How Not to Fail at Your Startup

Just Keep Going

francine hardaway
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

Steve Blank, author of the Startup Owners Manual perhaps the foremost authority in the world on startups, has said that every startup is a lab experiment. In other words, you combine things and see if there is a good reaction (or not). If there is, you’re lucky because you’ve found a market. If there isn’t, you have to recombine the ingredients — which we now think of as a pivot.

SySTEM Schools, a STEM charter school for inner city kids that was founded to prepare them for the careers we know will be available in the future — those requiring Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math — in addition to reading, writing and the arts — just started its fourth school year this week.

The entrepreneur, a woman has been through every startup minefield over the past three years (I’ve been on the board and I’ve been coaching, so I know). Here are some of the historical incidents:

-her cofounder bailed after six weeks, saying a startup was too stressful.

-her first year hires found themselves ill-equipped in the classroom management skills needed to teach problem-based learning to high needs kids. Some quit and others were let go

-many of her students entered the school at 6th grade, but read on a first grade level

-parents needed to move frequently for various economic reasons, producing churn in the student body

-not surprisingly, test scores on statewide exams were below average

For the past three years, the board and Angelica Cruz have battled together to recombine the reagents in the jar and produce the reaction we wanted. Many times we were almost ready to throw in the towel, and then some student would get an award or do something outstanding, and we reconsidered.

This year, we seem finally to have hit our stride. Or rather, Angelica has hit hers. Here are the ways we now know we’ve achieved product-market fit with the right reagents:

-Last year’s test scores revealed that our students gain a year and a half for every year they stay at SySTEM, and although we’re still not where we want to be, we know our method works

- 130 students enrolled and we are still actively recruiting and building the waitlist. We now know we will have churn because of the instability of parents’ occupations, but we are over the number of students we need to make our budget

— The right students enrolled, producing a super positive vibe on campus with regard to school culture.

The kids blew us away with their conversations in class about their goals for the future and what they want to change in the world when they grow up. We have students who want to find cures for diseases, become award-winning authors, explore outer space, become white hat hackers, and invent apps that help solve worldwide problems like hunger and poverty. We are in awe of their excitement for STEM and project-based learning.

— The team. Teachers are engaged, incredibly passionate, and willing to go above and beyond to do whatever it takes to help students be successful, including spending their lunch hour talking with kids about their dreams for the future or show them around the biology “living” classroom, and volunteering to lead clubs every day after school when they are only required to teach 1 club a week.

— The community. Parents are volunteering to lead clubs, help with lunch/dismissal duty, recruit students, promote the school on social media, and more.

Not all startups are tech startups. But they all go through the same truly difficult period of about three years, during which most of them fail. In fact, that number is 90%.

SySTEM Schools is now among the 10% that didn’t fail. Why? Because the team kept going and we stopped trying to scale prematurely. Lessons learned.

francine hardaway

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