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Any friendly entrepreneurship communities that aren't rotten with the whole "grindset," hustle culture stuff?
I've always been interested in entrepreneurship, and I think I want to get serious about doing something. I checked out the Millionaire Fastlane forums, and it's just completely saturated with the whole "grindset" BS. I tried reading a couple of threads, and my eyes almost rolled out of my head. 🙄
I've also hung around on the entrepreneur subreddit, and it just seems like a bunch of people without much experience trading unproven advice and people trying to sell courses.
Does anyone know of a better community? I'd like to find some friendly, welcoming adults with actual experience to talk with. Are entrepreneurship and hustle culture always a package deal?
As far as I am concerned, the Venn diagram of "entrepreneurship" and "hustle culture" is a circle. Certainly the types of people in both groups are quite similar (in values, goals, etc), but I'd be curious what you or others think differentiates the two.
I think that's mostly because of the people who identify as "entrepreneurs". Lots of people decide that they could do a better job than their boss and go out on their own providing the same service they did as an employee, but they often don't identify as entrepreneurs, they identify as plumbers or bookkeepers or lawyers who run their own business.
OP, better to go to forums for your specific profession. You're much more likely to get good info about how to start the kind of business you want to run from that side, rather from the general "starting a business" forum mindset. Just make sure to read the FAQs first. The number of people who popped into r/bookkeeping to ask "I have no experience or training, how do I make $100,000 a year being my own boss?" was both embarrassing and irritating, but when they had specific questions about the process or pitfalls to watch for, we were a font of information.
I don't think so. I guess the SEO is a bit flooded by it but that's just what @RadDevon mentioned about people selling courses. "Entrepreneurship" in some circles is a dogwhistle for rich kids to say "I'm a job creator, tax me less". If they had better SEO, this is what you'd see.
On hustle culture... yeah, as a whole, it grosses me out but I've come to understand it's the other extreme of what I've been calling "business apathy", which is very present here in Belgium.
The country, much as I love it, is filled with absolutely brilliant people, but the amount of "business apathy" makes it so that most of their innovation opportunities are sapped. It's filled with people who get used to working slowly, and who tend to bring others down with them.
Hustle culture on the other hand is a push to get you to do more; lift you up instead of bring you down. The execution can be gross, but in principle, it's about keeping you fighting even if you're beat down, not giving up, pushing you to work harder, etc.
Obviously the healthy mindset is somewhere in the middle, but "entrepreneurship" is a lot about responsibility. When the economy is shit and your work lays you off, you can blame unknown forces. When the economy is shit and your business does badly, you have to take responsibility, and those who give up do not succeed. "Not giving up" of course doesn't just mean "try harder", but can also mean "try smarter", "introspect", "understand the problem, fix it, and try again", etc.
By the way... for context, I'm creating a startup community in Belgium. I live this apathy people have. Sometimes I've given up on people I wanted to help because they just... brought me down with them. And it's everywhere. It's even government mandated: You want to start a business? The government immediately wants to know it's a safe one, and asks you to show a 3-year business plan... that they then don't read, because it's all pretend CYA anyway, nobody actually gives a shit and helps you if you fail; everyone just politely asks you not to take risks and looks at you funny if you do. There's no desire to make things better, in fact there's no vision that things CAN be better. People complain things aren't as good as they should be, but shrug their shoulders at the very thought of helping fix the system beyond "I guess I'll vote for someone else in five years".
I'm running my program with a lot of Ukrainians (with the goal of bringing ukrainian entrepreneurs to Belgium). They have a completely different mindset, much closer to hustle culture. It doesn't mean they sell each other bullshit books on how to be a 150% productive person and lifehack your way to success... but it means they get shit done. They have the default A->B->C mindset of "If I don't know how to do this, I'll research. If I can't do it alone, I'll ask for help. If I don't do a good job, I don't get paid."
I haven't fully cracked the code on what exactly makes Ukrainians so much more efficient/productive and so much better at getting shit done. I'm certainly working on it.
Okay, sorry, that went on. All this to say that hustle culture and entrepreneurship aren't a package deal, but it depends what you want to actually do. If you're looking to make your own startup, look for startup-minded communities. Anything under the flag of "entrepreneurship" will be closer to running your own lifestyle business. And @MimicSquid is quite right in recommending forums for your specific sector if you just want to turn a safe 9-5 job into running your own firm doing that.
I agree with this 100%. I find the online "hustle culture" insufferable, but I probably still mildly prefer it to people who instead just complain about everything and do very little about it.
I'm from Czechia, another post-communist country that is considerably more westernized than Ukraine, and we have very similar issues to what you describe, though with different causes (and so do Ukrainians, what you experience is 100% selection bias, more below). We've always had good engineers who were terrible businessmen and it was almost frowned upon to be good at business in some layers of society.
Communism worked hard for 40 years to squash the mindset that anybody can do anything without state oversight because the regime needed people to be obedient, not independent, and this is still extremely prevalent. They went to great lengths to do this, for example they often destroyed centers of big villages/small towns where people used to go to just sit around and talk to each other, because that creates and supports natural communities resilient against ideological changes. It's hard to describe to a westerner how much people weren't (and in most places still aren't) used to just doing new things (on any level, including using non-profits, clubs, neighbor groups, whatever) on their own without state oversight or help, compared to the opposite extreme like the US.
The more you go to the east, the more you encounter this. There's a significant difference in attitude between western and eastern Ukraine even - or at least there used to be before the war.
