Photo from Ethan Hein

If you are working on or thinking on working on your first startup, read this. It should help you avoid a messy situation.

In the journey of entrepreneurship, ups and downs are expected. So when BlackTop Hoops had an entire month of everything going right, it was to be assumed that the perfect storm was waiting right around the corner. Here is a quick story of how the perfect storm hit my first big scale entrepreneurial project, BlackTop Hoops, how I handled it and how you can do better.

I tried to forge the river and my wagon got flooded (everyone likes nostalgic analogies right?).

For those of you not familiar with me or BlackTop Hoops, I have been working on “BTH” for a little over a year trying to figure how to help recreational basketball connect and organize. I set forth to create social platform which would allow online communities of basketball players to highlight their basketball skill set, find courts to play on and organize game to play in (this was BTH’s core). Our (I’ll tell you the reason for the “our” usage later) grandiose plan was to help basketball organizations (leagues, tournaments and trainers) promote their companies and organize their members. We believe that rec. basketball is far too segmented to the detriment of basketball players …so we would build the community, bring in the organizations and create a meaningful/ profitable company Yayayy!! Easier written then executed. It turns out that when I started I knew absolutely nothing, but was ballsy enough to take the leap of faith and get going on the project. I guess I knew so little that a year later, I still didn’t have a finished product to push public. (more…)