the business that I started a year and a half ago with Dom Jackman. Esc is designed as a community for corporate professionals who want to do something different with their careers. What is different? Find an exciting job. Start your own business. Go on a big adventure.

We started with a basic blog and began communicating our idea. No funding, no online experience, no entrepreneurial experience at all. Everyone thought we were mad. This isn’t a business… it won’t work… my dad even asked me if I was trying to start a cult… to which I said ‘that’s an interesting angle – we can use that!’.

18 months after launching, we have 42,000 members, have been in most of the main newspapers in the UK, live on Bloomberg, Reuters TV, and almost every week a German reporter rings up asking us when we’re going to launch in Germany… for some reason they love it out there! We now have a new partner – Mikey – out in New York starting the US community.

So what can I share with you in 15 mins?

If you are anything like me, or me from 2 years ago sitting in my corporate job & dreaming of escape – I figured most people are here this evening because they’ve started their own thing, are planning on starting their own thing, or are dreaming about leaving their jobs to do something else but don’t know where to start and are here to have a think about it.

#1. Solve a problem.

This is the problem we were solving for ourselves (above) – and is the reason we’re so clear on what we want Esc to be – we want it to solve a problem that we experienced so personally ourselves. Some people say any successful new business idea should seek make things easier, cheaper or more fun for people. We say – solve a problem.

You don’t have to invent the next Dyson hoover to come up with a good business idea. Innovate on your brand, your marketing and your message… but your core business model doesn’t have to be new. Escape the City is an exciting idea, but the business model that allows us to keep doing what we’re doing is a jobs board – hardly revolutionary.

Another interesting idea is that your business idea should sit at the intersection of 1. Stuff that you enjoy doing, 2. Stuff that you’re good at, and 3. Stuff that people are prepared to pay you for.

We started Esc on the hunch that people would like it. How did we hope / know people would like it? Because we were our own ideal clients.

Scratch your own itch.

#2. Do it for ‘Love’ and do it for ‘Freedom’.

If you’re sitting there thinking… ‘why should I start a business?’ or ‘should I start a business?’… at the risk of sounding like a hippy – here are our two main reasons for doing it.

The first… which I alluded to before… was freedom. We’re 27 and 28… We’ve spent enough time jumping through hoops through our education and our early careers to realise that we wanted our time to be our own. The only way we could work out how to do this whilst also paying the bills was by starting a business and controlling the means of our own income.

The second… ‘Love’ – you have to love what you do otherwise you would be able to grit your teeth and get through all the tough times involved with building a business, all of the doubt, all of the boring work and all of the ups and downs. What’s more… life is really really short and careers fills up a large part of them – don’t you want to be able to look back with pride on whatever you’ve spent your working life doing?

Yes do it for money (obviously). Yes do it for status and success and a feeling of massive satisfaction. But do it for freedom and do it for love. It’s what it’s all about: loving what you do and being able to do it on your own terms.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

STEVE JOBS - http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

#3. Define Success:

I stand up here speaking at the same event as Simon Woodroffe – Yo! founder – and my first impulise is ‘oh but we haven’t made it yet – good old Imposter Syndrome.

But then I had a good think about what ‘Making It’ means to us. Have we made it? Well, it depends on your definition of success. We have built a sustainable, profitable business in less than 2 years. We can support ourselves (meagrely) and we are reinvesting (massively!) in the business.

No we haven’t made millions and no we haven’t finished building our business (lots still to do). But why did we quit our jobs to do our own thing? What was our original objective or definition of success?  Well 1) we wanted to escape (freedom) and 2) we wanted to do work that matters to us (love).

Yes of course we wanted to earn money to afford a nice lifestyle – and we’re getting there – but based on those first two tests – Freedom and Love – we’re actually there!

When you’re building a business it’s easy to lose sight of the small victories and the progress that you’re making. The more you achieve / build / survive the more your aspirations accelerate away from you. Every now and then you have to remind yourself what your definition of success is and celebrate the small victories along the way.

#4. Have fun because it is going to be a slog:

Starting a business is a massive mission.

No one tells you what an emotional, personal and psychological challenge it is as well as a professional one. There are big ups and downs – often not really relating to the objective progress of your business but more to do with what’s going on inside your head.

We have both survived on very little cash for almost two years. We’ve done a huge amount of scrappy, adminy, boring work to get our business off the ground. A lot of unglamorous manual stuff. Bar programmers have only been two of us building Esc – so if we weren’t going to do it who was?!

But it has also been a massive amount of fun and it’s important to remind ourselves of this fact. For ages our office phone number was the same as the Red Cross’s office in Wimbledon. I often used to pick up the phone (“Escape the City – Rob speaking”) only to be faced with a granny asking the Red Cross for a wheelchair.

People joke that in the early days of starting a business you’ll be so excited to receive emails that you’ll respond to junk mail.

You have to laugh otherwise you might cry!

But here’s the thing – it has to be fun otherwise what is the point? You quit your job in order to enjoy life and work more. Don’t invent just another job when you start your business… do it on your own terms.

