"When you decide to become an entrepreneur, you already know that your life won't be easy." This is what an entrepreneur tells you

She arrived in the United States without knowing a word of English, taking jobs as they came up. In one of them, as a receptionist at a radio station, he got the idea for his first venture, Voice123, a company that connects speakers with people who need them. And suddenly, boom! Success. Is this a typical story? No, behind what Tania Zapata told us, there is much more.

This Colombian knows that her venture emerged * ** “at the right time** because there was a great need for direct contact with voice actors. We didn’t even know you could ask for money [from investors], which forced us to create a business model that allowed us to monetize relatively quickly. In six months, we were at breakeven*,” she comments. It’s the purest definition of success… or not?

Not for Tania: “In all my entrepreneurial stories and those of the friends I know, there’s no ‘overnight success,’ it takes time.“ She doesn’t say this out of false modesty but from the perspective of someone who knows perfectly well what it means to undertake and what skills and characteristics a person who wants to dedicate themselves to it must have. There is always a lot of work behind it, it is not a matter of luck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A7GVqSCQvw

The four key points of an entrepreneur

“Something very important to value is the soft skills you bring to your company,” says Tania. She highlights four above all:

Commitment: “When you decide to become an entrepreneur, you already know that your life won’t be easy, it’s a 100% commitment.”

Celebrate your own success: “The entrepreneurial journey is hard and full of frustrations. The best way to get through it is to celebrate the ‘small wins,’ reward yourself for them.”

Choosing your team wisely: “Sometimes you want to spare the team the pains you have. There are things you can share with them and things you have to carry alone. The main thing is to surround yourself with people who have been through the same process and who listen to you, who say, ‘I understand‘ and tell you how they solved that problem.”

Resilience: “It’s the most important thing, getting up [after every blow] and thinking, ‘How am I going to solve this so that my company can move forward?’ And always with the clarity of knowing when to close the company.” How do you identify if that day has come? “If you have tried all forms of monetization, creating value, and haven’t succeeded, that’s the moment.”

How to make your project take off

The CEO of BunnyStudio knows very well what concerns an entrepreneur from the perspective of creating a company: how to give wings to a project? Take note of a very interesting concept, small successes: “Projects that have already made money on their own, that have had certain successes, even if small, in what they have done.” Does it sound familiar?

Indeed, at Santander X Explorer, we repeat it many times: you have to achieve profitability to then seek investment. And one way to do it is crowdfunding. Pre-register in the programme, and if selected, not only will you receive training on this form of financing, but your project could also receive personalized support in a crowdfunding campaign!