Nobody Understands a New Business Until It Isn’t New Anymore
Guest Post by Phil Toussaint
Phil is the co-founder of Ecopreneur, Inc. and a passionate voice in the world of education technology.
When you’re building something new, people often wonder what your biggest challenge is: the money, the development, or the pitch?
Actually, they [and we] had it all wrong.
It’s being misunderstood.
We’ve lived that reality with our company since day one. Ecopreneur started as a simple vision to help schools and students manage community service hours. It sounded straightforward, but underneath was a much bigger ambition: to connect schools, students, and communities through meaningful service and measuring that impact.
But nobody saw that in the beginning.
To friends and family, it looked like a nice side project where students log their volunteer hours.
To schools, we were “just another tool.” And to outsiders, we were a mystery. “Wait, are you a media company? A tech startup? Something environmental? What exactly do you do again?”
The truth was, we were trying to build an ecosystem. A full infrastructure for schools to run their programs efficiently and for students to see how their service work mattered. Now, we’re focused on connecting our data to outcomes like GPA performance, test scores, even mental health. That’s not easy to explain when you’re new, and even harder to get others to believe in.
“New” in business isn’t just about time. To us, new means true innovation.
It’s the moment you ride the wheel differently, even if you didn’t invent it. You’re not just adding another spoke. You’re building something so unique that the old blacksmith in town doesn’t even know how to repair it.
And here’s the kicker: what’s new in one world might already be old somewhere else. While pioneers like Jobs and Zuckerberg created technology we now see as common, there are still communities today that haven’t even touched an iPhone or heard of Facebook.
“New” is always relative but when you’re the one building it, you know it in your bones. It feels electric. It feels risky. And it feels lonely.
In the early days, only a handful of people truly understood what we were building.
My father, who spent his career in education, saw it immediately.
A childhood friend believed so strongly he became our first investor.
But most people didn’t understand. And that’s okay.
We learned early on there are three groups you’ll encounter when building something new:
Those who both believe and understand.
Those who don’t understand and therefore don’t believe.
And the most surprising group are those who don’t understand but still believe in you.
Those last ones matter most. They believe in you, not just your business. They place their trust in the human behind the idea. And that’s rare. That’s something we need more of in a world where so much has become transactional.
We’re still in our “early days.”
The pressure doesn’t go away just because you’ve been at it for years. In fact, it builds. As someone with a marketing and sales background, I take it personally when what we’ve built doesn’t resonate immediately. When someone doesn’t “get it,” it feels like a personal failure.
It takes extreme mental fortitude (or maybe just insanity) to keep going when, so few people see what you see.
Most days, the doubts win.
I once read a quote that stuck with me:
“My dear boy. Either you increase your sacrifice or reduce desire. It’s simple. Yours sincerely, Grandpa.”
That’s entrepreneurship in a nutshell.
If you want more, you have to give more.
And that hurts if you truly admit to yourself that you don’t want it enough.
Most people don’t.
Along the way, people made plenty of wrong assumptions about us:
“Schools don’t need all that.”
“It’s just another tool.”
“You can’t scale in that market.”
“Nobody actually likes doing community service.”
We also made our own wrong assumptions.
In the beginning, we focused too much on the story, the “kumbaya” moments.
We believed schools would connect with our vision emotionally.
What we learned the hard way is that schools are driven by funding.
If you don’t have it, you need it.
If you have it, you want more.
Storytelling matters, but measurable impact matters more.
We spent months thinking if we just said it differently, people would care. But you can’t sell a piece of garbage dressed up like a candy bar. At the end of the day, it still smells like sh*t.
There was no single “big break” moment where we went from misunderstood to respected.
It’s more like tides shifting slow and subtle, but powerful over time.
Signing Westwood High School as our first client was a turning point.
It was proof that someone saw the value, even if most people still didn’t.
Recognition doesn’t come all at once.
First, people recognize your name.
Then, slowly, they start to recognize your value.
That’s when the respect comes.
Patience in entrepreneurship is a cruel joke.
You want everything to happen yesterday, but the world moves on its own clock.
The only thing you can control is your why.
Your why gets you through the waiting, through the doubt, through the nights when it feels like no one is watching.
For us, the why is simple: if we don’t do this, who will?
If we sit on the couch and let the world pass us by, that couch becomes a coffin.
And we didn’t build this company to die in comfort.
The reason nobody understands a new business until it isn’t new anymore is simple…
Fear.
New ideas are scary. They can’t be controlled. They challenge the status quo.
People reject what they don’t understand because it threatens the familiar.
Our advice to anyone in those early, lonely stages:
Network relentlessly.
Find people who believe in you, even if they don’t yet understand the idea.
Because no one truly builds alone.
Even the strongest solopreneur has a team, a network, a village standing behind them.
Building something new is a constant fight to be seen, understood, and valued.
But one day, if you stay the course, the same people who didn’t “get it” will tell others, “Oh yeah, I knew them back when they were just starting out.”
That’s when you’ll know you’ve made it.
Not because they understand now, but because you never stopped believing before they did.
Signing off, Phil
