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Originally Posted by mattsonn  You know, I agree with this statement and with what Rohok said about hard work being necessary. But the thing is, out of the 90% (?) of entrepreneurs that fail, surely a large percentage of them invested a lot of hard work into it. |
The statistic is something like "80% of businesses fail in the first five years, and 80% of the remaining ones in the five years after that." But Steve is 100% right about this -- other people's failures don't determine the outcome for you. I think that the more realistic approach is that your chance of failure could be 80% in your first venture or with the first product you create, and then as you gain experience and understanding each time you try again your chance of success will go up and you'll eventually succeed.
And by the way when a business fails, most of the time it's due to running out of money (not being profitable, or even self-sustainable). This in turn is mostly due to lack of experience of the founders in things like market research, marketing and sales, all of which can be learned in time. But if you give up prematurely you'll never learn them. People who give up after their first failure are giving up in the first few minutes of the marathon.
"Hard work" alone isn't enough to succeed in business though, it's the
right kind of hard work. The idea that hard work alone will lead to success is very misleading (and wrong). There's plenty of hard work you can do that won't get you anywhere. You can spend lots of time working on a product, but if you finish it and then start working on another product instead of working on sales and marketing (the work that's responsible for all your revenue), then your hard work in product development will be for nothing as you'll eventually run out of cash.