Starting Your Business or Startup For The Wrong Reason? —Because You Better Know

It’s a crowded market — and too many people are starting companies for the wrong reasons. A common principal is that speed is the most important element to succeed in your start up or business is the wrong advice (for most of us). Mentors and investors constantly say: “Start and iterate!” “Optimize for speed!” “Go go go”. “Speed as a habit.”

The result: products that don’t matter and founders that don’t last.

Products evolve so much that entrepreneurship becomes more about lasting than what you’re making. Outlasting competition, bad markets, keeping your energy and commitment up on what you’re product (s), ups and downs at the company are what kill new startups.

I use the word visionary over founder because so much time is spent visualizing a world with your product or service in it — this is important.

A vision is the end result; a startup is only the beginning.

Great artists and entrepreneurs have an insatiable desire to do what they’re doing.

After 15 months of experimenting on ideas, it has become a no brainer for me to focus on ideas related to presence and productivity. The outward manifestation of this has become Sprint for Email, which is something I built to solve my problem to end compulsive email checking, in the spirit of serving others while they work.

I have decided to focus full-time on Sprint for Email and developing my start-up. I made this decision in spite of the income uncertainty. With start-ups, there are no guarantees. Yet, I’ve never felt more confident betting on myself. If it becomes necessary for me to get a job to support myself financially, I’ll maintain my focus on Sprint, even part-time.

“My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.” -Steve Wozniak

Here’s Dr. Peter Diamandis on the tactics of determining the startup that’s right for you:

“I often talk about finding your passion. The truth is, it’s more about finding and sustaining emotional energy. What are you unreasonably excited about?”

“What can’t you go a whole day without talking to someone about? What opportunity (that nobody else seems to understand) makes your heart race? On the negative side, what aggravates you the most? I mean, what really, really pisses you off? Why shouldn’t this thing exist, and how could you envision a better world without it?”

You Need to Love What you Do So Much — That it’s Bordering on the Religious.

Think about the writer who derives bliss from the practice of writing and is willing to sacrifice in order to write every day. Picture engineers who derive so much joy from coding that they pursue a job that allows them to code everyday. A start-up needs to be conceived from an idea that produces that depth of emotion. Start there, and your ideas will manifest into products that matter.

Founder/Market Fit For Ideas that Matter

Founder/market fit is more important than it’s ever been. It’s why you do what you do and who you are that makes you the right person working to solve a problem for the world.

It’s the drive, passion and resilience needed to arrive at your ultimate destination which is product/Market fit.What’s Product/market fit? Product/market fit is about the business model and customers using your product.

“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. Lots of start-ups fail before product/market fit ever happens” — Marc Andreeson

Find founder/market fit, and you — the visionary — are more likely to arrive at the right product/market fit. You and your start-up become one.

How To Discover Your Founder/Market Fit

Become a “passionate person” — without motive, and you’ll progress naturally towards a calling that serves others.

Becoming passionate is based on how you appreciate things and creating purpose for yourself. Serving a mission helps give you purpose.

A life calling can come from a turning point in our lives, be it an obstacle or success, a pain we’ve experienced, or a haunting book or film — something that moves us.

Focus on yourself. Your product often begins with how deeply you feel about a problem and its solution.

Work Slow

“Optimizing for speed” assumes that once a target market has been established, a start-up entrepreneur’s top priority should be finding the fastest route to market and execution.

Everyone says “decide fast, and go”. “Just get it done”. “Ship as fast as possible or someone else will beat you to it.” Etc. etc.

On one hand, this makes sense. As Mark Cuban put it:

On the other hand …

Optimizing for Speed is a Strategy, but it Doesn’t Mean You’ll Win in the End.

“First mover isn’t what’s important — it’s the last mover. Like Microsoft was the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine.” — Peter Thiel

If you’re in a market race — competing with a product or vision that’s only incrementally better than what is already out there, in most cases you’re likely to lose because your work is being done without the lasting vision necessary to improve the quality of your product above and beyond its competitors.

What does it mean to “win” anyway?

What do you seek from your business? Ask yourself:

If speed matters so much to your business — how special is what you’re doing? Are you the right visionary to be solving that specific problem or creating that particular solution?

Did Mark Zuckerberg optimize for speed at Facebook? He worked slow to connect the world and turned down the chance to get advertising dollars early on, and a $1 billion offer from Yahoo.

This was well before Facebook was the behemoth it is today and still faced considerable risk to not become the force its founder had envisioned. It was the depth of Zuckerberg’s drive and vision that helped Facebook beat out many other first movers in social media (remember Friendster, Myspace, Small World and a slew of others?) to become the #1 connector of people in the world.

Paradoxically, it’s creating a business without money in mind that often generates the most money. After doing my own start up full-time for the last two and a half years, raising seed funding and pivoting twice in my start-up career, I’ve concluded that founders depth and vision for a problem is the most important factor in the start-up equation.

Everyday you’re crawling forward and pushing, for what? Is it survival and money exclusively? Once you’re paying your bills, will it be worth the effort? You’ll often find boredom and novelty.

I’m now working on products I have no problem committing to for the next 10, 20 or 30 years. I know I’ll understand the market, dive into the needs of my customers and create products they never knew they’d love.

By adopting that framework, you, too, can work slow (at night and on weekends for the folks with day jobs) and deeply enjoy every moment you spend on your project.

If you’re not willing to wake up early or stay up late, you likely don’t love your craft or feel impassioned enough about your mission.

Work slow and then there’s no losing, because you’re working with love for its own sake.

“If I was working on this for the rest of my life, would I be content, fulfilled and satisfied serving others, no matter what the outcome?”

This framework helps turn the difficulties and stress that come from launching your start-up and fulfilling your passion into resilience.

We have bills to pay, families to support and stakeholders who count on us. Working with love helps you intuitively iterate and intelligently pivot when it’s required. Don’t make the mistake of equating “winning” with wealth. Because constraints push us to be creative as we work to move beyond them.

“Constraints make us creative and resilient.”

Today is a great time to start a business. Today, startup/testing costs are low, the web allows instant access to marketing platforms and resources to test ideas. In our increasingly connected world, it’s a perfect opportunity for moonlighting entrepreneurs with jobs to try and turn their vision into reality.

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” — Charles Horton Cooley

Thanks so much for reading. I’m co-founder, a long with Shihao Guo of a lab of love called Flow. We make tools to help raise our inner awareness and Sprint is our first product. If you liked this post, please support my writing by hitting “Recommend” below and following me. I also curate a weekly email on the power of presence through art, business, technology and science. If you’d like to receive those articles each Sunday morning, sign up here. Warmly with gratitude, Aram