Don’t feel like there is any set way to start a business – all the received wisdom is just that: ‘received’ – like these ‘entrepreneurial rules’ – take em or leave em.

You have to have fun if you’re going to put up with all the hard work that is involved with starting a company – and do it in a way that works for you.

#5. Make Meaning – Ideas that spread win:

So you’ve identified the problem that your business is going to solve and you’re progressing with starting up. If you’re like us and have little or no money to spend on marketing and spreading the world – how on earth are you meant to make sure that the right people (your clients) hear about the business?

Make Meaning. ”Ideas that spread, win” – Seth Godin. Be remarkable. Draw a line in the sand (37 Signals – Rework). Pick a fight. Have a point of view.

People don’t care about your business. They care about stories – so tell a story with your business. As people will tell their friends your story if it is interesting and relevant to them.

Check out Tribes, Purple Cow and Tipping Point.

Here are some great examples of businesses that make meaning as well as just selling a product:

• SOCKS – Socks For Happy People – Socks make you happy. - http://twitter.com/Socks4HappyPPL
• SHOES – Toms Shoes – One pair sold = one pair donated – http://www.tomsshoes.co.uk/
• PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE – 37 Signals – Rework ‘change the way you work forever’ - http://37signals.com/

People talk about these businesses. It’s how I know about them and now how you know about them. Why do I talk about them? Because they’re about more than just shifting a product.

Everyone knows Innocent’s story about the two bins at the food fair where they asked the people drinking their smoothies to put the empties in ‘Yes start a business’ and ‘No don’t quit the day job’. Innocent are fantastic at sharing the story behind the company and it’s one of the reasons they’re so successful.

We always say to each other that Escape the City would succeed if we started featuring in the type of conversation where people complain about their jobs in the pub after work etc (the kinds of conversations that happen ALL THE TIME!).

What is going to make people talk about your business in the pub? That’s the kind of start-up you want to build.

Conclusion:

Fulfilling work is driven off three main ingredients: Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose.

Check out Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Autonomy for me is the ‘freedom’ that I talked about earlier. Purpose is the ‘love’ – do you love what you do? Does it have meaning for you? And I would say that Mastery comes from working on stuff you care about (Purpose) on your own terms (Autonomy).

Reflecting on my corporate job I think I lacked all three. No wonder I was so demotivated and unfulfilled! The only thing I think I mastered was Powerpoint!

Our own story goes to show what you can achieve with an idea and lots of determination. We started 2 years ago and today have 40,000 subscribers and big ideas for where we can take it. It’s never easy and sometimes feels like you’re pushing a stone up a hill… but man is it worth it. And you progress – professionally and as a person – so much more than you do under the duvet of a corporate job and salary.

So my final thing to share is this… if inside you you have that niggling feeling that you want to do something different and you would like it to be on your own terms… start a business.

You win because – hopefully – you’ll be fulfilled – Freedom & Love.
And we win because we don’t have to hear you complain about how much you dislike your job anymore!

Thanks very much.

Related posts:

1. What we learned from last night’s event: Starting a Food Business
2. It’s all about the money
3. 10 things we learnt at ‘The Answer to the Money Question’

A huge thank to you to Lev Wood from Secret Compass for a really fantastic talk and Q&A at last week’s Esc Wednesday.

Secret Compass is an expeditionary service that provides adventures in some of the most remote and undiscovered locations in the world.

Lev gave us all a great insight into his extreme travel experiences and his journey from leaving the army to set up an adventure business.

Our Esc Wednesdays take place at the Adam Street Club – a home and support network for entrepreneurs and business-people.

Here is a quick summary of the best nuggets from our perspective. What have we missed? Please add what you learnt in the comments.

Who else would you like to hear from at an Esc Wed? Let us know and we’ll try to get them along to speak to everyone.

So here they are… 5 things we learnt at last week’s Esc Wednesday:

1. Not having much money needn’t hold you back

Lev hitch-hiked from London to India on less than £700 (a lot of that was the flight home). Admittedly that was back when £700 could get you a bit further! But his point was that a lack of money isn’t a good enough reason not to do something… all you really need is the inclination and some guts.

2. The fact that you’re coasting might be a sign

Lev didn’t leave the army because he didn’t like it or because it was too tough. He left because he realised he was too comfortable. He left because he realised he was coasting.

I remember feeling a very similar thing working in the corporate world… we could very easily have worked there for years and years without ever really challenging ourselves (and without being found out).

The lesson here is that if you’re cruising through your working weeks (and months and years) and if you have that nagging feeling that want to achieve more than you can in your current job, then perhaps you should consider something a bit more challenging.

3. Plan / No Plan – it doesn’t necessarily matter

Lev didn’t have a proper plan when he left the army. He had some savings, his experience, his mates, and his love of travel. Leaving with no plan actually led him to a fantastic adventure – delivering some ambulances (bought on eBay) to Malawi with 10 mates.

It’s incredible how everyone who has ever taken a big and scary leap reports the same feeling… that the world is rewarding you for being brave and starting something - read this quote.

