How to stay motivated as an Entrepreneur?

Rachid Akiki, MD, MBA
3 min readMar 21, 2022

I have been building/learning for months, and one day I hit a plateau where I was so discouraged that I couldn’t bring myself to keep going. It’s hard to stay motivated as a founder. Sometimes, you have to believe when no one else does. And then, there are those times when it’s hard to believe even for you.

Fellow founders, have you been there?

Impossible is nothing

1. Customers

One of the biggest motivators when building a business is taking on customers without charging them. It might sound silly, but it works very well. Start off with an entirely free product with no fixed timeframe on when to start charging. This works really well to validate the idea, get feedback, and figure out how people use the product. Use that to figure out where you want to take things. Don’t introduce a paid plan until you are at a point where you have a solid offering. Within a few days of that, you will have a handful of customers convert to paid.

Getting your first paying customer is a huge motivator! Every time you get a new customer, it just drives motivation higher and higher. You need to love what you’re doing. If building your product/business is a slog and you’re not enjoying it, that won’t change. Your motivation won’t improve without a serious change in perspective. It cannot all be about money, and if you’re not in it…

--

--

Rachid Akiki, MD, MBA
Rachid Akiki, MD, MBA

Written by Rachid Akiki, MD, MBA

Decentralizing healthcare 🚀 Medical Doctor turned Serial Entrepreneur. Boston & Miami-based. Studied physics, medicine, radiology, & business. Always Learning

No responses yet