A successful career is often defined by the salary one earns. As such, it’s not uncommon for would-be entrepreneurs to focus on how they’re going to earn a big paycheck or raise their profile, and then shape their business around whatever they think will help them reach those goals the fastest. In reality, those motivated by creating “the next big thing” aren’t usually the ones to do it. Entrepreneurs are increasingly achieving lasting success not by determining what product will help them “get rich quick,” but rather honing in on a problem they’ve experienced personally and engineering a solution to address it.
This has been the case for companies like Mint, Airbnb and Dropbox, among others, and it’s also how my company got started. When I co-founded Bomgar with our CEO, Joel Bomgar, we’d recently graduated from college where he earned extra money as a part-time IT rep. He got the idea for our company after spending countless hours driving from site to site because no software existed that would enable him to remotely access and fix customers’ computers. To address this issue, Joel invented our flagship remote support solution and within a few months things took off and never stopped. Because we built the business around a product we wanted to create, versus building a product around a business we wanted to create, our mindset differs from those who are motivated for financial reasons. This seems to be a common theme among other “accidental entrepreneurs.”
To read the original article: Achieving success through ‘accidental entrepreneurship’ | VentureBeat
