Thoughts after Listening to a Podcast with Yaro Starak and Sean Gallagher
After listening to a podcast with Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey and Sean Gallagher, I feel more determined to work through my fears and challenge myself more than I have so far. In the interview, Sean describes how he began his online career. He started off by investing $20,000 into a website for online music distribution during his sophomore year of college. (This was way before iTunes, Napster, etc.) The website designer he hired ended up falling through even though Sean paid him in advance. While still in college, Sean partnered with someone that had a similar idea and invested another $20,000. Things began to really take off so he put more money into his business. Unfortunately, competition with new companies increased and although money was still coming through the website, it was not enough to justify the amount of time and work being devoted to the business. He disbanded the business, selling as much as he could. There was one major problem, though. He was $75,000 in debt and still in college!
If you are a student attending a private university, law school, or med school, you can probably relate to that $75,000 figure because of your student loans. Imagine what was going through Sean’s mind. He could have done so many other things with that money and he was walking away with nothing.
From here, he did anything he could think of to pay off his debt. He did a little bit of everything including becoming a car salesman and doing DJ events. His DJ job worked out well to get a couple hundred dollars per event. This job led to a website that he founded called howtodjfast.com. He also runs another website at startupfreedom.com.
He mentioned that everyone kept telling him that he shouldn’t give up his steady paying job in order to try another online project. He did it anyway. He overcame the financial burden and stress caused by his debt and failed business. I think the take home message here is to not fear failure and believe in your dreams. Hard work can pay off and it will certainly take a lot of hard work to reach the point of Sean and other successful online entrepreneurs.
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