We started Escape the City on a hunch. We didn’t plan much, we saved a bit, and we had limited online experience… however we didn’t let it stop us starting a blog and putting our ideas out there.

4. It’s all about risk and reward

This one speaks for itself. You will never run your own extreme expeditions company if you don’t try to start your own extreme expeditions company. No one is going to hand you an opportunity (job, start-up or adventure) on a plate.

Lev reminded us all about this when he said that all the best experiences in his life have involved an element of risk… a challenge… it wouldn’t have be rewarding otherwise.

5. Be like the termite that jumped out of Lev’s throat

Lev was once made to eat a termite… and he decided to swallow it whole. The next thing he knows, the bug is climbing back up his throat and jumps out of his mouth. Whenever Lev is in a sticky situation or the cards are stacked against him he often thinks of that termite!

Reminds me of this great line from Finding Nemo…

Photo credit: http://piecefulkwilter.blogspot.com/2011/05/just-keep-swimming.html

Related posts:

1. ‘How I built a life around expeditions’ by Levison Wood from Secret Compass
2. What we learnt from ‘How to build a life working from anywhere’
3. 10 things we learnt at ‘The Answer to the Money Question’

1.    We believe in having a mission, we will be successful if everyone in the team is genuinely excited about the problem we are solving.

2.    We believe in building a purple cow (a business that is remarkable). Not just our mission but in terms of how we operate.

3.    We believe happy people do the best work. We strive to ensure Esc is a really fun and rewarding place to work.

4.    We believe in transparency. Being open, human and honest will differentiate us. It’s also more fun to behave like this.

5.    We believe in working smart. Plan your own week and be clever about it. Live the life you want or what’s the point? No face-time.

6.    We believe in delivering incredible customer service that doesn’t scale. Every interaction is an opportunity to delight.

7.    We believe that speed is a competitive advantage. Get back to people within hours not days.

8.    We believe in great design and user experiences. This can be the difference between a good idea and the execution of a great idea.

9.    We believe that you should start small. Try lots of things, launch quickly, test, and react fast. Launch again, test again, improve.

10.    We believe that we should tell a story worth spreading. People relate to stories. People tell their friends about the best stories.

11.    We believe in saying no. Saying no more often allows us to really deliver when we say yes.

12.    We believe in doing the right thing. We get to make 100s of decisions a week. Make the ones our mums would be proud of. Do good.

13.    We believe in being brave. Not everyone will agree with our philosophy. Focus on the ones that do. Have a point of view. Back ourselves.

14.    We believe in enjoying the journey and celebrating the small milestones. The process of building a business should be fun.

15.    We believe in helping. The best businesses help people do something they already want to do. Let’s focus on building something genuinely useful.

16.    We believe in solving a problem. We’re building Esc to help people find the opportunities, people and information they’re looking for – keep that as our guide and if we do it well we will succeed.

Related posts:

1. The Escape Manifesto – Discussion #1: An Esc Manifesto (in draft)
2. Esc Hero #24: The Inca Ride Team – 2000 miles along the Andes
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #25: The Atlantic Rising Team

There are lots of reasons (or excuses) people use to explain why they can’t start their own business.

One of the main ones is money. This is closely followed by a lack of know-how.

The objective of this post is to show you how many (often free) tools there are to help you start something online.

We started Esc with a free wordpress blog. That’s it. No cash, no experience. Just an idea and the determination to turn it into a reality.

It struck me the other day quite how many amazing tools we use to run our business today – 18 months after the first blog post on our crappy off-the-shelf blog. I thought I would share them with you today.

1. WordPress.com

Start with a free blog and don’t beat yourself up about details that aren’t yet clear. Your blog will essentially be your website. You can build a proper one further down the line but equally many business just use blogs as their permanent online home.

Start talking about your concept online, you don’t have to spend a penny on anything physical, just evolve your idea in public – even if at the beginning only your mum is reading it.

This is relevant if you are planning for any business from selling beach clothes to starting your own catering company. Make sure your to-be business has a point-of-view that people can relate to and get your thoughts out there.

2. Facebook Fan Page

It goes without saying that you should be on Facebook. But be relevant. Don’t just post offers / plugs for your products / services. That is not the way to grow your fans. Engage, interact, have a character. Be human, don’t hide behind the brand.

3. Twitter

Twitter is a tough one for lots of businesses because it isn’t immediately clear where the value is. You can spend a lot of time on it without being hugely clear on why. Follow people who are prominent in your area. You can be passive and use it as an information source or you can get active and begin tweeting relevant information and communicating with people. It’s essentially another way to communicate. Don’t bank on it to transform your business though.

Use Tweetdeck to interface with Twitter on your computer and use Echofon on your phone.

4. Newsletter software

To start with we used the Subscribe2 plugin in WordPress to email our early subscribers (the first 1000 or so). Now we use MailChimp. MailChimp is amazing and if you want to send a regular newsletter (which every business should) we can’t recommend them strongly enough. Free till you get above 1000 subscribers.

