10 Commandments From My 10 Years as an Entrepreneur
September 24, 2024 marks 10 years since I registered my first company and officially entered the entrepreneurship game. Becoming an entrepreneur upended and totally disrupted the linear and predictable career trajectory that becoming a doctor had promised. Despite the clear drawbacks of the roller-coaster that’s entrepreneurship, I’m convinced that it’s been a net positive. The lessons and growth have been unparalleled and could scarce have been derived from many other endeavours. Here are 10 things I’ve learned in the last 10 years styled as commandments.
1. Thou shalt be flexible in the routes towards your vision. When you first start, you never truly understand the market you’re in and what will work. All you have are hypotheses that require testing. This ignorance should thus inform a freedom to pivot and change tack as many times as you need. In my time I’ve built over 10 products and pivoted several times all in a bid to find Product market fit (PMF). Even when you’ve gained some market understanding, always have and retain a humility that enables you to continuously learn from the market.
2. Thou shalt be patient and persistent. Any thing of worth takes plenty of time and effort and business is no different. Business growth takes time. I started in 2014, spent 10s of thousands of dollars of my own money and had nothing to show for it in the first year. That was however not what the financial projections on my spreadsheet told me. According to said sheet, I’d be a dollar millionaire within the first year of business and retire a billionaire in ten! In reality, the first customer that paid for anything was at least a whole year later. The first grant or award I won was 3 years later in 2017 and our first external investor came onboard in 2018, a full 4 years since I first ventured into entrepreneurship. Google launchpad gave us a platform in 2019, Thanks Fola and team then Techstars came calling in 2019, Zoe our MD was and is literally an angel. All this happened 5 years after I’d started. If I’d given up anytime before that none of this relative success would have happened. By end of 2020, we’d raised $500k in funding.
3. Thou shalt always be selling. The central competence required of a CEO is sales. Fundraising is sales, recruiting is sales, product sales is obviously sales. All the key things I’ve done have been related to sales. I started off not knowing any, I was a doctor afterall, what self respecting doctor sells! So I had to learn how to become proficient at selling and now I teach sales. If there’s one thing you must do it is to learn sales properly. Always be looking to close someone or something whenever and wherever you are.
4. Thou shalt build a team of believers. As the saying goes, if you want to go far go together. I would not have succeeded without key early team members who all took a chance on an unknown, ‘crazy’ and contrarian doctor. From Bayo, Lanre, Jeph, to Greg and Anita they all took a leap of faith I’m grateful for. Except Anita, we’ve all been together for over 5 years now. People are the biggest asset in any business, especially in technology businesses. Find and invest in excellent people (Twitter is great for this) but beyond excellence, find people who truly believe in the future you’re building. That above all has proven the biggest predictor of people who will work out versus people that won’t. Most skills can be learned or bought but true belief in a cause is hard to come by. Find the believers and invest in them.
5. Build a network and invest in relationships. Being an outsider in the Nigerian tech, health and business scenes on every level, I went to university outside Nigeria and had been away for 10 years before returning, I realized early on that I needed to be deliberate in building a network. So I did things several uncharacteristic things. I started a WhatsApp group of digital health entrepreneurs (over 300 in it now), wrote a monthly health tech newsletter for over 18 months and in contrast to my real life persona, became a nuisance (read as opinionated) on twitter. The latter in particular meant I started to become recognizable and was able to stand out from the crowd and attract like minded people. I endeavour to connect with diverse people and always reach out when they come to mind.
6. Thou shalt learn voraciously. As an entrepreneur you will need to become a generalist and know a little about a lot. This is on the assumption that you already have a specific technical expertise or experience that gives you unique insight into the problem you’re solving. I knew healthcare reasonably well so I had to go learn other stuff to be a more proficient entrepreneur. I now know a bit of frontend, a bit of product, a bit of HR, a bit of sales, a bit of legal. You often don’t have the luxury of big consultants so you will need to read widely, write to help distil your thinking and speak to everyone and anyone you can to learn more. I can’t count the number of times a random conversation with someone has led me to insights I wouldn’t have had otherwise. One more advantage of being a generalist and doing the grunt work in the early days is that you can more easily detect bullshitters.
7. Speak to customers, they have all the answers. Over the years there have been days where I’ve woken up either clueless or overwhelmed. The way I’ve found the right direction to go is to speak to customers and then act on what I’ve learned. This approach has never failed me, it always gives me clarity and fills up my to do list with the right priorities in no time. These days with a team approaching 100 people, many of my main customers are the internal team leads and the people that interface with external customers. I’m thus regularly speaking with the leads and customer service to understand what the bottle necks are so I can help unblock them.
8. Make money early and always, you’re a business. Thankfully the GAAC (grow at all costs) days are over so this is no longer contrarian but it bears highlighting still. In the 10 years I’ve been in the game, people have pointed to other startups who are raising more and growing faster than us. Guess what, many of them are dead now and we’re still alive and on a path to being profitable. This is simply because we prioritized making money and building a business to give value to customers over one built to appeal to investors. When investors have foot-dragged and the bills piled, we were able to extend runway with debt based on the cash flows we were generating. If we weren’t making money, we would have died. So in all your getting, make sure to get revenue. Not just revenue but sustainable revenue which means selling things for more than it costs you to make. Selling $1 for $0.99 is easy. Selling $1 for $2, now that’s a business. While you’re at it, learn finance and once you can, get a proper finance person on board. You can never hope to scale and be successful in the long term when your books and financial processes are a mess. A simple tweak for instance in how you manage your payable and receivables can be the difference between success and failure.
9. Thou shalt nurture your mental and physical health. The moment you sign up for entrepreneurship your physical and mental wellbeing immediately becomes at risk. Your personal life and relationships will suffer and you become higher risk for several conditions. Many of your flaws and imperfections will be amplified and highlighted both in your personal and professional life. You will face severe rejections more times than you can count and twitter will not be kind to you when you slip up. If you’re not deliberate in maintaining your mental and physical health, you will suffer. Eat right, sleep right and exercise. Invest in your personal relationships. Give priority to building deep connections with friends and family who will be there through the ups and downs.
10. Believe that you’re a winner. Starting a business is one of the most difficult yet valuable things to do. Getting in to the arena alone shows you’re a different breed, a winner who’s not afraid to venture. Adopting this mindset of a winner has helped me to navigate difficult days. I’ve imbibed the idea that the end result doesn’t matter as much as the sincerity of effort I put into my work daily. So whether I fail or not, I know I’d have tried my best and that’s all anyone can ask for. The day I became an entrepreneur is the day I won. In entrepreneurship starting is winning.
There you have it, the 10 Commandments From My 10 Years as an Entrepreneur. I write this while in New York having just spoken on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative about the progress we’ve made with our work at Wellahealth. I never would have dreamed of being on a stage like this or associating with such an accomplished crowd but that’s what entrepreneurship does, it forces growth and elevates you to the highest associations as there are not many greater endeavours than creating the future through sheer will and grit. The world rewards doers! Become a doer today!