A First-Time Entrepreneur's 5 Tips To Anyone Trying to Start a Company

For the past year I have enjoyed the thrilling ride of starting my first company. These 5 tips are lessons I've learned along the way.  

1. Network, Network, and Network

Make sure to network up, down, and horizontally. There’s no way to be fully prepared for all the situations that will arise when you're starting a company, so just talk to as many people as you can. At my first job out of college, I was getting coffee from the company kitchen and ended up meeting the president of our holding company. I still use her as a trusted advisor. 

Make sure to pay-it-forward. There are so many inexperienced entrepreneurs out there who are looking for help. Even if you’re just starting out yourself, there’s always someone who is newer to the game and is looking to you for guidance.

2. Ask for a lot of advice, but know how to be the decision maker

As soon as you start your company, you'll be flooded with opinions - solicited and unsolicited. Be humble enough to take all of the advice, but be confident enough to make your own decisions. You'll find people on both side of the fence for every choice you'll need to make. Trust your own abilities. You are ultimately accountable for making the right call.

3. Never give up

There will be no shortage of people who will be skeptical that you can get a new company off the ground. Don’t listen to the doubters. If you fail at one venture, use what you’ve learned to start on the next good idea. One of my closest friends from high school became a successful rapper, actor, and entrepreneur. He could easily have succumbed to all the negativity of his fellow peers thinking he couldn’t make it. He chose not to listen and is now living his dream.

4. Don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong 

There is zero chance that everything will go according to plan. What you can do is fail fast, and be prepared to keep making changes. 

We founded MedPilot with the goal of empowering patients to understand and manage their medical bills. Our original model tried to tackle this by targeting individual patients, but we quickly realized that we weren't going to make a sizable impact if we went one medical bill at a time.

But by talking to our users, we learned more about their biggest pain points and realized that if we adjusted our model to focus on healthcare providers, we'd be able to drive a higher degree of transparency, trust and cost efficiency and stay true to our initial goals.

5. Enjoy yourself 

There’s no point in embarking on a venture if you can’t have fun with it. The odds of becoming the next Uber are slim. One way to guarantee that your company is not a failure is by enjoying and learning as much as you can from the ride. Plus, having a good time is infectious and will help attract the right opportunities, team, and customers.

Feel free to contact me at matt.budershapiro@gmail.com if I can be of any help. Good luck!