How to start a business, not having free time

The founder of the project, Winnie Sara Mauskopf shares his secrets: how to start a successful business in the complete absence of free time.

A year ago I quit my job to start Winnie, the application that gives parents access to the most-needed local information. At the time my baby was only a few months. To care for the child and to develop a startup already was not easy, but a few months after the launch of the Winnie, my husband discovered an aggressive form of cancer, which required serious treatment.

If before I just haven't had time, but now it was sorely missed. Many told me to start a company to earn over $ 2 million, in my situation would be insane. Here are 5 tips that have helped me to free up time to implement your project.





1. Refrain from meeting for a coffee

Within a few months while my husband recovered from cancer, I refused all kinds of informal networking over a Cup of coffee, a glass of wine, etc. Most of these invitations came from venture investors, who wanted to know what I'm working on, or about the upbringing of children in General.

Remember that the job of investors is to meet with many people and learn what they do — so they can decide in whom to invest. The founders are also involved in the development of their business.

If you are not doing fundraising, investor meetings and networking with the right people will bring your business little good. Product development and finding the right market for it will give much more dividend to your company than the networking.

It's hard to say no? For me it was a huge problem. I felt horribly guilty, rejecting the invitation, especially given the fact that many venture investors was very persistent.

In the end I worked out a polite way of refusal, which allowed to save the relationship. I said, "you Know, in the next couple of months will be very difficult to meet you in person, but I'll be happy to help where I can. Maybe I'll answer your questions via email, and then we go ahead?"

It turned out to be a great way to bring people to their senses. Most of them admitted that they have no to me urgent cases, although some sent specific questions. One person simply wrote that he wanted to participate in the investment rounds of our companies, when we start to attract investment. We contacted him when it came to fundraising — and it really put us in the money.

Drink as much coffee as you want, just don't drink it at a table in a cafe!





2. Prepare a list of tasks

Every week I dedicated some time thinking about what I need to do and break work into small manageable tasks. I had projects that could be performed in the presence of free 15 minutes, larger projects that required a couple of hours, and doing all kinds of things in between. All these tasks were arranged in order of priority.

Thus, if I had a few free minutes while husband waited to see a doctor, or a couple of hours while my daughter slept, I did not spend my precious time on thinking up what I can do next.

I just assumed already prepared before the job. This will require advance planning, but it is not time consuming. The plan is drawn up once, and the job can be completed within a week.

3. Do not work alone

The only exception to my rule of refusing meetings over coffee was the interview. The time I spent on meetings and hiring awesome people. When you have a crack team, with them you can get better results than alone. It requires some preliminary work, but brings great dividends in the long run.

If you are the founder of the company, hiring employees is the best thing you could spend your time. I was very lucky with my colleagues.

4. Ask for help

People are very bad can help. Even when they offer you their help, they usually don't bring it to the end or doing it so that they need to redo everything. Many wanted to help me with the development of the Winnie, and I usually asked: "I need feedback on the app!" The answer was silence...

As it turned out, "giving feedback" is a daunting task for most people. Now when someone offers me their help, I give them a very specific task: "Download app Winnie at winnie.com/ios write a review of your child's favorite Playground."

When one of them performs this task, they are, of course, at the same time tell me what was good and what could be improved in the product — and I get their feedback.

5. Force yourself to do the work imperfectly

Here is the real practical example: I gave myself an hour to write this post before you go to babysit. I can publish this post after this hour or to spend more time to edit it and bring to perfection. I force myself to post this entry earlier than scheduled, although it certainly has typos, and it could be reduced.

 



One-on-one: 6 ways to get the employee of the truth5 phrases for which you do not take to work

The extra two hours that I spent on improving this text, not too will increase the number of people who will read it and extract from it. Perfectionism is a habit that is very difficult to reverse, so you need to set time limits and force yourself to finish as much as have time, even if they are less than 100% perfect.published

 



Source: www.iidf.ru/media/articles/lifehacks/kak-nachat-biznes-ne-imeya-svobodnogo-vremeni/