On April 2, 2019, Jason Njoku, a Nigerian entrepreneur tweeted about how entrepreneurship abuses and consumes us if we let it. This is nothing but the truth.
Entrepreneurship isn't glamorous at all, and often it affects our mental health. However, in contrast to Njoku's opinion, I believe there is true happiness in entrepreneurship if we share our pains, mistakes, worries, failures, and shortcomings with other like-minded entrepreneurs, and receive feedback and help from them, and grow from there.
In a bid to achieve this, I started a podcast for entrepreneurs called "Dear Entrepreneurs” in April 2019. Olamide Akomolafe, a colleague, and I anchored this podcast in Accra, Ghana, from April to July 2019; recording eight episodes within three months. In each episode, we talked about our experiences as entrepreneurs, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in order to encourage other entrepreneurs going through tough times.
We garnered hundreds of listeners from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Canada, Germany, United States, and Mauritius, but had to discontinue the podcast, unfortunately, after the eight-episode, as Olamide and I flew out of Ghana and began living several timezones apart.
In December 2019, I somewhat rekindled the podcast, as I began posting across my social media profiles, a series of open letters to entrepreneurs. Since then, I have written and posted hundreds of open letters to entrepreneurs like myself. All letters begin with “Dear Entrepreneur…” and closes with “With love, Chidi”. In March 2020, I decided to collate all letters already posted online and to be posted, into a book called “Dear Entrepreneur”.
It should serve as a devotional for entrepreneurs looking for a companion along their entrepreneurial journey. They will be 366 open letters, from January to December; a letter for each day, including February 29 for the leap years. My hope is that you start your day by reading one of the letters, and it helps you put everything into perspective.
