Seen through the eyes of Richie Stapler and Bruno Lima, co-founders of Pura.
I am not an entrepreneur.
Whaaaaaaaat, you must be thinking?
I know, it’s true, I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m just a kind of nerdy dude who writes about entrepreneurs. In that sense, I’m guess I’m an entrepreneur by proxy, but that’s really splitting hairs and seems somewhat misleading. So again, I will say it: I’m not an entrepreneur.
I have wondered what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. How does it feel to start a company and feel like the world’s caving in on your head every day? Is it really that hard trying to get a business started, or do entrepreneurs just tell us that to look cool? Does anyone — and I mean anyone — actually know what they’re doing? Yes, these are questions that float through my head from time to time, mostly when I’m gazing at Mount Timpanogos and wondering what life is like running a startup beneath the snow-ravaged peaks of Utah.
Well, with the launch of The Startup Vlog — a video series from the perspective of Pura co-founders Richie Stapler and Bruno Lima — I’m about to find out.
“As entrepreneurs, we were looking for video content like this that showed the real life, ups-and-downs of a startup, and honestly couldn’t find it anywhere,” said Lima. “All we could find was the typical ‘Day in the life of a startup’, but we wanted more. We decided to record our journey to allow others to see what it’s really like, not just the ‘acquisition piece’ that they read about on the web but the real blood, sweat, and tears.”
Through a series of weekly videos, Stapler and Lima are chronicling the ebb and flow of trying to launch a business. The idea is to show the entrepreneurial journey as it happens, rather than post-success or -failure. This means showing things like customer acquisition, trying to raise money, hiring employees — everything that goes into being an early-stage entrepreneur.
“We have so many friends that say, ‘I want to be an entrepreneur,’” said Lima. “People think it’s so easy and that if you have an idea you’ll make a billion dollars. There is so much more! People need to see that sometimes it’s not fun, sometimes you have everything riding on a hope, you’ve maxed out 9 credit cards (which we have) hoping that this will take off and knowing that if it fails you’re bankrupt. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. It’s true, things can take off, you can make millions, but it doesn’t happen to everyone. We do this because we absolutely love it, there is absolutely nothing else in the world we’d rather do than be running this startup. We believe in it wholeheartedly and we put our own money where our mouth is. The vlog shows all of that.”
