Life is all about perception, and the ever-increasing usage of social media continues to obscure the clarity between reality and fallacy amongst our peers, colleagues, friends, and family.

You’ll rarely ever see the guy who works a dull desk job 40 hours a week post about how miserable he is at the office, but your timeline will surely be filled with his weekend trip to Vegas. I think this notion of augmented perception holds especially true for entrepreneurs.

You’ll see the entrepreneur’s Facebook status about their feature in TechCrunch accumulate nearly 600 likes – but it doesn’t show the number of sleepless nights they experienced testing their product tirelessly, the weekends they spent working rather than seeing friends and family, their deteriorating bank account from investing into the company rather than their paycheck, the emotional stress of repeatedly being rejected by incubators, accelerators, and VC’s, their declining relationships with those who they were once close with, and the volatility of their livelihood with the potential for failure at any given moment.

Now if you could excuse that run-on sentence, I’d love to tell our journey beyond what is shown on the surface.

My co-founders and I began working on VentureStorm towards the end of our sophomore year in college in 2014. (Quick shameless plug: VentureStorm is a web application that helps entrepreneurs and startups connect to talented software developers to advance their venture. VentureStorm provides opportunities for developers to gain experience, earn money/equity, work with promising startups, and get recruited for their dream job.)

We were each committed to bootstrapping a sustainable and profitable business while balancing an extremely challenging and time-consuming engineering workload at the University of Maryland. Although I will admit, we still managed to have plenty of fun at school- we each made tremendous sacrifices during our collegiate years to bring our business to where it is today.

During the semester, we developed a schedule in which we met 8-11pm each night at the very minimum. Although more often than not we ended up working well into the night, this ensured several hours of building the business each day to continue to advance our mission. After we began to really accumulate a community of users in the DMV area, we began to sponsor university hackathons all along the east coast to attract top developers to join our platform.

Just in the past few months we’ve spent weekends traveling to Michigan, Harvard, NYU, Georgetown, Drexel, Princeton, and several other universities. In fact, during our senior year of college there were very few weekends we actually spent in College Park.

On the surface, it may seem glorious being official sponsors and seeing our logo next to Google, Facebook, Uber, and other huge tech companies.

What others don’t see are the 10 hours a day of standing and networking with student developers, sleeping on friend’s couches in crammed apartments, spending 16+ hours in traffic, skipping out on happy hour and fun weekends with friends, draining your bank account…and in return not getting paid for any of it.

As of May 2016, my co-founders and I began our postgraduate careers going all in on VentureStorm. We have since worked around the clock developing an updated version of our platform, marketing to expand our brand awareness, networking to develop strategic partnerships, and responding to emails from users and affiliates 24/7. Building this business to be successful has become priority number 1, 2, and 3…and requires an almost unhealthy amount of sacrifice and commitment.

In fact, it’s a sunny 85 degree Sunday afternoon as I’m writing this piece, in-between testing the updated payment transactions on the site, all while a group of friends are BBQing a few streets down.

This post isn’t meant to be full of complaining, and I’m certainly not asking for any sympathy. My co-founders and I work tirelessly on VentureStorm because we absolutely love it. Because rather than working on someone else’s corporate schedule and building their vision, we’re building ours. We profoundly believe what we’re building can innovate the entrepreneurial and technology communities, change people’s lives, and build a better future for everyone.

Our platform helps bring people’s ideas to life, new innovations and technologies to market, and provides various opportunities for others to gain experience and grow as individuals.

In the cut-throat sport of business, there’s really only one option to be perceived as, and that’s successful.

I believe that holds true for any business at any stage, but even more so for early stage startups and entrepreneurs.

Failure is so common amongst startups, entrepreneurs are forced to filter any speck of negativity and instead magnify each and every success. Similar to any other sport- it would be foolish to display any sort of weakness to your competitors and fans.

Just know behind every success you see on the surface, there were countless hours of work, sacrifice, and failure before getting there.

VentureStorm

The story of our company, VentureStorm, dates back to winter break sophomore year – and it’s been quite the experience to say the least.

I really want to share the ride we’ve been on these past few years. There have been plenty of struggles, success, and everything in between; but by the time you’re done reading this, I hope I’ve inspired you to at least attempt something outside the status quo and to accomplish something magnificent.

The Ambition

I guess I’ll start with that – the desire to be different and not just follow the norm. There’s something that never made sense to me about dedicating nearly two decades of your life on education, only to utilize your knowledge and expertise by working for someone else and growing their wealth. That’s one of my inspirations behind both wanting to be an entrepreneur and growing VentureStorm (but we’ll get to that in a minute). Being an entrepreneur, there are no ceilings. Being an entrepreneur allows you to take something you are passionate about and build a business around it, innovate an industry or product, and hopefully change the world. Of course there’s the realization of risk and failure, but if you’re a young student without a spouse and kids, without a mortgage, without anything to lose – does the risk really outweigh the possible rewards?

The Seed

The story all begins a few years back while taking an online entrepreneurship course over winter break. We came up with an awesome concept for a music discovery mobile app, and the passion behind the idea really began to grow. We ended up writing an extensive business plan, creating screenshots, and buying the web domain as we began to seriously pursue the venture; however, none of us had experience in developing a mobile application at the time, and our motivation began to wither.

We spent months exhausting our networks for a viable developer to work on our app with little to no success. Being involved with several entrepreneurship programs at the University of Maryland, we witnessed countless other aspiring entrepreneurs fail to bring their idea to life due to a lack of technical skills as well. There is an abundance of entrepreneurs with great ideas and distinguished backgrounds in business, marketing, psychology, etc.; however, often times they lack the necessary programming and development skills to bring their venture to life.

There is also an abundance of talented student developers hungry to build astonishing mobile and web applications – but the disconnect between the two parties is bewildering.

The Vision

VentureStorm is a web application that connects aspiring entrepreneurs to talented student developers within proximity. Think of it as a combination between a freelance marketplace and matchmaking site to find a technical co-founder (if that’s what you’re looking for). Our platform allows entrepreneurs in need of technical assistance to post their project or current venture free of charge, and specify what they are looking for. VentureStorm also provides opportunities for student developers to apply what they learn in the classroom and gain real-world experience, build their resume, earn money/equity, and co-found technical startups while in college.

There are so many brilliant yet simple ideas which, who knows, may go on to revolutionize an entire industry (think Uber). Unfortunately many of these ideas, remain just that – ideas. Imagine the amazing things we could accomplish if more of these ideas entered the market as successful ventures. Imagine being able to pursue your own venture and co-found technical startups, rather than building a resume to pursue the ideas of others.

The possibilities are endless, and our vision at VentureStorm is to make these possibilities a reality.

I have been unbelievably lucky to come across several others that share the same passion and entrepreneurial vision as myself, and even luckier to currently call them my teammates/business partners. Over the past few years we have transformed VentureStorm from a side project into a scalable business with thousands of users relying on our platform to build their venture.

Personally I have grown tremendously through my experiences working with VentureStorm. You could register for every entrepreneurship class on campus, but nothing truly prepares you for the reality of just getting out there and doing it.

From learning how to code, to understanding the legal necessities of creating a business, networking with people in all sorts of industries, leveraging new technologies to build our platform, marketing and creating a brand, traveling and sponsoring events around the country, public speaking, and even writing blog pieces like the one you’re reading right now; the experiences and skills I’ve obtained are invaluable.

So whether you are a student developer looking to gain experience, make some money, and potentially be a technical co-founder for the next big startup, or you’re an ambitious entrepreneur looking to change the world; maybe VentureStorm can help you achieve your dreams. Just know the only thing standing in between your dreams and your reality is you.