Can an organist help inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs?

Yesterday I was invited to participate in the panel discussion at Oberlo Vilnius headquarters for Shopify Merchants Meetup during Global Entrepreneurship Week where I talked about my experiences of running our Secrets of Organ Playing blog, podcast and store for the motivated group of young Lithuanian entrepreneurs.

Thanks so much for Oberlo team who put it together: Giedre Sarapinaite, Sandra Saukaite, Donatas Pranckenas and probably others whose names are a mystery to me. Also thanks to Roneta Bajorinaite and Matas Pajarskas who were the panelists with me. All you guys are so inspiring!

It was exciting to look back at those 7 years since I wrote the first post on this blog. 

We were asked the following questions (among many others) by Giedre and Donatas who moderated the discussion:

How did you start? What keeps you going?
What are the good/bad/ugly sides of running your business?
How did you get your first sale?
What are the best 3 self care tips you have?
How did your team grow?

After the event everybody was very excited and was happy with how each of the 3 panelists shared their highs and lows, struggles and victories without artificial facade that we might see in many events of this kind.

I know I was inspired to choose myself when I came to Entrepreneurship Week event at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln back in 2006. Fast forward 12 years and we come full circle. Now it's my turn to inspire somebody else to do the same in their own niche.

It was funny because normally people who started their businesses first got their business degrees in college and I had to learn everything from scratch by doing, by making mistakes, by educating myself.

After the meetup a lady from the Vilnius Rotary club came up to me and said they would be delighted to listen to my talk at their meeting so we'll see where this entire thing leads.

I think a lot of people in attendance are looking forward to more of these meetups in Vilnius. Maybe Oberlo can lead the way as they already are doing.

​Thanks for sticking with Ausra and me all these years! We appreciate it more than you can imagine. And we hope to continue helping you grow everyday as many of your love letters we receive continue to demonstrate.

Because of this the list of questions for the podcast is getting longer and longer so we appreciate your patience while you wait for your question to be answered.  But we'll get to for sure...

Below I'd like to share some of the photos we made at the meetup (the last two are by the people from Oberlo).

Let me know what you think.