Each part is necessary, but in itself not sufficient.
Successful business takes hard work, the right work, done well, reaching a market that needs it and can afford it.
Motivation by itself is worthless. Working on the wrong thing is worthless. Working hard on the wrong thing is worthless.
Being smart isn't about doing Integral Calculus. It's about deciding to work on the right thing.
Most of all a business needs to reach customers who want what you are selling, and can afford what you need to charge.
To the OP I say "I don't know you, but i expect you looked for product first, then first customers. Switch to finding customers first, then worry about the product."
Once you have that then you'll need motivation, hard work and indeed some luck.
So if that’s all it takes? Then why are so many businesses failures? I bet if you got in a room with 30 people and they all told you their story without mentioning the outcome and you could judge the characteristics you mentioned and they were all equal, you couldn’t predict which ones are successful business people and which ones are failures.
On the other hand, if you gave 10 people a job at BigTech, 10 a job at a well known non tech company and told 10 to go start a business, which one of those groups do you think would have the highest median and mean compensation history over 5 years? 10 years?
I posit that it would be BigTech, Enterprise Dev and the startup founders would come in dead last.
Heck I got close to a million dollars in “revenue” just working as a mid level (L5) remote employee at BigTech for 3.5 years and I was paid 10-15% less in my position (cloud consulting) than the equivalent SDE.
If that were my major concern at this point in life (I’m 50), there are much easier ways to have a million dollars in “revenue” over 3-4 years for anyone in tech than starting a business with much less work and risks.
> So if that’s all it takes? Then why are so many businesses failures? I bet if you got in a room with 30 people and they all told you their story without mentioning the outcome and you could judge the characteristics you mentioned and they were all equal, you couldn’t predict which ones are successful business people and which ones are failures.
Luck. Or, IOW, random variation. In physics, you could probably predict the position[1] of every atom in a confined volume of a gas, if you knew all their initial positions and velocities with sufficient precision... But that required precision is so high, and the effects of any infinitesimal deviation from the true state has such far-reaching chaotic effects, that it's in practice pretty much impossible.
Same with the social sciences, economy, and "the market" (whichever market it is you're entering): Random impossible-to-measure tiny variations add up to a chaotic sum of effects that manifests as what is usually called "good" -- or "bad" -- "luck", which probably accounts for almost as much of your success as anything you do (or don't do).
> On the other hand, if you gave 10 people a job at BigTech, 10 a job at a well known non tech company and told 10 to go start a business, which one of those groups do you think would have the highest median and mean compensation history over 5 years? 10 years?
> I posit that it would be BigTech, Enterprise Dev and the startup founders would come in dead last.
Yup, I'd guess so too... For N = 10 or so. Add an order of magnitude, and the mean might rise enormously -- though not the median.
> Successful business takes hard work, the right work, done well, reaching a market that needs it and can afford it.
And luck. Or, to put it another way -- which kind of is luck: What "the right work" is, and whether you reach your market or not, is influenced by so many other hard-to-predict things besides your own input, that getting it right among all these confounding factors is pretty much the definition of "luck".
Successful business takes hard work, the right work, done well, reaching a market that needs it and can afford it.
Motivation by itself is worthless. Working on the wrong thing is worthless. Working hard on the wrong thing is worthless.
Being smart isn't about doing Integral Calculus. It's about deciding to work on the right thing.
Most of all a business needs to reach customers who want what you are selling, and can afford what you need to charge.
To the OP I say "I don't know you, but i expect you looked for product first, then first customers. Switch to finding customers first, then worry about the product."
Once you have that then you'll need motivation, hard work and indeed some luck.