Graduate Blog / Graduate Life

A Day of Legitimacy

It was one of those days that you’re just not sure how to classify.

On one hand, it’s excruciatingly tiring.  You’re up at 7.  You spend 7 hours on the road.  You feed an unreasonable amount of quarters to perpetually expiring meters.  You have 20 emails in your inbox that you can tell, by looking only at the first line, are important but that you have no idea when you’ll actually get to, and the number keeps growing every time you glance at your phone.

On the other hand, it’s absolutely exhilarating.  You get your first real customer.  You fulfill your first real order.  You see the customer be pleasantly surprised and slightly ecstatic.  You breathe a sigh of relief… Then you go sign in to your first official resemblance of an “office.”  It’s instantly all real.  All of a sudden you realize – you’re finally a legitimate business.

So if I absolutely had to classify this day, I would call this not a tiring day or an exhilarating day; I would call it a legitimizing day.  Today, I woke up before I cared to, but I did it because I actually had a customer to visit.  Today, I wasted a ton of quarters, but I did it because I was touring MassChallenge-host of the world’s largest startup competition and an amazing Boston incubator-because Fetchmob is, thanks to the amazing generosity of the Graduate School and the Blank Center for Entrepreneurship, setting up shop there.  It’s an amazing opportunity not just to have a home base but also to meet, talk to and learn from entrepreneurs much farther along than we are.

As every entrepreneur will attest to, there are good days and there are bad days.  Today was a day that made all the hard work put in so far and all the immeasurable amounts of hard work that is yet to be put in worth it.