It takes years to become an overnight success — a story about a startup founder’s mojo and how it is earned — by fire.

Winslow Swart
4 min readSep 28, 2018

The stories we (or the media) don’t tell about startup success are the failures, setbacks, rejections and roadblocks that somehow get buried underneath the hurdles that we do clear. Fundraising milestones, product releases, channel partnerships, market traction, downloads , and acquisitions — these are the stories we read about. The war stories from the front-lines of the startup battle field are usually reserved for the postmortems of startups that failed to achieve their milestones and never attained ultimate success. We talk about how much we have raised more than how we are two or three times past our original projections in development time and production costs. But why? Aren’t these the most important lessons for future and ongoing planning?

The thing I found to be truer than expected is that tenacity is a founder’s most valuable asset. When you are all in, like I am, every investor or fund pitch rejection is personal. Counting the number of “No’s” can be quite demoralizing — unless you are able to tap into a kind of resilience that every successful startup founder has had to dig down deep and tap into. I lost count of how many rejections I have collected from investors and potential channel partners because my job as CEO is not to take them personally, but rather learn from the feedback received and convert that into a better product, a better company, and a better pitch.

I spent a lot of nights, and days, wondering what would happen if my dream of “building a world of dreamers and doers” by virtue of bringing the One Million Dreams mobile app to the entire world — would die an untimely death and never come to fruition. And I had good reason to worry. The fund raising and product develop goals were, at times, slipping further and further away from any realistic expectation of happening.

Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” When I heard this recently, I was on the final precipice of failure or success. It helped a lot.

I have found that it takes at least two years to become an overnight success. When I posted this little brain fart on social recently, several entrepreneurs commented that it actually takes anywhere from 10 years to a lifetime. The point I was trying to make was that it’s never actually overnight. The reason I posted it, however, was that I had just received another rejection from iTunes Connect’s Resolution center and that the build we had submitted for publication still had issues. Again. Months of jumping through hoops as the App Store continually moved the goalpost and added new requirements causing us to add hundreds of additional developer hours to what was supposed to be the final sprint towards product release. Welcome to a startup founder’s reality. While I was working relentlessly to be in the “dream’ business, often times it felt more like I was living a nightmare. The technical setbacks threatened our very existence. “Fail and fail fast” startup mentors like to say. “Not an option” my internal dialogue answered out loud. Reminders like the Edison quote were salve for my startup founder’s soul.

As of right now, we are poised published the Dream App 2.0 on iTunes and Google Play. Here is brief description of what we are creating:

1MDreams/One Million Dreams* is a Geekdom born Startup that has built a mobile application designed to help users create and accelerate their dreams. We found that there is a need for an app that helps users build a roadmap to pursue and achieve their boldest aspirations and is a 100% positive social media site at the same time.

1MDreams mission is to improve lives and communities and build a world of dreamers and doers.

Dreams are defined here as those things we seek to achieve that are bigger than just our goals.

The 1MDreams app is built on both iOS for iPhone and Android platforms and will be accessible at the AppStore and on Google Play.

The “dream profile” features on the app are robust and include alerts that keep users engaged and on track. The social component is organized into categories of dreams and allows users to like and comment on each other’s dreams, which helps crowd source the mentoring and needed connections that activate and advance dreamer efficacy. These features also alert the user when engagement and activity occur.

One Million Dreams founder Winslow Swart is an organizational development practitioner who has helped leaders and teams of large and small enterprises on three continents achieve personal and professional success. Winslow is a founding member of Geekdom and established the Eastside Dreamers Academy to help at-risk youth work on their dreams, as well as providing dream mentor programs for executives and team members across industries in both the public and private sector.

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