By Lawrence Watkins — The Grio
African-American entrepreneurs in the tech space are scarce. This was especially true five years ago when I started my first company. Here are five important lessons that I’ve learned over the past few years that will make your journey into tech entrepreneurship a lot smoother.
Develop a product so great that you cannot help but be confident in selling it to customers
I started my first company, Great Black Speakers, immediately after I finished my undergraduate studies. I did not plan on entering the professional speaking field. In fact, I did not know that it even existed. Therefore, you could understand my shock and amazement when I heard of speakers getting many thousands of dollars for an hour speech. My initial thoughts were that no one was worth that amount of money, especially if the same information was available scattered across the Internet. This mindset hindered me during the sales process, because I did not fully believe in the product that I was trying to sell.