Valuable lessons for your first year in business. ASPIRE shares its experience

The beginning is a frenzy of activities, with things happening at breakneck speed, and with an exponential learning curve. It is also a time that is perhaps filled with the highest amount of effort with little to no rewards. Going from unknown to familiar is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve as a brand, business, service, or even a magazine.

So you have rejections. Emails unreturned. Business cards which seem squandered on people who do not match your client profile. Deals dropped at the last minute. Pitches that miss the mark despite your rehearsal. The odds seem stacked higher than the tower of Babel against you.

It’s hard to look at the bright side or even believe it exists. But what looks like your business faltering are actually disguised hints of success. Yes, there are rejections, but they’re helping you sculpt your next pitch. Business cards travel from those who don’t need your services to those who do. Pitches get naturally refined by showing to actual clients.

The first attempts are you making a bid at getting your business into high gear. To falter is inevitable, and you will learn that the less you treat it like a shock, the faster you can recover from it and move on to the next thing.

The same is true for Faisal Ibrahim. Before the success of Brainciti, he experienced losses in a coffee shop venture. To gain better experience, he launched three more companies with various degrees of success. The lessons he learned from these ventures paved the way for his online learning platform Brainciti, which has now grown to over 100,000 minutes of informative content and more than 200 people tuning in each day