This is a guest post from Dominik Balogh

Operating a small business is very important for the big future of an entrepreneur. Even if the business only generates about the same profit in the early days or years as you would get in a normal job, it’s still worth all the risks and challenges. You’re forced to think, learn and expand your horizons infinitely. By not having enough money, you are feared. You have to be effective and do a lot of things on your own, which means you need to learn many new methods over a period of short time. I call it a “Benefit of the business doubt”, which always forces you to do better. Thanks to it, you can evolve 10 times faster in the first 2-5 years of your SB compared to all of the previous years. You also meet established business people, you learn how they think and what they expect, which you mostly can’t when being just an employee. Though there are some executive job positions which make perfect business sense and provide a comparable level of doubt or stock benefits, let’s skip it for now.

Some years back, I had to learn European accounting very quickly to manage it on my own. It was a nightmare at the time and I’m luckily not involved in accounting operative anymore, but thanks to the real experience, I’ve learned and understood some optimization tricks and other tweaks on a worldwide level, while fresh economy graduates are usually still hardly able to construct in their head, say, how VAT works and what it affects – and it’s unfortunately not so much of their fault, but the flawed HR and education system. It then struck you when a manager with MBA and 10+ years of job experience asks you about the elementary invoicing “issue”. But it also helps you realize that all the work was worth it even if you didn’t make much more money than in a so called “safe” job.

After my media, advertising and consulting business ramblings on my own, we’ve formed PoweryBase (now incorporated in CA) with my partner in crime, and we accepted a more difficult route of storing user data in the “cloud”. We started to find out what the mobile platform has to offer. We’ve made some incorrect decisions, some great decisions, didn’t prepare the best exit strategy from the beginning and found many drawbacks. We also didn’t market much due to focusing on development heavily. However, our products are great and have an interesting potential. Last but not least, users love them and use them almost every day. Thanks to the data we own, there are still many opportunities to push the business models further.

But the more important fact is, we’ve learned so much from our solution in just a year, and we’ll also use that experience in more complex projects. Server side services, databases, geo-data, syncing multiple mobile devices live, notification systems and users’ feedback on syncing experience is a valuable knowledge you need today to build interesting products. You can hire many kinds of skilled people, but you can’t hire your own real life solution experience. You see more options, you learn technological limits, various approaches, and you can make better decisions in the near future. What sounds very easy is really not, because small details and new features in the service may highly affect the software + hardware operating costs overall. Even with today’s very cheap highly scalable storage solutions. Managing or reading technical support requests of your customers for a period of time also teaches you what customers really need.

There’s always the benefit of business doubt, no matter who you are and how far you are. Sometimes it’s even smart to do stupid decisions and jump into the waters in which you have no knowledge of, because it’s going to force you to learn about it and you’ll be more smarter next time. There’s always much more to learn, and I’m often wrong in many things, but experience from managing a small business always proved itself to be a very valuable experience in life.