But remember – with your newsletters – send something people will actually want to receive and read.

5. Eventbrite

We use Eventbrite for managing RSVPs and tickets to events. This isn’t free but you can choose to pass on the ticket charge to your attendees. Really slick little system. Think even my Mum could use it (maybe).

6. Dropbox

Dropbox is amazing. File sharing between your team and also an online backup. It’s free up to about 2GB I think. Which is absolutely nuts. I often feel like we should be donating them cash the amount of value we get for nothing. Use it.

7. Google… ah Google.

Google also gives away a hell of a lot of tools for free. Although I think we pay a little bit a year for our Google Apps account (in order for them to host our emails).

Using Google Mail for your company’s emails is great – no more worries about deliverability (which you often get with a small hosting provider).

Here are all the Google products we use:

8. Google Calendar.

Everyone in the team has synced their diaries with each other via Google Calendar. We are a small team and we like each other so don’t mind everyone knowing what the others are up to. But it makes scheduling meetings very easy.

9. Google Reader

I read 100+ blogs (I’ll share all the blogs I read in another post). I would never be able to do this if I had to go to 100 different sites to check for new posts / updates.

Stay up to date with what is going on in your area. Competitors, thought leaders, industry news. There’s lots to learn – expose yourself and your business to it.

I use my Google Reader (RSS reader) on my iPhone and it’s like a personal newsfeed.

10. Google Docs

We use Google Docs to share spreadsheets and documents within your team. Work off the same version at the same time.

No more ‘who has the master copy?’ confusion.

11. Google Analytics

Want to know what on earth is going on on your website? Who is using it? What are they clicking on? Where do they live? Etc, etc, etc… Google Analytics.

Stat heaven.

12. Paypal

We use Paypal to process all of our online payments. The interface isn’t great and they take a % of every transaction but it’s convenient and works for now.

13. Xero

Xero is fantastic online accounting software. We use it to generate invoices and to reconcile all of our company transactions. I think it saves our accountants a lot of time too.

14. PicResize

A bit of a strange one, but we’re so often resizing images for our newsletter and our blog. Picresize allows you to change the dimensions of your images for free. It’s really good actually.

15. Basecamp

37 Signals are a fantastic example to anyone trying to start anything online. Their philosophy and teachings (Signals vs Noise blog and ReWork book) are spot on.

Basecamp is the best simple project management software out there. Check it out.

We’re currently building our new website with a fantastic front-end developer in New Zealand, us in London, and our main developer in Southampton. No probs.

16. Skype

Stating the obvious here – but Skype is great for staying in touch from different locations. We’ve constantly got a chat window open and use it to share links, make decisions etc.

——————————————

So there you have it. 16 tools we use to run our business.

We started with a free blog and have now become complete wannabe techno-geeks. I’m sure there are masses of other programmes and services out there that would save us time and help us make more money but these are the core tools that we couldn’t do without…

What have we missed? What do you use?

Related posts:

1. 5 Top Tools for Slowly Transitioning into Location Independence
2. Esc ‘How-To’ #1: How to develop your business idea
3. Tell us what your business does

Doing something different is scary…

• Quitting your job is scary.
• Starting your own business is scary.
• Having no money is scary.
• Taking a point of view is scary.
• Cold calling is scary.
• Charging for a service is scary.
• Public speaking is scary.
• Being challenged is scary.
• Writing blog posts is scary.
• Managing people is scary.
• Saying no is scary.
• Being in it for the long run is scary.
• Talking to aggressive journalists is scary.

Sometimes it feels like it would be much easier to not do scary things. Opt-out just a little bit…

• Stay in a job you don’t really like.
• Coast.
• Get drunk on the weekends.
• Be able to afford nice stuff.

Feel OK about things overall… if a little unfulfilled.

I don’t blame you. It’s incredibly seductive. It’s comfortable. It’s really rather nice.

Or… you could use the fear as a radar and go straight at the things you’re most scared of.

Got that little voice in your head saying “Wow, maybe I could do that, what if I actually pulled that off…?”

Related posts:

1. Our greatest fear
2. Rethink Fear In Your Career
3. Know what you’re signing up for.

Just wanted to say a huge thank to you to Tom Vernon from Right To Dream for a really fantastic talk and Q&A at last night’s Esc Wednesday.

Right To Dream offer talented, underprivileged children the opportunity to reach their true potential in life and claim a better future for Africa.

Tom gave us all an incredible insight into setting up the organisation and the amazing things they are doing for sport and education in Africa.

Our Esc Wednesdays take place at the Adam Street Club – a home and support network for entrepreneurs and business-people.

Here is a quick summary of the best nuggets from our perspective. What have we missed? Please add what you learnt in the comments.

Who else would you like to hear from at an Esc Wed? Let us know and we’ll try to get them along to speak to everyone.

