I write this post as E-resistible has nearly completed it’s 11th straight week of consecutive growth with 6 of these weeks having a growth rate of 10 – 15% week on week. To put that into context with a growth rate of 15% you double your sales volume every 5 weeks!

Over this time I’ve seen how powerful a business can be when it gathers momentum and how the small victories add up over a short space of time and have a knock-on effect to bring a big victory which provides a motivational boost for everyone involved. This in-turn makes everyone work even harder bringing further victories which then really start to impact on your bottom line.

It’s an obvious thing to say but it is much easier to maintain momentum than it is to get started from standing still. Therefore when you see the business start to slow down & motivation amongst everyone begin to drop a little this is the crucial time to find small victories wherever possible. Without giving too much away this can be as small as gaining a 0.5% increase in conversions or a mention in a local newspaper or website.

These victories do not come about on their own and one of the most difficult things to do is drive yourself toward achieving something every day with no real penalty for not doing so. However, the considerable effort you put in to get the ball rolling very often pays you back many times over as pleasant things begin to happen that you don’t expect. Suddenly luck seems to be on your side, you meet the right people who can help your business and everything seems to be coming so easily. Long forgotten are the struggles in the beginning. All of this comes about because of momentum, with the right people involved it propels you forward on a wave of optimism.

In X Factor, Jedward managed to maintain momentum so far but were unable to keep it up by showing that they actually deserved to be there so their campaign petered out. In contrast Barack Obama came from a senator with little national political experience to become the president of America in little over 2 years.

Once you have even the smallest amount of momentum it’s so important to keep it going because just maybe one day it will be enough to beat the strong favorites in your field.

When you come up with a business idea even if everyone tells you it’s amazing and the best thing since sliced bread the one thing you don’t know and can never know without going to market is if your going to make money. This is a huge risk and quite frankly is the number 1 reason why some people start their own businesses and the majority of others don’t. There are so many good ideas out there that will never been started because the person isn’t able to hack the risks involved.

However being an entrepreneur is not about taking enormous risks, it’s about being in control of all the risks that you are exposed to and reducing them as much as possible. In the early stages of a start-up the main risk is that no-one is going to use or buy your product and therefore you need to find out if this is the case as early as possible. This means getting a version of your product to market as cheaply as possible to test your idea & see if there really is demand out there.

When we launched E-resistible at the University of Warwick as a test market in May 2008 we had a minimum of functionality, zero search engine optimisation and no idea if people would use the service. However this didn’t matter, we had got to market with 18 restaurants on board, customers could place orders and we could learn if it was possible to make money from online takeaway. Fortunately for us we discovered that the Warwick students did like to order takeaway food online and that with the right strategy we could replicate our successes in other cities throughout the UK. However, if it was a total disaster we could have walked away relatively unscathed at this point with only our time and a small amount of money lost between the 3 of us.

A person’s time & effort are the most important ingredients to get a start up off the ground, and the best part is that they are both free! It would have been tempting in the beginning to pay money to take an advert in the student newspaper or employ people to drop leaflets. Doing these jobs ourselves meant that we were at the front end of the business talking to all our prospective customers in the halls of residences and conveying our enthusiasm for the service, our cost base was zero because our time was free and we gained valuable feedback about what people liked & wanted from such a service.

The nightly operations of E-resistible were run from our bedrooms in the student house therefore rent = zero. Internet = zero, phone bill (using our mobiles) = zero, artwork for leaflets (my girlfriend is a very good graphic designer) = zero. Throughout our period of running in our test market we didn’t have to open our wallets once. This was very important for us because we didn’t have a clue if we could get a return from any activities, so by spending nothing it didn’t hurt us if we didn’t get a return.

When making any investment decision in a business you have to know that if you spend X now that you will get Y back with a certain probability over a period of time. If you don’t know what that Y will be then it’s probably best not to put the money in until you know. Since our launch E-resistible.co.uk has grown infinitely more complex with different systems handling different functions of the business and of course we have invested cash into many areas, the difference is now that we’re sure before we put the money in what our return will be & when we will get it.

I will say now that we have made some pretty big mistakes along the way which I will talk about in other posts so this advice is not something that we adhered to all the way through. But then again no-one gave us this advice so we have an excuse for being naive!

You put so much effort into earning cash from a new business so the best way to make money is to not spend it, basically just think like a duck’s arse.