The experience of how prioritization lead to immense benefits in my personal life prompted me to look at how we could implement a similar mindset & workflow within WooThemes.

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Maybe we've lost focus on the things that are really important when building a business.

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I've been doing a lot of thinking about my personal ambitions on how so many revolves around being an entrepreneur and being involved in business(es). In my attempts of figuring out why entrepreneurship is such an integral part of who I am, I realized that there's one aspect of being an entrepreneur that greatly appeals to me: the sky is the limit.

I believe that in business (and as an entrepreneur) that everything is possible that we're only driven by our own passion, ideas, hard work & ambition. Stumbling blocks or supposed limitations are only challenges that entrepreneurs need to face (and find creative solutions for) along the way.

This appeals to me, because I'm a naturally ambitious person who doesn't like to be put in a box. I simply love the fact that I'm able to have this never-ending journey from project to project, business to business. The sky is the limit.

I think most would agree that ideas are just a multiplier of execution, and that just having an idea for a new startup isn't sufficient to actually get started or be successful. Neither does it make you an entrepreneur.

I have however recently come across quite a prevalent problem with this: if you're the non-technical ideas / business guy within the startup realm, you are most probably struggling to get your projects out there due to your lack of technical skills (and thus your ability to actually build anything).

So sure, there are a couple of ways around this:

• Find a technical co-founder. Even if you manage to figure out the question of equity distribution, quality technical co-founders seem to be few & far between.
• Outsource the work to a top-notch developer. This is expensive, because quality development talent is in high demand, which means you will have to put a considerable amount of cash into a startup just to get it to Alpha or Beta.
• Outsource the work to any other developer that you can afford. There's probably a reason you can afford these: they either don't have the skills / experience, have a bad reputation or are likely to drop you before ever getting close to Alpha or Beta.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons that I failed in setting up a side-project beyond WooThemes. And this exact challenges have come up in so many conversations that I've had with talented individuals that have great ideas for startups.

How do you get around this?

Reading through Ben's post, from which I've extracted the above quote, I found myself nodding in agreement to most of what he said. The quote above made me stop reading though and I found myself unsure of whether I actually believed that.

Why did I consider myself an entrepreneur? Did I start a business to make money?

Regardless of my definition of success, I'd have to agree with that; I definitely didn't start a business not to make money. I know that I've never been able to motivate myself with the potential lure of money and that's not why I come to work every morning. But it would be an outright lie if I said I didn't believe that I would profit financially from starting my own business.

I think this borders on my opinion that the execution of any ideas includes the actual monetization thereof. I would definitely consider myself a failure had a I started a business - even if it was for non-financial reasons - and then I failed to profit from it.

More importantly though, I believe I'm an entrepreneur because I want to be involved with building sustainable businesses. There's obviously an element of "money" involved in that and to be sustainable one needs to be profitable, but the initial aim of creating a sustainable business versus making money sits more comfortably with me.

And once you have created something sustainable, the other "nice things" that Ben mentions (having fun, changing the world, disrupting an industry, creating jobs) comes into play: having a sustainable platform to explore, where money isn't the only consideration.