I’m a 23 year-old journalist and owner of a media startup, Driven Media. I don’t consider myself a business woman–though I’m becoming one–but I definitely am an entrepreneur.
And you can be one too.
Entrepreneurship transcends business. You don’t need an MBA to be an entrepreneur. You don’t need to have decades of experience in your industry. You just need passion, time and a solid support system of mentors and teammates.
Everyone lives their life aware of problems in the world and frustrations in their life. Some people are content to accept those problems as norms or too large to make a dent in. What creates an entrepreneur is the decision to take an active role in challenging norms or tackling problems.
Illustration by Samantha Harrington.
For me, that meant creating change in the media industry. A month before graduating from college, a group of friends and I decided to tell the stories we felt were missing– stories of women succeeding in all kinds of fields and walks of life.
To make our entrepreneurial venture successful, we knew that we needed a very specific problem to solve. We couldn’t completely change the way women are represented in the media overnight. We needed to start small and then expand.
We settled on solving a problem: young women feel like they are left out or overgeneralized in traditional media coverage.
But before we even got to the point of defining our problem, we had to do a lot of research. It is essential in entrepreneurship that you clearly understand the problem you’re trying to solve, the related industry and your customer demographic before launching anything.
When my team and I started Driven, it helped that we belonged to the demographics of our audience. We already understood what it was like to be a young woman and we had a network of friends and peers who could help us get to know our market and start building an organization that mattered.
Illustration by Samantha Harrington.
If you don’t have that built-in advantage, you have to put in the work to get it. Any entrepreneur needs to prove, to themselves and to future investors, that there are other people out there who see the same problem they’re trying to fix.
The network of people you find will become advisors, friends and customers.
Throughout our year of building Driven, we often returned to those same lessons we learned while doing research: when you don’t know something, ask an expert. And if you don’t know an expert, Google ‘til you do.
Being an entrepreneur is exhausting, so it’s important that you believe in what you’re doing. It also is important to create a team of people you trust, who are willing to disagree with you, and are equally passionate about your business. That support system will get you through the worst of times.