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You Have to Love the Startup Process

The process of starting a company is messy. It has massive ups and downs, tons of uncertainty and a significant portion of time is spent doing things you don’t know how to do, or don’t like doing. But that’s the Startup Process. Either you embrace it and love it or you get out.

Don’t expect that most of your time as a founder will be spent doing things you love (i.e. building your product). Building a great product is just assumed. Ultimately everything hinges on the product, but so much more has to happen successfully for a great product to be realized. And all of those “other things” are generally things startup founders don’t want to do.

Here are some examples:

  • Raising Capital – It’s time to change the way we describe raising capital as “a distraction.” You need to look at it as much more than that. No startup survives without money. If you have to raise it from external sources then that becomes pretty damn important. The lights can’t stay on otherwise. Very few people like raising capital, and first-timers can’t believe how much time it takes away from “doing what they should be doing.” But enough of that. If you’re raising capital because you need it to improve your chances of success, then do it. Don’t complain about it and embrace it.
  • Hiring – This typically comes later in the process, but it’s very sad how little effort most startup founders put to it. Except without the best people, you likely won’t succeed. So again, hiring top talent is a prerequisite for success (like raising capital) and yet it’s looked at as a distraction. It’s not. It’s core to improving your startup’s chance of success.
  • Legal – You may delay formal legal stuff for awhile when you’re very early on and just investigating the potential for your startup, but don’t ignore doing things right when it comes to corporate structure, employee agreements, share structure, etc. This stuff can (and will) come to bite you in the ass later. Even in a mild way, if you don’t have your legal ducks in a row when you go to raise money or hire people, it’s troublesome and wastes more time.

You don’t have to love all of these things, but you have to love the overall process – the Startup Process. You have to love the experience, or at minimum accept the realities of your situation (you don’t get to code by yourself in a room for 12 hours a day) and make sure these sorts of things are top priorities, not distractions or irritations. They’re a necessary and critical part of succeeding – so get to ‘em.

Have You Really Identified Your Biggest Competitor?

Every startup has competition. In fact, I can virtually guarantee you that someone is already working on your idea. And you know that you can’t go into an investor pitch and say, “We don’t have any competition.” That’s completely untrue and sends horrible signals to investors.

But who is your biggest competitor?

Most startups have several other startups (at least!) playing in the same space. But I don’t necessarily consider them real competitors, unless one of them has real market traction. If you have a bunch of startups all roughly at the same stage and none of them owns a significant piece of the market, they’re not really competitors. They’re creating a lot of noise, most likely distracting you and scaring you (this is the “holy crap reaction to competition!“), but they’re not hardcore competitors. You still need to demonstrate an understanding of these players and the overall market, and start to differentiate yourself from them (for your own benefit and when pitching investors), but you can’t get obsessed with them.

The real competitor you need to obsess over is the dreaded “doing nothing.”

“Doing nothing” is even worse than the good enough solutions provided by big competitors. “Doing nothing” is right at the very root of human nature: laziness, uncaring, “meh.”

Chances are the real alternative to your solution is “doing nothing” and not another competitor (startup or otherwise). Changing behavior is hard. Being haphazard about how you go about changing people’s behavior will kill your startup. You have to be methodical, analytical and totally focused on getting people to do what you want. You have to be 100,000x better than the alternative: doing nothing.

I’ve rarely seen “doing nothing” or even “the status quo” listed as a competitor in startup pitches – and maybe that’s because everyone recognizes this as obvious, but then startups go off and build products, provide solutions and try to sell customers without a strong enough value proposition to justify action. So customers sit and wait, maintaining the status quo of doing nothing and getting psychologically further away from being interested and motivated to do what you want. More than anything, startups need action. Even if people aren’t using your product quite the way you want, or they’re not using everything, or they’re not sticking around long enough, out of the gate you need action. Without any activity you can’t learn and iterate fast enough. But even with early adopters, you need a compelling enough value proposition to get them moving, to turn inaction and doing nothing into action.

“Doing nothing” is probably your biggest competitor. That’s where you need to put most of your focus, not on other startups in your space.

Beware of Too Much Tinkering

More and more people these days are technology tinkerers. They’re messing around, trying new things, jumping from small project to small project, but never settling on and committing to one thing. It’s certainly easier and easier to tinker, which is great; it makes building stuff more accessible and less expensive. And that can lead to new innovations, ideas and startups. But beware of too much tinkering.

At Year One Labs we see quite a few tinkerers; people working on interesting stuff, but oftentimes it’s small in scope and they’re doing a ton of projects simultaneously. And not surprisingly, they rarely finish anything either. That makes it harder and harder to judge someone’s ability to execute and scale. It also throws up red flags around issues of commitment – and a startup is nothing if it’s not about commitment.

We all hit periods in our lives when we need to tinker. After Standout Jobs, I couldn’t commit to starting another company right away. So I did some consulting (and still do), while exploring options. And tinkering. It didn’t take me long to jump into my next project (Year One Labs), but even that affords me a bit of opportunity to tinker (and assuage my ADD) because we’ll be working on numerous projects at once.

The danger in tinkering is when you can’t get out of it. Tinkering may lead to fantastic stuff, and may even lead to starting a company, but it can also lead to endless tinkering. And there’s a big difference between a Tinkerer and a Founder.

Tinkering also tends to shrink people’s vision. Big vision is a good thing, even if you focus on executing in small chunks (think: minimum viable product.) There’s a duality there that has to be dealt with: big audacious goals & vision vs. getting shit done and executing. Tinkerers definitely struggle with big vision, and they also aren’t as focused as need be on getting shit done.

So if you take a moment and look at what you’re up to: are you a Tinkerer or a Founder? And if you’re a Tinkerer, are you ready to make the jump and become a Founder?

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About Ben Yoskovitz
I recently joined GoInstant as VP Product. GoInstant changes how we use the web, making it shareable like never before.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it). I'm a hands-on startup guy, helping companies grow successfully from the idea forward. You can reach me at byosko at gmail dot com.

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