6 great bits of advice from last night

1. You don’t need money to do something amazing – for the first 3 years Tom relied on £300 a month to get RTD going.
2. Empower people – To have the greatest impact enable the most passionate and talented people locally to make the most of their potential and you’d be amazed at how much they can then contribute back to their own communities.
3. Do it yourself and then ask for help – Just because you are passionate about an idea that you think will help people, it doesn’t mean you will get support while it is just an idea.
4. Start focusing on a small problem – Prove that you can contribute as a solution and then as you (hopefully) succeed, bigger opportunities and challenges will present themselves.
5. Don’t get hung up on marketing – focus on making your project a success and it will sell itself.
6. Give – Whatever you give to Africa, you’ll get much more out of it.

And finally, Tom and the Right to Dream team want to hear from you…

If you’re passionate about making a difference in Africa and you have a ‘Talent’ that you are passionate about and you’ve got what it takes to build a programme within Right to Dream then get in touch with the team…

Other stuff…

As we mentioned last night, if you didn’t speak to someone last night who you wanted to just comment below and we’ll try and put you in touch. You can also use our Connections section to post up shout-outs.

Our next Esc Wednesday is with Ed Stafford, Walking The Amazon, on June 8th. All our events are listed on this tab.

If you want to grab your ticket when they are announced, subscribe to the blog in your RSS or go to our main site and make sure you’re getting our Monday newsletter.

For those of you that missed the event, Right to Dream is a registered charity in Ghana, Sierra Leone, the UK and US.  Their mission is ’to offer talented, underprivileged children the opportunity to reach their true potential in life and claim a better future for Africa’.

Related posts:

1. What Priya learnt from last night’s social enterprise event
2. Beards, maggots, and whales: what we learnt from last night’s adventurers event
3. 5 Things We Learned at Last Night’s Event

The purpose of this post is to say a huge thank to you Henry from Spoonfed and Bullseye Hub for a really fantastic talk and Q&A at last night’s Esc Wednesday.

He gave some fantastic advice about starting up: product/market fit, business models, non-technical founders, advisors, teams, pivoting. The works.

Our Esc Wednesdays take place at the Adam Street Club – a home and support network for entrepreneurs and business-people.

Here is a quick summary of the best nuggets from my perspective. What have I missed? Please add what you learnt in the comments. Who else would you like to hear from at an Esc Wed?

Advice

In the early stages of your start-up your main decisions are likely to be hunch driven. Further down the line they will (and should) become data driven.

First and foremost, be incredibly focused on delivering product/market fit by working in a close relationship with your customers.

But always have a business model from the outset (for example, we’ll start charging at xyz points), even if you have to pivot in the process.

That said, be prepared for the way you make money to change as you grow. Be flexible on this front. Pivot!

You need millions of monthly users to make real money from traditional digital advertising. Don’t bank on this as your business model.

Share your idea. Get input. Unless you have a world-beating patent – talk about it. Obviously be careful with how early-stage you are and who you are talking to.

Try and have a ‘lean’ approach to getting your first product / version to market. Get it in front of potential customers with as little capital expenditure as possible.

Don’t speak ‘start-up’? Lean?! 1) Use open source software. 2) Agile development environment (test & tweak lots). 3) Customer driven dev (launch fast & iterate).

If you can prove demand, qualify the idea, and even get some early revenues then you’re in a much better position to raise money if that’s what you’re after.

Bootstrapping vs Investment debate. Depends on your business: some can’t get started without £££ and some you can get post-revenue & profitable by yourself.

Spreading the word for B2C start-ups (Spoonfed in Henry’s case) – organic search via Google is really strong for them.

Also important for spreading the word: social networking and building viral mechanisms into your product (check out Quora’s invite a friend).

Spreading the word for B2B start-ups (Bullseye Hub in Henry’s case) – inbound content marketing (teach your prospects), SEM, SEO, cold calling, free trials.

To assess your product/market fit… go to 10 big potential clients, tell them that you’re building relevant/useful, offer them a free trial in exchange for feedback.

Advisors: Find people who are passionate about what you’re doing and ask them for help. Informally at first. Go to DrinkTank, OpenSoho etc.

If you’re non-technical (you don’t write code/engineer stuff, etc) Henry strongly recommended finding a technical co-founder.

Where do you find programmers? Go to every grad fair / computer science department. There will be young coders and some will be entrepreneurial.

Have a co-founder of any sort: share the stress, pressure, and challenges. Evolve ideas together. As well as enjoying the victories and high-fives too!

During really early stages how can you motivate your first team members (the vision, equity, work for free to get a beta version)… how persuasive are you?!

Always be hiring. Once you’re growing, the quality of your team is paramount. Get to know the potential hire, go for a beer and see if they fit your culture.

The work space has a huge impact on productivity. Spoonfed found that putting the sales guys in a separate room to the coders had huge results.

Read. Everything. Anything relevant. (from Rob: we’ll shortly be doing a blog post on every site we read and every book we’ve read for start-ups).

Top recommendations from last night: Mark Suster, Eric Ries, Steve Blank. Who do you read who is good? Please add any good links below…

Other stuff…

As I mentioned last night, if you didn’t speak to someone last night who you wanted to just comment below and we’ll try and put you in touch. You can also use our Connections section to post up shout-outs.

