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18 6 SECRETS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

azine, or surf the Web. You’ll find a thousand smiling entrepreneurs,
posing in front of swimming pools and Maseratis, eager to tell you
how they did it and bring you into their startup fold. You will be
amazed at how happy and proud they are, and how many there are.
You can watch the Y.E.S. movie (by the Young Entrepreneur Society),
starring white-toothed motivational speakers. You can surf entrepre-
neurial comment boards, where fellow dreamers decry “negative and
unsupportive people.” You can peruse a Start Your Own Business mag-
azine with a hundred get-rich-quick schemes. And you can read a re-
cent book encouraging the younger generation to go ahead and make
the entrepreneurial leap, offering advice like, “Don’t worry if you don’t
know what you’re doing. Nobody does!”

Plenty of worthy information does exist for aspiring entrepre-
neurs, if you can cut through all the noise and clutter (I have included
a listing of my favorite sources in Appendix B at the end of the book).
It seems, however, that the following themes dominate most of the
startup content floating around these days: (1) Starting a business of
your own is the surest way to happiness and wealth, (2) Everybody’s
doing it, or will, (3) Ignore nay-sayers who don’t support your dream,
and (4) The only thing holding you back is . . . you!

There is one more theme. Most of these sources of encourage-
ment have a strong commercial interest in your taking the entrepre-
neurial plunge. Their mantra: “You can do it—we can help!” My
favorite example comes from a 2007 promotional campaign from In-
tuit, maker of small business accounting software. Its stated purpose
was to move aspiring entrepreneurs from saying, “I wish I had just
started my own business…” to saying, “I just started my own business!”
It was called the “Just Start” campaign and hosted at www.IWillJust
Start.com. The campaign was Intuit’s response to survey data, col-
lected from a paid vendor, suggesting that four out of five working
adults in the United States dream of starting their own business some
day (with no mention, of course, of the high percentage of startups
that fail). It’s not clear how many aspiring business owners “just
started” a business as a result of the campaign or how many software
products were sold as a result, but the campaign surely stoked the
startup fires among thousands of founders in waiting.

American Management Association • www.amanet.org