Getting started with your startup sucks
From getting the right people to handling your relationships, it's all tough.
Building a startup is hard—obviously—but just getting started sucks more than you’d expect.
When you begin the gauntlet, you ought to find “who you build for”, instead of “what to build"; the former answers the latter. (How can you build something people want, if you don’t know who wants it?) To find the right people, you need to know answers to these questions: who has the problem, who has the budget, who wants to solve it, and who wants to use your shitty solution to solve it.
Answering “who has the problem” requires navigation through your circle of relationships, which reminds you how finite high-quality interactions can be. Outside of your limited number of friends, family, and immediate network, you have a much lower chance of getting a conversation/meeting. Your professional network and online connected network require demonstrating value, relying on your perceived reputation, or being lucky, before you can get that conversation. Beyond that, you have online communities and everyone else, which requires you to connect with them in some way (LinkedIn, email, calls, whatever) and build trust, before you get that critical learning. Unfortunately, you can only have so many interactions with the same people about the same topic, so you will spend most of your time on bringing people from the outside circles inward; e.g. as you spend more time on your startup, you exhaust your high-quality relationships, especially if you don’t have a good growth rate for new HQ-relationships.
Once you find “who”, you can easily answer the next two questions of budget & willingness to solve; however, you’ll likely find out that those answers kill your startup idea and you have to readjust. In your conversations, you just figure out if the prospect has looked at solutions, already paid for a solution, and if they’re the decision maker to solve this problem. You’ll get signals in this process that indicate that you’re in the ballpark of a good problem or that this problem is a dud. (Spoiler: it’s likely a dud.)
The last question is the hardest in my opinion: who wants to use your shitty solution? Even if someone has the budget and decision-making authority, they still might not want your solution. Moreover, the answer to this question undergirds two important aspects of a startup: whether or not this is an important problem and whether or not you have the opportunity to solve it. This will kill you if you don’t have either of these, because you’ll build a product that you can’t sell.
All of those can be hard questions you have to answer, before you even get traction. Most of us experience a level of pain getting to these answers (unless you’re lucky or maybe well-connected). The upside is that you control all the levers to get answers here and being resourceful ought to be or will become your bread-and-butter (if you want to survive). However, though fundamental, uncertain, and difficult, this isn’t the only painful part about a pre-PMF, nascent startup.
The other painful part is how you have to continuously manage your reactions to how your friends and family engage with you about your decision. Unless you come from a tech startup family or community, your friends and family likely won’t understand why you left your job, what your startup struggle is like, why your business idea keeps changing, and most importantly, how to support you.
These interactions fall into two buckets usually: well-meaning but disconnected advice or dismissive judgment. By disconnected, I mean advice that is made without experience as the basis of it or sufficient context. Because it’s your job to test out different pathways, you’ve likely already tried what they recommend. At worst, this advice can be annoying, but it’s a pleasant reminder: these people just care about you and want to try to help you in whatever way they think they can. Dismissive judgment is worse, more personally targeted, and usually comes from people you thought would support you unconditionally (like your family or close friends). The judgment boils down to: I’m trying to help you, by helping you see that you’ve made a bad decision. Sadly that means comments in the form of: you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re wasting time, you’re wasting money, or you’re setting yourself up for failure.
I don’t have a shareable solution for handling these interactions, since they vary in positivity and severity; however, one certain thing is that they’ll seem persistent till they stop cold.
People know how your failing startup is going (e.g. it’s not) and people stop asking questions beyond platitudinous inquiries. And that sucks. Because even though the rude judgment stops, the nice support stops too.
At this point, you’re left with what you started with: yourself and your co-founders with hard questions you need to figure out how to answer.
And that’s just the beginning.