Our next Esc Wednesday is with Tom Vernon, founder of Right to Dream, on May 11th. All our events are listed on this tab.

If you want to grab your ticket when they are announced, subscribe to the blog in your RSS or go to our main site and make sure you’re getting our Monday newsletter.

Have a great Easter break and thanks for helping to make last night such a good event.

Related posts:

1. 52 great (borrowed) bits of advice for any start-up
2. How to Start Something You Love – 104 more bits of advice (#105 > #209)
3. 10 bits of internet start-up advice from the founder of Bed&Fed

This is a call-to-action for anyone who has just graduated or is about to graduate and is wondering where to start their career.

Please do two things: 1) read this post and 2) check out the year-long New Entrepreneurs Foundation placement. It’s pretty incredible.

Where to start?

Of course you can go the graduate job route. It’s a great option: training, exposure, cash and a solid introduction to the working world.

Definite value there as long as you are clear what you are getting out of the experience and don’t get stuck / start wondering why you’re there.

Please, please don’t do a law conversion course just because you want to prolong your student life or you don’t know what else to do and it feels like a safe option.

Does the world really need another accidental lawyer? Surely it needs lawyers who really want to be lawyers!

An alternative?

You could stop waiting for permission and do it yourself.

It is far too easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to keep amassing experience, credentials, and qualifications in order to finally ‘do your own thing’.

It’s not that all that stuff isn’t useful. It’s just that it’s not absolutely necessary.

I’m losing track of the amount of people we’ve met who never had a graduate job and have started impressive businesses straight out of uni:

• Will founded Keystone Tutors – check out his interview
• Tom founded Giveacar – was on BBC news the other day
• Ric founded Hoodeasy at uni - check out his interview
• The guys at Yearbook Machine are killing it
• Raj started enternships.com – check out his interview
• The list goes on… but I’ve got to get back to work!

How many of the CEO’s of the FTSE 500 have MBAs? Fewer than you would imagine. Some of the most impressive are uni drop-outs.

Certainly lots of successful entrepreneurs didn’t wait till they were 30 to start their own businesses. You have a whole different set of priorities by then.

The older you get, the less likely you are to ‘start up’

The best time to embark on the roller-coaster that is a start-up is in your 20s when you can take the punishment and have less to lose.

“Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be?”

http://paulgraham.com/mit.html

You can’t underestimate the power of being blissfully naive and charging at a problem you want to solve.

Bored of hearing excuses

• Not enough experience
• Not enough money
• Not enough contacts
• ….

They all feel like valid reasons if you want them to be. Or you can just call them by another name – excuses – and get on with it.

You’ll learn more in a month of starting and running your own business than you will in a year on a graduate training scheme.

Trust us.

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No related posts.

… when it starts like this:

Everybody needs an Evil Plan.

Everybody needs that crazy, out-there idea that allows them to actually start doing something they love, doing something that matters. Everybody needs an Evil Plan that gets them the hell out of the rate race, away from lousy bosses, away from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate. Life is short.

Every person who ever managed to do this, every person who managed to escape the cubicle farm and start doing something interesting and meaningful, started off with their own Evil Plan. And yeah, pretty much everyone around them – friends, family, colleagues – thought they were nuts.

Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to have an Evil Plan, to make a great living, doing what you love, doing something that matters…

More…

• Read the book: Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination
• Check out: www.gapingvoid.com

Related posts:

1. What you can learn from Innocent’s latest book
2. Lara Morgan’s new book – More Balls Than Most.
3. Notes on a must read book

A big thank you to Dave Cornthwaite for sharing his incredible adventures and unconventional lifestyle with us.

Thank you to everyone who came to last night’s Esc Wednesday – it was a lot of fun. If you didn’t come: here is what it was about. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful.

5 Things we learnt

1. Comfort kills ambition

2. Take time to think about what you really want from life (write a bucket list)

3. ‘It pays the bills’ is THE worst reason to be in a job. We spend more time at work than anything else, we can’t afford not to enjoy it!

4. Time disappears far too fast, live to ensure you never have to say ‘I wish I’d….’

5. Creativity is the fruit of happiness, in the making and doing of new things we realise the importance in life

Dave Cornthwaite

Dave Cornthwaite is a record-breaking endurance athlete, adventurer, author & speaker whose original & thought-provoking expeditions & projects have been shared with millions.

Dave continues to explore the possibilities of endurance travel and human potential through Expedition1000: 25 journeys of 1000 miles or more, each using a different form of human, animal or natural powered transport that will see him travel across 3 oceans, to both poles and undertake expeditions on every continent.

• Here is Dave’s Hero profile
• Here is Dave’s website
• Here is Dave’s email address: dave @ davecornthwaite.co.uk

Hope you all enjoyed last night as much as we did. Good luck with everything, stay in touch, etc.

If anyone wants to make any connections from last night that they didn’t manage to do after the questions please just comment below and we’ll try and put you in touch with each other.

