5 ways entrepreneurship has changed in the past decade
In today’s episode I talk about the five ways entrepreneurship has changed in the last decade. I wanted to do this episode because it’s been over 10 years since I jumped into the world of startups. The first one I started was around 2010. It wasn’t my first business, but it was my first tech startup. It’s now roughly 12 years later, and I’ve noticed a lot of things have changed, some for the better and some for the worse. So tune in to find out what I found!
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Here’s the transcript from this podcast episode, please excuse any typos!
So the first thing I’ve noticed in the past 12 years for the past decade, is that some things have gotten a lot easier to do when it comes to a startup. For example, back in the day if you wanted to start an Ecommerce business, you had to build quite a bit, you had to learn quite a bit and you had to purchase inventory. And you know, it just wasn’t the same as it is today. Because now if you fast forward, there’s Amazon FBA, there’s Shopify, there’s WordPress. There are e-commerce plugins and templates. You can drop shipping, you know, a long time ago, you had to really build everything yourself. And so, in that, in that perspective, some things have gotten easier. Another thing that’s gotten easier in terms of startups is resources. I mean, back in the day, once again, I had to learn everything on my own. I had to read books, I had to ask other people, which of the two things you should still do. But if you fast forward, you know, including my course, my book, my YouTube channel, this podcast for example. There are so many 12 years now of resources available for free mostly, if you’re not paying for those pesky master classes that are trying to steal your hard earned money. There’s these resources out there you can learn a lot about being an entrepreneur. And one of the things I try to tell people and this is not part of the tips, but being an entrepreneur, quote unquote, is not really a job. You know, it’s not really a thing that you do. It’s more of a lifestyle. You have to kind of look at it from the perspective of every day. You’re doing new things. You’re challenging yourself. You’re assigning yourself goals, goals and reaching those goals. And being an entrepreneur is really a mindset. It’s not, it’s kind of hard to explain until you’re actually doing it you’ll realize it becomes part of your life like you’re integrating the pieces of entrepreneurship into your life.
So the second thing I noticed and it’s going to be the opposite of the first is that some things have gotten harder, believe it or not. And some of those things could be for example, marketing, like over 12 years, that many apps have been built. So if you’re building a startup in terms of a technology app or a mobile app, 12 years of apps have been built. So the oversaturation of apps in the market. As you know, social media has been just pummeled. You know, with all the Facebook’s and Instagrams of the world and all the privacy issues. It’s harder to put out an app because people have already seen them for 12 years, so now it’s not really a new thing anymore. So you really have to come up with ingenious ways to do that. It also is harder to recruit people, because again, 12 years people have seen the rise and fall of social media and apps. And they see that a lot of apps fail. So they figure well, I’m not going to really join a new startup because I’m going to waste my time and my energy. So it’s harder to recruit people because especially during the pandemic and today , people don’t want to work as much. They value their time more so they want to get paid more money for their time. So it’s much more difficult to get people to join your startup, especially for a low pay, which most startups offer let’s face it, and so I found it to be a much harder situation. 12 years ago, it was so easy. And I mean the word easy to get people to join a startup, I was able to get five to 10 people to join within 24 hours because it was a new exciting idea. And they were excited to be a part of the growth of that idea. So it should have been part of point one of getting recruited, but I’m making it the hard part because it’s very, very hard to get people to join. So it goes on and it’s easy. 12 years ago, hard today, but I remember 12 years ago how easy it was to get people to join startups. So it’s a big one. Keep that in mind when you’re starting yours.
