Why an early stage start-up may not be for you

Coming from management consulting, the standard answer to the now ubiquitous question of “Should I leave to do a start-up?” is “Sure, but first join a start-up — something mid-stage, funded, with growing revenue, etc.”

The conventional wisdom (buoyed by the consultant’s inherently higher risk aversion) is that you want to get your feet wet in a secure way, i.e., you’ll be paid well, potentially even better if the start-up you join has an exit. And that will set you up with the funds you need to venture out on your own. Of course, you’ll also gain the experience to know how to do a start-up.

But I’ve now come to realize that there’s another reason that the typical consultant may not like to start his or her own start-up or join at an early stage where product/ market fit is still ambiguous.

Consultants are used to tackling business problems hand-in-hand with relatively senior people who are generally pretty intelligent. Send them to a post-product/ market fit start-up where the challenges are growth, efficiency, operations, and they can thrive.

However, in a pre-product/ market fit world, the challenges are how to get consumers to buy what you’re selling. Keeping in mind that the average consumer has a few seconds to care about you, may not be educated enough to understand what you’re saying, and has fickle and frivolous tastes that sometimes are not predictable.

In other words, the business angst, the consultant can handle. The consumer angst? May be harder.

Everyone I’ve shown Last Minute Gear to has loved the concept. Like… really loved it (praised it in some cases). If I were to believe the reactions, then my low conversation rate should simply be ascribed to:

• Lack of awareness
• Bad timing (i.e., you learn about it before you need to use it, and then you don’t remember it when you need to use it)
• Unclear messaging

These are all things that I can fix myself. I can raise awareness (if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, enter my sweepstakes for lift tickets to any mountain on any date!), which will also address the timing issue (i.e., if you’re repeatedly reminded of Last Minute Gear, it’ll stick).

I can also fix the messaging and distill the value proposition. Granted, this is one of the most difficult tasks and contributes to the angst. As a consultant, you had to simplify, but by and large, people “got” what you were saying. When I’m now at the frontline dealing with consumers from all walks of life, sometimes the simplification challenge is ridiculous. Two examples: 1) On the customer side, some users have been thoroughly confused by the pay what you want model (i.e., the order of questioning in a non-sarcastic way: “so… I can write in $1? Which means I’ll get charged $1? Which means $1 will be on my bank statement?); 2) On the hiring side, more than one person has applied to work for Last Minute Gear either not knowing what the business does, or thinking that it was for a railroad engineering position (as a playful nod to the Ruby on Rails backend, the job posting is titled “Rails Wizard”).

But… what if it’s none of these things? What if I do all of them and this is just a product that consumers will say they want and love but ultimately won’t use? It’s like the world of green products. Plenty of consumers in surveys will tell you they will definitely pay up. But when the rubber hits the road, many of them don’t (one article with an interesting explanation for this phenomenon). Certainly, I’ll eventually find out the answer to this as well. But after wallowing in the emotional angst of consumer drama, and after more periods of infinite frustration. And this is why I think it’s actually fair advice to say to anyone, consultant or not — if this kind of challenge is not for you, then for that reason alone you might re-consider your decision to do your own startup.*

*So then you ask me, do I like the challenge I’m in? Honestly, yes and no. Sometimes I do (when I’m trying to figure out how to logistically serve as many people as once), sometimes I don’t (when I apparently can’t design a website). But at this point, I’m pretty committed to brute forcing it through and seeing where I emerge on the other side.

These are the things I muse about while building an on-demand rental & delivery service for outdoors recreational equipment. Check it out at www.lastmingear.com.