Related posts:

1. Come to March’s Esc Wednesday: Dave Cornthwaite
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #23: Dave Cornthwaite
3. 10 things we learnt at last night’s Esc Wednesday – Jon Cousins & UnLtd

I was recently speaking to a friend about how things are going with Esc. We were talking about the seemingly endless web development challenges that come from being a non-technical start-up founder.

He told me about his friend who is building a web start-up. His friend said this: “It’s hard – but I  totally knew what sort of lifestyle I was buying into when I started this.”

It doesn’t get any easier

I also mentioned that the more you progress with your business, the more challenges you encounter.

Don’t get me wrong, Esc is going really well and if someone had told us where we would be 12 months after launching I wouldn’t have believed them.

But it’s interesting that at the beginning (when all we had was an idea, a blog, and a few dozen readers) we had no doubt that we would easily turn the Esc concept into a powerful community and a working business.

We still have no doubt that we can do this. But wow it requires concerted, consistent, focused effort! Hustle, graft, and working until your wrists hurt (from typing) and your eyesight starts going!

Starting a business is like climbing a massive mountain

Starting a business is like climbing a massive mountain. In the foothills you’re full of blissful ignorance and optimism. The going is often easy and you cover lots of ground quickly (after all, you’re just starting out – and any momentum is more than what you had before when you were static).

You can’t even see the top of the mountain at the start but you’re absolutely certain you’ll get there.

As you continue on your journey you summit false ridges from which you see scarier ascents and bigger cliffs to climb.

But the great thing is, you’re also getting stronger, fitter and more experienced. So although the climbing is getting harder, you’re getting better at dealing with the challenges.

At the end of the day all you need to climb most mountains is determination.

Keep chugging…

Determination is also all you really need to start your own business. Everything else is secondary.

So here is some advice from our own journey – and god knows we’re still right at the beginning of it too…

• Don’t spend too much time thinking about the top when you’re at the bottom or you’ll never start
• Celebrate the small victories on the way up – it’s going to be a big climb
• Concentrate on your immediate environment and the steps you need to take to get to the next resting point

People starting businesses often say: ‘if I had known how hard it was going to be when I started I probably wouldn’t have done it.’

I don’t think any of them actually mean that.

We definitely don’t.

Photo credit: http://startupquote.com/

No related posts.

I don’t want my memoirs to be like reading a compliance manual.

A history of the rules and regulations of my corporate confinement.

I don’t want to wear my suit anymore, I don’t want to shave (not that I need to).

I don’t want my alarm to go off at 5:30am anymore. I feel tired, pale and fat, and I have gained little from this punishment.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful though. I have learned a lot from my experience and if anything it has given me the enlightenment that I needed. You need to get rid of some of the “what ifs” in life by actually doing things.

Worked for the foreign office, pretty cool but not as amazing as I had hoped. Worked in a bank, long hours and pretty dull, ticked that box too.

The underlying constant has been my lack of enthusiasm for the constraints on my creativity. I can’t think or make decisions without them being suppressed by standard operating procedures.

It’s actually so bad that when you try to brainstorm, you need to snap out of it before you can open your mind up. I’ve been institutionalised into not thinking. The thought police have got to me.

The corporate behemoths of yesterday are stuck in their old ways, unable to change with their lack of revolutionary young blood, which would otherwise promote change and cannibalisation. They have become factories, places to do business and make money, not places to inspire and change lives.

Either work for someone whose ideas of business, environment and philosophy is aligned with yours, set up your own business/community, or just carry on and let the “what ifs” pile up until you retire and are too old to do the things you once dreamed of.

—————————————

This is a guest post from a good friend of ours who has just handed in his resignation. 4 years at an investment bank in London. He will shortly be making another big announcement on this blog. Watch this space.

No related posts.

If we had listened to the ‘Reasons why not’ we probably wouldn’t be here at all.

‘Reasons why not’ are an idea’s worst enemy…

‘Reasons why not’ are why so many people stay in jobs that don’t fulfill them and don’t take big decisions to start things.

We’re all really good at persuading ourselves why we shouldn’t do things.

WE ARE BORED OF HEARING REASONS WHY NOT.

There will always be reasons not to do things.

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If there’s one thing we hope you take from the story behind Escape the City we hope it is this:

Once you take what other people deem to be a crazy decision and begin working towards it you’ll feel like the world is rewarding you. It’s not. You’re making these things happen… things that would never have happened if you hadn’t taken the first step.

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“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

Related posts:

1. 11 reasons I’m thrilled to have escaped the city
2. 10 Reasons Why Projects Fail
3. 5 reasons you should spend 4 months in Sierra Leone helping lead Tribewanted

We got a really nice email from Lara Morgan on Thursday saying how much she enjoyed talking at our Esc winter party.

In true entrepreneur style she also had lots of ideas for how we could improve the evening for next time. One of them was to give everyone a print-out with lessons / takeaways from each speaker.