Another thing I noticed and this is point number three is that development or programming has become much more streamlined and open source. So 12 years ago or a decade ago, when I was building apps for websites, my team and I we had to actually build pretty much everything like from scratch when it came to the design, the programming the back end the infrastructure, you know, we could use some API’s but there weren’t that many available back then. So it was a lot of custom coding. Today. There are so many open source software’s which means free software you can use that people contribute to a lot of coders around the world. It’s free to use and you can use it. There’s also paid software. There’s also software from the big companies like Google and Facebook and all the other ones that provide these APIs and SDKs which are application program interfaces and software development kits. Basically it’s a fancy way of saying you can tap into these massive amounts of code so that you don’t have to build them. And you just put one line of code into your code. And it uses that functionality. For example, in our app spinner as pretty much all the other apps out there. We’re going to be using an Open Source SDK for audio video chat. So we’re not going to build audio video calling. We’re going to just use an API or an SDK and pay, you know, point 003 cents per minute to use it. And yes, there were things like these back in the day, but they were clunky and slow. They didn’t work really well. We really did have to build pretty much everything in the app. But now there’s just so many libraries and so much available in terms of development. It’s just cutting the time down to build it from like, you know, 100% down to like 50 percent cutting it in half basically. So we’re still building a ton of custom code, but for the things that are like what we consider heavy lifting, we could tap into APIs and SDKs.
Now the fourth thing I noticed going back a decade to today, and this is kind of in the middle somewhere. It’s a little murky, but you know it still counts as originally when we were marketing different businesses. Whether it was my services that I provide consulting, or movies that I made, or apps that I built or websites we were doing a lot of in person networking and marketing and events, handing out flyers, raffles, you know, doing a lot of giveaways and talking to people in person, and what I noticed over the past 10 to 12 years is a lot of that shifted to online marketing is mostly online. And again, we had this back then, but it just wasn’t as big as it is now. It really has completely shifted from in person marketing to online marketing, a lot of ads and videos and influencers. I mean, there were no influencers 12 years ago, I mean, there might have been a couple, but influencers really took off over the past five to 10 years. And that’s really where a lot of brands are promoting their products and their services. And we are too so online marketing has taken off substantially from the days of in person marketing. And it just so happens that we also do in person marketing for spinners. I’ll be at an event today, the Philadelphia Taste festival. So we’re still doing in person marketing because we believe in the power of in person marketing so I feel as though entrepreneurs out there rely on online marketing too much as a crutch. And I’m here to tell you, you should be doing both. We’re going to be handing out flyers and bracelets and other swag and doing raffle giveaways and things like that in person to get them to use the app and then also promote online with videos and ads and marketing techniques that we’re using. So we’re doing both and I think you should too. So bring it back, bring back a little bit of the old and use the new and put them together and then you have a really great marketing package.
The fifth and final thing that I’ve noticed where entrepreneurship has changed dramatically is in the word entrepreneurship is that everybody wants to be an entrepreneur 12 years ago or a decade ago I didn’t really hear that five and that’s it. I was an entrepreneur. People didn’t really understand what that was. But I’ve noticed again, over time, more and more people have started businesses. They’ve started online e-commerce shops, they’ve been doing the gig economy in full force, whether it’s you know, food deliveries, driving Airbnbs people have become entrepreneurs, by default just by using the gig economy platforms. So it’s almost as if the new apps and platforms that came out have created this entrepreneurship economy out there or this entrepreneurship society. It’s kind of wild to see that happen. So inadvertently, people have become entrepreneurs whether they want to or not, and they might not even realize that they might think that they just have these gigs, but they call it the gig economy. But they’re working for themselves in a sense because it’s their own hours. They dictate which days they work, whether or not they want to work, you know, and so and as much work as they put in as much money as they get out. That’s the definition of an entrepreneur. When you work really hard. You get paid for your work because that’s what it is. As opposed to a job where you just go in every day you get a paycheck, and that’s that, you know your set schedule and that kind of thing. But, again, people are trying to build their own apps people are doing like websites where they’re selling items, drop shipping, people are starting services, whether it’s dog grooming, or house cleaning, or fashion, creating clothing for celebrities, whatever it is people doing photography, there’s so many different things out there where people are earning an income from being an entrepreneur and it just wasn’t as prevalent as it was back in the day. So I just feel really kind of humbled that I’ve been able to see all of this kind of progress over my career. And, and I’m hoping that you’ve also witnessed all of this and you realize that it’s changed and you want to take advantage of those changes. You want to use the knowledge of these changes to dictate how you run your business or your startup. So I’d love to hear more ideas of how you have seen entrepreneurship change over the past decade. I’d love to hear them in the comments. Please leave them because I always answer and as always, I will see you guys in the next episode.