However, there's a weird effect where if things are bad enough in a country, it sometimes causes a developmental leap to happen. It most often happens with technology, where for example relatively poor countries adopt phone-based payment services much faster than any country in western Europe. With society it's never that easy, but many people in eastern Europe greatly looked up to things like the American culture of entrepreneurship and innovation (even though we sometimes don't see a lot of love towards the US in general), and since we all started on the opposite end of the spectrum, the effects of that were generally quite positive.
So some part of society started to split off in their views of these topics and actually learned to take responsibility for themselves and their surroundings, and that's where your Ukrainians came from, and that's where Euromaidan came from as well. The mainstream society in Ukraine is definitely still not like that, but the proportion of youngish people like you encountered is getting bigger.
I assume Belgium has good social safety nets. Why should companies be de-risked to this degree? I think as long as the employer isn’t deceptive to employees about the company’s risks then there’s informed consent all around. Some people, like myself, specifically seek out riskier employment opportunities. I’ve worked for the government, I’ve worked for Google. Those jobs are too safe. Not only does that mean they’re no fun, it also breeds all sorts of issues where people mistake their rise along the totem pole with personal growth. And in a dysfunctional system there’s sometimes a negative correlation there.
shrug. There's no good reason. Bankruptcies do cost the state money but so does killing innovation so... ymmv.
I think you need to be more specific. "Entrepreneur" is not a very binding attribute. A twitch livestreamer is as much an entrepreneur as someone who owns a bakery; other than suffering during tax season, they have very little in common with each other.
Because it's so vague, that's why you get hustle culture bros coping about being unemployed. Who else would call themselves "entrepreneurs"? If you own an etsy shop, you'd call yourself an artist, or a jeweler. If you are a content creator, a youtuber, twitch livestreamer, etc. They would never join an "entrepreneur" forum or group.
Find what kind of business you want to be in, and there will be groups of normal-ish people who talk about the challenges they have in a community.
You need to focus on small business or "mom and pop" shop communities. They are much more comfortable, and tend to shy away from the hustle culture. I don't have any specific sites, but those are the type of things you'll need to look out for. They generally are less vindictive and competitive, but don't be surprised that they all in some form subscribe to some form of the "excellence above all" aspects to hustle culture, and if you are in regional groups — expect it to become more like a high school cafeteria, or worse, a PTA group.
I've found that "Maker" spaces and other innovation-focused organizations often have healthy entrepreneur and leadership/mentorship groups co-located or nearby
+1 on this, totally forgot to mention them in my comment. Maker spaces are filled with people with brilliant ideas with dreams of being (or currently living as) entrepreneurs.
It sounds like there are a few people on Tildes already. Is there a way to make one here??
We can just use ~talk but tag with a specific #entregroup or something to let people filter. The discussion would be otherwise very public, though.
We could have a boilerplate disclaimer at the end of each post as well, saying we're part of a group that follows specific rules #1 no selling to each other, #2 only here to help others succeed, and more to be fleshed out.
Just a thought.
I'm a business owner as well. Contract CFO. Help other businesses with finance, banking, admin operations, risk management, and investors/boards and interface with auditors, insurance/bonding agents, tax accountants, and all interested outside parties.
Many of the comments already posted hit good points. Local meetings are great, but not great if you're really not into face to face, which is totally fine. This forum could be a space for those people.
Additionally, just getting things done and picking yourself up after being knocked down are exactly what you need to do as an owner. You won't make every sale, you'll get pushed back, if you have employees things will never go exactly like you want, but continuing to move forward with whatever you have to do next is important. Make progress, especially if it is not perfect. Be able to vent frustrations and get over them quickly, to come up with solutions. Your job is to solve problems. Customer problems (that's why they pay you) and business problems (so you can deliver on your customer promise).
Much of this is cliche, but it's true for a vast majority of businesses.
Hey, another contract CFO! It's nice to have company. I'd definitely be up for more conversation on the topic, and it's as easy as having a themed conversation thread of the week/month (depending on activity level.) If it's done on an impromptu level, there's nothing needed but to post a thread prompting people to talk, and we can ask for a recurring thread once we can show that there's consistent interest in the conversation.
I had success with the small business association’s SCORE program (https://www.sba.gov/local-assistance/resource-partners/score-business-mentoring)
I was also part of Toastmasters and found some good people there.
Is meetup.com still a thing? If so, I found steering clear of the direct “networking” groups, but for a freelance developer, anything geeky can add to building out a bit of a network. Go to the fun ones.
Good luck. Face to face is where it’s always been at for me, and usually the smaller events and groups made for better success in finding great people to work with.
I'm not an entrepreneur but I hope to be one soon. I'm pretty close to a lot of company founders. The ones I know aren't in some kind of "grindset" bubble. They do need to work hard and more than 40 hours per week. If you live in a major metro area you can probably find meetups or social groups for these kinds of people. You'll still need to filter out the BS.
I have learned a lot from posts on indiehackers.com although it has a solid bit of what you want to avoid. My best pro tip though is to look for local entrepreneur focused co-working spaces. My startup team of three works out of one in our city, and there are about 70 different founders in the space. We have game nights, poker nights, a monthly party, and all kinds of other great social events and presentations that are relevant for founders. In this local rl community (based on sharing a physical space) everyone really helps each other in a way I just haven’t ever experienced in online communities.
All the best to you! And please do share here what you are working on! Go Tildes entrepreneurs!
Community service cooperatives are a type of organization that can provide services like a company without devolving into infinite growth and grind. That's what I'm leaning towards after 9 years of running a 1-2 person for profit failing corporation
Perhaps look at this group, mostly USA based
https://seattleangelconference.com/
It helps entrepreneur get through the first hurdle: raise money or build on own. Low pressure group as well since you interact with first time investors too. Known to steer folk away from turning a hobby into a "business'. Fun should be fun.