Two Years of Building a Business While in College
Lessons learned by doing it myself.
I’ve spent the last two years and a half years building a business. It started out as a small little freelance writing side guide, then turned into a full service content marketing and branding agency. It helped put food on the table during a global pandemic, paid my tuition bills on time, and taught me things that university never could.
Just start building
Prior to actually getting in the weeds and growing a business myself, I thought the people that claimed doing > learning were narrow-minded and outright wrong. It took less than a month of building to realize they’d been right all along. Nothing prepares you for the “real world” (hate that phrase with a passion) then diving in and getting your hands dirty.
This was proven true in every regard. My front end skills grew more from trying (and failing) to get my website up and running. I learned cold outreach and how to effectively automate email blasts and get conversions trending upward.
Now I’m not saying that this method of learning is inherently better than a traditional university education (though in many cases it is), just that it’s something different that you’re not going to get in the classroom. Even if the biz ends up a failure or you discover that it’s not your passion, you’re still going to end up so much farther than you would’ve been without it.
So do it. Take the leap.
And learn to love the process
This was probably my biggest takeaway from building a small biz while balancing a 20+ credit course load each semester. I’ve learned to not only embrace the long, often unfulfilling process of building, but to love every step along the way.
It’s not easy finding SaaS companies willing to shill out a few hundred bucks on content to a relatively unproven freelancer. Being eighteen and a college freshman makes this 10x harder. Throughout it all, I kept pushing and continued to reach out to companies every day.
Eventually, a few of them began to bite and I started closing deals. As my inbox began to fill with interested leads, so did my confidence. So when it came time to apply for internships that I was wildly under qualified for, I applied anyway. This directly led to my upcoming internship this, where I’ll be doing product work for a rapidly growing SaaS company.
