Evan Carmichael launched his first real company at 19. His software venture nearly broke him: he called his co-founder during a family gathering to quit, then cried for 15 minutes. He went back to work the next day anyway, sold the company two years later, and learned that passion, not profit, keeps you going through the lows.
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The life of an entrepreneur. I got a question from Eric, who's one of my readers, who wrote in a huge long email, but basically wanted to know, "I know you've been in business since you were young. How has it been?" So that's a pretty wide-ranging question. I started my business, my first real company, when I was 19, and before then I had a whole bunch of little things on the side, selling baseball cards and a whole bunch of different ventures. But the real company was when I was 19. How has it been? It's amazing, it's fun, it's tons of highs, and it's also frightening and scary, and you doubt yourself constantly, and tons of lows as well. You know, it's the best part of my life and the worst part of my life all wrapped into one. And I think any entrepreneur will can feel the same way. I think you can— I don't know what the word is— you can associate with it. Maybe what will help is to tell you the best part and the worst part in my business career. The worst was when I thought about quitting. In the early days of my software company, I had two partners and we thought things would be great. You know, we thought we had a great product, people loved it, and we would take over the world with our software. And it just never picked up like we thought it would, and things were so much harder than we thought it would be. And it's frustrating because you're losing money. You know, I'm making $300 a month. It wasn't enough to survive. I was frustrated and angry and lost my confidence and didn't know where to go with it and thought about giving up on a daily basis. The worst moment for me in all of that mess was— I don't remember the day, but I was over at my parents' house for a family function, and I got a call from my business partner, and I took it upstairs, and we just— we had struggled so much in getting to this point and trying to figure out how we would grow. We both had the same vision of what we wanted to do, but But different plans on how to get there. And it got to the point where I thought, you know what, this is, this is not working. You know, I'm so frustrated. I don't want to be there. I don't want to be in this business anymore. I quit. You know, you could buy my shares, whatever it is, we'll figure it out, but I'm done. I'm done with this company. I need to do something else where I'm more, where my talents and skills are being used properly. I want to have an impact. I'm done. And I hung up the phone and I cried for 15 minutes, just uncontrollably, you know, tears running down my face, down my nose, you know, it's like I was a wreck, just a total wreck, because I built— I spent so much time building this thing, you know, I put so much of myself into it, barely sleeping to launch this company, and We saw barely any progress. It was so disheartening. And my mom came up and she put her hand on my shoulder and asked me what was wrong, and I couldn't even say anything. You know, I was just so overwhelmed. I don't know if I responded at all. And I went to bed that night, you know, cried myself to sleep, and the next day I got up and went back to work. That's what you do. That's what you do as an entrepreneur. But that was the worst, single worst day in my life as an entrepreneur. The best day was when I sold my company. And that wasn't that far from when I almost gave up. You know, it was only 2 years in between that terrible day where I almost quit to being acquired and all the crazy stuff that happened in between. And what kept me going was the passion for the business and feeling like I was doing something right. And I wasn't doing it just for the money. I was doing it to do it and doing it to have an impact and doing it to be part of something meaningful. And so as an entrepreneur, you have to be, you know, willing and ready to ride that roller coaster. You're going to have great highs where you feel on top of the world, you feel invincible, you feel like, yeah, this is working finally, you know, this is amazing. And then almost as quickly as feeling that emotion, you'll get hit in the face with something and it'll knock you down, and you're in full crisis mode trying to solve this problem. And just when you feel like things couldn't get worse, another punch comes to the stomach, and you'll be tested beyond what you thought was possible. It'll be so bad, and it'll really test your character and test to see what you're made of. And test how much you really love this business or not, if you're doing it for the right reasons or not. And if you come out on the other side, it's because you're really super passionate about this company and not willing to give up. So it was a bit of a broad question, so I gave you kind of a broad answer, but that's my story in a nutshell. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I love seeing those come in. And if you have a specific question for me Or if you want to leave a comment, leave it below. I really love seeing those come in. I really appreciate it when you guys do that. It really makes me want to keep doing more of these videos for you. You guys inspire me to keep going, so please leave a comment underneath. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
