Guest Blogger: Arthur Root, Nostra
In college, I was busy. As a pro, I am under pressure.
As an introduction, I am Arthur Root, a co-founder of Nostra. At Nostra, our goal is to make the online shopping experience as similar as possible to the in-person experience using psychometric information. My team and I hopped on the entrepreneurial bike in 2018 while we were juniors at Indiana University. We are now college graduates pursuing our company full time. To use a metaphor, we have taken the training wheels off our bicycle and are beginning to ride full steam ahead.
My last two years of college were a whirlwind. I constantly had to make choices - taking sales calls and prepping for exams, hustling for my startup and completing extra credit. I didn’t understand the drawbacks of being so busy. My team and I clearly missed opportunities because we were rushed. We had less time to think strategically and had to focus much more on doing. With that said, anything I did on top of school was a bonus. While others studied and socialized, my team and I were busy building tomorrow’s technology. At the end of the day, even if we failed, it was a win because the knowledge we accumulated building Nostra was multiple times larger than anything we learned in the classroom. Yes, we had to sacrifice a lot, and, yes, we were busier than most, but college is about learning, and we were learning more than we bargained for. What I now know, is that I was just barely learning what being a founder is. I was riding the entrepreneurial bike with training wheels on.
I thought it would all be easier after I graduated. With no course load, I now have 30 to 50 extra hours a week. There certainly are benefits to this. To begin with, I have the mental capacity to think further into the future. In college, I rarely had time to sit back and think. Today, I am amazed at how many executable ideas come up simply because I am not rushed. If being an entrepreneur is like riding a bike, graduating college afforded me the time to take the training wheels off my bike. Like a professional cyclist, the more hours I spend on my craft, the better at it I become.
On top of that, since “going pro”, I have learned tips and tricks you can only learn from firsthand operating experience. When I left college, Nostra had no clients (COVID-19 really hurt our travel business), but we have used a variety of growth tactics to facilitate our growth. For example, we needed to connect with hard-to-reach partners. So we “scraped” all publicly available Calendly links in order to schedule meetings with them. Instead of reaching out to these partners via email or LinkedIn, we simply hopped on a scheduled call with them! This maneuver allowed us to move into the market more efficiently. We also found that most of our clients communicate in Facebook groups, but really do not want to be reached out to through Facebook. As a result, we converted the potential client profiles we were seeing on Facebook into LinkedIn profiles where it was more appropriate to contact them. These tactics allowed us to oversubscribe our beta, and we are currently gearing up to take on more customers.
With that being said, being a professional entrepreneur is not purely fun and games. In college, the main opportunity cost for running a company was a lack of socializing. Today, the cost of entrepreneurship is not pursuing a mainstream career. Many of my peers are making serious amounts of money in finance, consulting, engineering, real estate, sales, etc., while my team and I are working for a fraction of our “worth in dollars”. This adds a layer of pressure and urgency that simply was not around in college. While this stress does not always feel good in the moment, the progress we make due to the pressure is more than worth it.
WE LOVE THE PRESSURE. It focuses us, which in turn makes us work smarter and harder together, which in turn gives our clients a better product.
Being an entrepreneur in college was like riding a bike with training wheels. But taking the entrepreneurial journey to the real world was like being thrust into the Tour de France. My bet is the longer we are on the bike, the faster it will go.