Hey everybody!

I would like to briefly share with you the story of how I created my fitness company and some of the crucial lessons that I learned along the way.

How It All Got Started
A year and a half ago I got the crazy idea of starting my own business without knowing what that actually meant. At the time I was still in university with the naive dream of one day becoming a doctor or a biology professor. But 3 years into my education it just wasn't going as good as I originally planned. I realized that my whole life I loved creating things, and on top of that, I have been a fitness fanatic since I was 14. Over the years I have transformed my body from a skinny 140lbs kid to almost 195lbs of lean muscle. Finding an actual business idea proved to be more difficult than I imagined and took me the better part of the first month of my journey. But it all came together when my younger brother's friend came over and asked me to show him what he can do to look like me. I realized that I could combine my love for creating things with my love for fitness, and so it began.

The Lessons

Challenges immediately arose from day 1. First, I knew I wanted to create an online business because it was so cheap to get into but I did not have any programming skills at all. Secondly, I always loved psychology but knew almost nothing about marketing, and thirdly I knew absolutely nothing about business! This brings me to lesson number 1

Lesson 1. You must love learning, and almost anything can be learned at this day and age.

Learning To Program
We live in an amazing time. You can go to amazon and find almost any book or textbook imaginable. So while going to school, going to the gym, and seeing my girlfriend, I set aside time for myself and started learning programming and how to create a website. I used resources such as Lynda.com, online tutorials and stackoverflow.com. My approach was very simple: dive right in and solve one problem after another. I would watch a quick 10 hour course on say PHP and then dive right into it, saying to my self “okay, so what do I want to create?” Sometimes it was very frustrating, but I saw that the more time I gave a problem, the more likely I was to solve it. A year and a half later I am proud to say that I solved every problem and was able to learn all the major web development languages including Objective-C (for iPhone development). Looking back I never would of thought it was possible, but nothing is as hard as it first seems.


Programming Vs. Outsourcing a programmer
My 2 cents on the programming vs. no programming debate that has been going on around the forum is as follows: programming is not for everyone but being able to program yourself gives you a long term advantage. As the founder of any project, you will undoubtedly care the most about the vision of your company and the quality of the product. Being able to program gives you the advantage of possessing full control over the entire experience and maintaining a higher quality than someone who you would hire. I personally loved the process so if you have the time, the will and maybe enjoy the process a bit I would recommend that you do learn to program and build most of the site yourself.


Marketing
I also quickly realized that marketing is a much more important contributing factor to your business's success than I originally believed. I started reading as many books as I possibly could. Books such as Positioning by Jack Trout and Influence by Robert Cialdini (both gold mines of information) really helped me.

While searching for books I also came across MJ’s book which was definitely a great read and helped solidify and articulate everything I felt. It does a great job making you realize how important it is to build a business that separates time from yourself and I tried to apply all of that that to my own company.


Lesson 2. It’s a lonely road, but don't give in.

When I first started working on my business I did not tell anyone. To this day, even my parents don’t know that I built an entire company. There are a few benefits to this. First of all, I had no pressure at all from my parents, or friends. I could take my time, and do things at my own pace, without feeling guilty by setting expectations but not delivering. You are almost guaranteed to fail or hit a major roadblock at one point or another. Entrepreneurs would understand this, where as your parents or friends might not understand that its part of the process and view your stall as a failure rather than a lesson. Not telling people what you are doing, removes that pressure and feeling of disappointment.

The other benefit is that to this day, I keep imagining the day that I will show my family the company with all the work I have done. This surprisingly, added so much motivation to the entire process! Lastly, if I told them about what I was doing before I had anything even on paper, I would imagine my friends and family dismissing everything as empty talk, whereas when I show them results, it’s a whole different ball game.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach. Building any business could be an extremely lonely place to be in. When times got hard for example, I felt sad and jealous of seeing my friends going to bars, partying and looking like they are having a great time while I locked myself in my bedroom, reading and coding into the long hours of the night. This feelings almost always went away by next morning and I would wake up feeling that I am proactively steering the ship of life while they were probably not.

The company I created is called LeanLegion, you can find the link here. I admit that I still have a lot to learn and I have yet to see where this journey will take me but looking back and seeing how much I have evolved makes me wonder how far I can still go.

I am glad I finally joined the forums and I would love to hear your feedback and comments about what you think about the site and if you could suggest places where I could improve on, I would greatly appreciate it.

Dmitri