Why risk everything to be an entrepreneur?

Hello! I'm Rob :)

I've been on Steemit since January with my company account @hyperfundit, but now with the launch of @hyperfundit.com, I thought it's time to re-introduce myself as Rob the human.

I'm born and raised in NYC, met Iris @allsthefoods in university who is now my life and business partner. We share a dream, to help build people up and bring everyone together. That's how we came up with the idea of a fundraising platform that involves building a team and part of why we moved to LA last year so that we can start HyperFundIt LLC, free of all distractions after we both graduated university.

LA is lovely but it took some warming up to get used to it. For starters I got into a car accident the second week we landed in LA with the rental and almost killed Iris. Thankfully the cars collided in a way where no one was seriously injured.

I had a hefty amount of savings from my tour in Afghanistan as a military engineer and a credit score over 750, but we had the hardest time finding a place to live. We were "recent college grads" and "entrepreneurs", which meant we had to work and live out of Airbnb's for several months.

It gets better though, four months in, we find a little studio that would rent to us and I also wrapped up with the web development around that time. I graduated with a Project Management degree so I knew nothing about programming and web development. While the website functioned, it looked like crap. Iris studied Corporate Communications, but has a personal interest in design, so she gave it a makeover as we were settling into our new home.

I had asked many people many questions about my concept before I was convinced to make it into a company; but when I started talking to potential clients to actually use the fundraising platform that Iris and I had built, we found that while they love the concept, they don't want to spend the time and energy working with a startup.

It was painful and this dragged on for months while my savings was depleting. We went back and forth between should we get a job? Part-time maybe? Or keep putting all of our energy into HyperFundIt and make this work? Eventually, Iris got a part-time and I kept working on HyperFundIt full time.

Towards the end of the year, we were close. I had two business owners who were really interested in starting a campaign, one even submitted a campaign, and we went back and forth strategizing how to best make the campaign successful. Then she went on a business trip and I haven't heard from her since. Of course Iris and I were torn. I felt like such a failure.

It wasn't until January of this year, did we stumble upon Steemit. In February, we attended a Steemit Meetup which led us to read up on the Steem blockchain and posts by Steemians. The more we read, the more we felt inclined to service the Steemit community so in March we made the move to focus on helping Steem projects get funded.

Since entering the space, we have built a wonderful team and we're happy that people who agree with our mission have begun gravitating towards us. We are really thankful and excited for what we can accomplish and the future that we can create together!

Despite all the time, energy, and money that I've put into developing the hyperfundit external website, I've decided to move the entire site to @hyperfundit.com to make life easier for you because this way you no longer need to leave the steemit.com domain to support campaigns.

The whole process and experience is now more streamlined and ultimately I believe this move will help the project creators raise more funding. It’s been a long and worrisome year, but I’m happy we’re finally starting to realize the vision we had in mind and are making progress with our mission in helping build people up and bringing everyone together.

With what little savings we have left, we’re still trying our best to make rent, to sustain our operations with HyperFundIt and make a difference in the world. With the launch of @hyperfundit.com, this marks a new beginning and on that note, I'd like to share with you that I’m going to launch two new initiatives in the next 30 days, so stay tuned! :D

Happy Steeming!

@robchen

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