The Age of Honeymoon Startups

You are reading this either because you saw startup in the title or because you are completely baffled by the title.

Startups are marriages. Wooohh !? Startup ? — Marriages ??

Yes, Startups are. Let’s take a closer look with some analogies.

Startups too, as in marriages have their founder’s dating period, engagement, marriage, honeymoon and then either a divorce or a happy married life. Startup marriages too can be either love or arranged. Dating period is the period of time you have known each other. And engagement, the moment when you realize that yes, you both really feel comfortable working together. Then the marriage: the company formation part.

One of the main objective while drafting this post was to point out some of the farces related to these kinds of startup marriages around us these days.

Everyone loves romance, so do the startup founders. The initial days of a startup are as much exciting as the initial days of a relationship. Lovers and founders, both love to be in a fictitious world. Indeed, it was and still continues to be the strong basement of great companies.

Startups are classified as either a successful one or a failure. The failed ones, the ones who sacrificed their lives to be in the game. They are the true brave soldiers in the entrepreneurs’ battalion. They deserve as much or more respect than the successful ones. But unfortunately, it’s just the inverse.

For decades, these were the two classes of entrepreneurs we knew. But today I would like to introduce you to a third class — The honeymoon startups.

Yes. Honeymoon startups. So, what are they, who are they ? Honeymoon startups are special breed of startups that got stuck intentionally in the ‘honeymoon’ phase of startup timeline. These also include the one-night-stand startups and some class of wannapreneurs. Some people call the founders of these startups, the business card CXOs. These guys neither have any product/prototype nor an execution plan. All they have is an IDEA and a business card. And in some cases they don’t even have an idea !

In my network itself, I know atleast twenty honeymoon startups. At this point, I recall a conversation I had with one such startup. So, it was during the days just after the product of my company got featured in a couple of leading newspapers. Back then, I was also in charge of E-cell activities in my college and it was usual for me to help the early stage student entrepreneurs with a little bit of mentoring and introductions to key peoples in the ecosystem.

So, one fine day when I was reading newspaper in the reading room, one of my friends came to me and said that he had this great idea and he wants to know how he could make a company around it. By then, I must have had an experience of 1 year running my company. So I lectured him for about 2 hours explaining each and every steps in the process and the stories of my startup in those phases. I felt really good about myself for mentoring him. Days passed by, weeks passed by. So after a couple of weeks, I inquired about the status of their idea. He said he is still in the idea part and it felt really hard. And I asked “Didn’t I tell you that it was not going to be as easy as you think and it needs perseverance?” He kept silent. Another week passed by and on another evening I found him rushing towards me. He asked “How can we get some publicity” hearing this, I was like ‘What ???!’

They neither have any product nor an execution plan. I asked him “Why do think that they would ever cover your story?” He exclaimed “Well, we have a great idea”. “Even the guy in our hostel mess has an idea, it’s the plan that makes it worthy” I said.

This is an exact portrait of the honeymoon startups. And the wackiest part is that we even have incubation centers for these honeymoon startups. Neither the honeymoon startup nor the incubator knows what they are doing.

There are even sub classes in these groups. One such group, I would like to discuss here is the safe players, the employing employers. The ones who manage to run a company being employed at another stable company. It’s not that this is not acceptable. It is acceptable in cases when atleast one of the founders is working full time for the company. And it’s highly an unacceptable concept when neither of the founders is working full time for their startup and the founders are looking for employees working for them. I see no difference between these groups of people and the previous one. They are all honeymoon startups. If the founders themselves don’t have the confidence in their firm, how can any employees or investors have faith in the firm.

Entrepreneurship is a do or die game and it’s not for the faint hearted.

This post was originally posted in https://athulsudheesh.wordpress.com/blog/