No is a good word
Most entrepreneurs will tell you that the “first brilliant idea” they
come up with is typically met with a no. But if anything, that
no forces the entrepreneur to go back to the drawing board,
make the idea better and tweak the proposition.
A less than warm response made the folks at Confinity Inc. tweak
their concept for a software that sends money from one mobile device to
another. They came back with the infinitely more successful Internet
payment mechanism known as PayPal.
So yes: no is a good word.
They said no, we said yes
It was 18 months ago that we first championed our idea for an online
charity platform. We came up with what we thought was a rock solid
business plan. We pitched it to a load of big names in business, seeking
funding so that we could hire a team of engineers and build this online
platform.
All we needed was a million quid.
But the economic recession killed any chance we had of getting cash.
People said no.
A hard knock, right? But when someone tells you no,
sometimes the best thing to do is answer back yes.
Yes we will improve our idea.
Yes we will go back to the drawing board.
Yes we will persevere.
(and no, we won’t give up.)
And so we did. Yes involved throwing the business plan out
the window, not looking for a million quid, but seeking instead to build
the platform ourselves, from scratch, for free.
By gathering up donated time and services and by seeking free
software, brain power and sound advice from our peers, we’ve managed to
transform mygoodpoints from a “first brilliant idea” into a reality.
We have today built the basic platform, and over the next few months
with the help of some people from the mygoodpoints community, we’ll be
putting it through some serious testing and getting ready to go live.
That’s our yes to some of the no’s we received.
There’s a nice Japanese proverb that we particularly like. It says,
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”