If you were at Guanabara on Wednesday you’ll know that Lara Morgan isn’t someone to quibble with. So… here they are… a few things Esc learnt from each speaker.

PS. Any suggestions for improvements or to add your own lessons please comment below.

A big thank you to our 4 speakers – really, really impressive stuff we thought.

Lara Morgan:

Lara talked about setting up Pacific Direct in her early 20′s, the challenges and excitements of growing it, and the eventual exit in 2008 for £20m.

• The importance of brutal self-awareness: Know your weaknesses and seek skills that you don’t have.
• No illusions: It is going to be tough. There will be difficult months (years even). And at some point or another your business is going to be tested in a way you couldn’t have anticipated. “Don’t be deluded, it is hard and there will be some hideous moments, but don’t ever give up. If you start something you love, you’ve got every chance of success.” Don’t give up.
• Hold onto equity: Say no for as long as you can. EXIT on the right price and terms.
• Ask for help: “If you ask you often get. If you don’t ask don’t expect.” Get out and network. Meet people. Talking with other people can be inspirational. Try to get a mentor (or several).
• Stop fannying around: Stop making excuses for not doing something.
• The importance of people: The power of those around you: find great people, treat them well. ”You need to do some dull stuff as your business grows, like appraisals, but actually they’re not that dull because if you do them the right way, with career development and reviews, your team will stay with you,”
• Lead & motivate: Motivate your people with your big goal. “Leadership is the art of mobilising others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.”
• Sell sell sell: Promise you can deliver then make sure you do. Cash remains king. Fake it – professionally.
• Keep a scorecard, work with numbers: Measure the important stuff even thought it is boring.
• Choose the life you wish to lead, plan it and make it happen

Zarine Kharas:

Zarine escaped the city herself. She founded Just Giving. She shared her story with us.

• You CAN start your own business: Entrepreneurship is a profession and can be learnt. “It’s hard, challenging and immensely rewarding.
• Persevere: It’s not going to happen overnight. You should persevere regardless of the set backs…
• Slaughter sacred cows: Ignore conventional wisdom. Be brutally honest about what really needs to be done.
• Be bold: Courage and boldness goes a long way. Be brave.
• Leave your ego at the door: When you strike out on your own nobody cares who you are
• Find great people: It’s important to be a people person – get the right team in place
• Escape the city – sooner rather than later: Life is better when you’re working for something you really care about. Zarine used a couple of great phrases: “Corporate fugitives”. “Faceless conglomerates”.
• Stop obsessing over killer ideas… instead look for opportunities. To be successful in business, it’s not necessary to have that “eureka moment”, you just have to be able to spot an opportunity.
• Fundraising is soul-destroying
• Do something good: Just Giving has shown that individual, real people can have an impact – so can you.

Al Humphreys:

Al left uni and cycled around the world. Determined not to waste this one, precious life Al has turned adventure into his profession. His message was simple: get out there and do stuff. Don’t waste your life.

• It’s about time, not money – check out the Deathclock. Your time is infinitely more important than money so why fritter it away by plodding through a life that you don’t enjoy. Al quoted Dr Pepper: ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’
• Set yourself a big scary goal and go and do it. Or don’t and waste your life.
• Go micro – you don’t have to cycle around the world to have a micro-adventure. Al walked around the M25 and enjoyed it (mainly because it was miserable)
• Anyone can do it - It’s not about being super-human
• Say yes to stuff – exciting opportunities will come from saying yes to things. Al’s first journey sparked opportunity after opportunity, and he is now lucky enough to earn a living whilst travelling around the world.
• What are you so afraid of? We are lucky to live in the decade and country we live in. Even if you’re not stinking rich you’re not going to starve / die if you quit your job.
• Don’t over prepare – do it the Wikipedia way. Learn / figure it out as you go. You don’t have to know what the outcome will be before embarking on a voyage
• Make a decision: What kind of life do you want to live? Now go and live it.
• Most importantly. DO IT. Get out of your own way. Think to yourself “what’s the the worst that will happen?”. You will often find it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.

Ed Stafford:

Ed walked the length of the Amazon River. It took him over 800 days. Everyone said he would die. He didn’t.

• Take inspiration: when in moments of doubt imagine someone you really respect looking over your shoulder saying ‘come on’.
• Do it with the right people: Have a partner in crime to tell you when you’re being a wimp lying on the road naked 50 km from your goal.
• You will find help everywhere: People will help you anywhere in the world – even if at first they look like they want to kill you.
• Everyone will tell you you’re mad: and although your close friends and family will encourage you – they haven’t got a bloody clue what it will take!
• Have a cause / do good: even if the original impulse is to do it for yourself.
• We’re all really lucky: no matter how tough you think your lot is, there will always be people who are worse off. Ed told us about the guy who walked with him for a few weeks whose mother had been murdered the week before. We should remember how lucky we are.

Related posts:

1. LONDON TALK: x3 start-up speakers – From Bathtub 2 Boardroom
2. SSYL from an Esc Member’s perspective…
3. 3 Lessons in Bravery