The most surprising thing about being a startup founder
It’s been 6 weeks since I started working on Emote full-time, and being in New York City as part of 4.0 Schools’ Launch incubator. Many friends have asked me, “how is it like to work on your own startup for a month now?”
I was hiking and catching up with a good friend in Woodside this morning (which is a great way to catch up). It gave me an opportunity to reflect on my recent experiences. I said to him, “the most surprising thing is how emotionally challenging the process is.”
The core of an early-stage startup is hypothesis validation, and the goal is to reach product-market fit, where the product is proven to meet a significant need for customers. The path is a process of focused discovery and rigorous experimentation, and inherently non-linear.
Along the way, there are plenty of celebrations and setbacks; sometimes, they happen all in the same day. This is commonly described with a rollercoaster analogy (it’s an emotional rollercoaster!), and I knew this before. However, knowing was not enough to prepare me. It’s like explaining the rollercoaster sensation to someone that’s never been — hard to describe in words.
I remember preparing for our weekly pitch night was particularly frustrating. Many teams in our cohort had polished pitches coming into the incubator, while we were still iterating on our value proposition. We were inherently behind.
Pitch night is always Thursday evening. Leading up to 5pm, my co-founder and I would scramble to put together a story but fall short, because our value proposition had not been crystalized. Invariably, the audience would tell us we lacked clarity. We’d look at each other and shrug to ourselves, “we knew we weren’t ready.” And it’s a defeating feeling.
This went on for three weeks, rinse and repeat. In week 4, we finally had our eureka moment. While preparing for a potential customer call, everything just came together. We told the story from a particular user’s perspective, and everything just flowed. We burned the midnight oil that night and produced a pitch deck. Not only did it win us applause on pitch night, but more importantly it won a few customers.
Of course, I’d love to have the eureka happen 3 weeks earlier and save all the frustration, but it was all the previous work that culminated in this moment.
The thing is, building an early stage startup is a messy, creative endeavor, and creativity can’t be rushed. It either comes, or it doesn’t. (Remember writer’s block?). But a startup has limited runway. Time is the most important and scarce resource in early days.
Herein lie the biggest challenges: how to be patient, while still moving at a fast pace. To take all the “bad news,” while still remaining optimistic. It requires a lot of mental and emotional toughness to thrive in uncertainty, remain optimistic, and not feel down when things go awry. After talking to other founders, I know this to be true across ventures.
“This too shall pass.” (either good or bad, nothing is permanent)
That’s a quote that was passed onto me, and truly resonated. I find my mindfulness practice has gone a long way to help me remain calm, and is even more important now.
