MAP Accelerator Program — Week 10
While the last couple of weeks have been very technical in regards to the program sessions, this week there were a few sessions that tried to zoom out, take a step back, and reflect on the overall trajectory of our startups.
Reflection
Some of the program’s cohort recognised over the past few weeks that they were focusing partially on the wrong aspects/phase and the program helped them to recognise this and point them in the right direction. There seemed to be a bit of a trend, where most startups — including us — thought they can focus on something that comes further down the line. The amount of prerequisites for a successful business often is much larger than one would assume. It is not just about having a great idea.
I also have to recognise that we really wanted to plunge into product development straight away, rather than doing customer discovery first, because the former is a lot more fun than the latter.
And that aspect I think hints at one of the main reasons for stress and burn-out amongst founders. The current cohort seems to be doing okay and I think that is in part because we have the program coordinators constantly helping and motivating us and in part because we see how each of us startups struggle with the same things and this is somehow comforting.
The baseline stress of a startup is created by the high level of uncertainty in every day: Is my product good enough? Have I understood my customer’s needs correctly? What is the competition doing? Did I hire the right person for this position? Have I forgotten anything? How long will the money last? Am I gonna get investors on board? Who should I hire next? Who should I talk to next? The list goes on and on and this can be exhausting. The best advice to reduce this type of stress, I got a few weeks ago: focus on the critical issues first and delegate or postpone the nice-to-have ones away — if you can.
Dealing with this type of stress I think is pretty straight forward: exercise, eat healthy, have some relaxation activity (meditation, music or gaming) and spend time in your social group (family and friends). All these things help to ground you and this reliefs some of the stress induced by the uncertainty of running a startup.
But there’s another type of stress and I think this one is much more dangerous and inherent to a startup founder: because in the very early days, you cannot hire specialised people for every task, it often comes down to you as the (co-)founder to do a lot of the chores. For me as a technical person those chores are: administrative work, legal paperwork, customer discovery, sales and marketing. They fall into the category of critical issues and need to be addressed. However, because I don’t like doing them, I tend to procrastinate and even if I start them, it is hard to do them for a whole day. So, I usually fall short a bit. This leads to me feeling like I haven’t worked hard enough, haven’t achieved enough in a given day or week. And that feeling is precisely what creates a lot of stress.
I haven’t found a silver bullet for this, but I had to recognise that this type of stress doesn’t just happen to me, but I create it deliberately in my head. This means, that I have some control over it and just need to make sure to have an “acceptable” answer to this feeling of not having achieved enough. I have a great sense of urgency, because every week costs us money. So patience comes at a huge premium, but might indeed be the key to preventing — or at least reducing — this type of stress.
Pitching
I couldn’t come up with a good transition to this, so I’m just gonna switch gears and dive straight in. We had another event last week, which was dubbed a “reverse-pitch”, where investors pitched their funds to us startup founders. This was actually quite interesting, because I had to notice that these investors — because they listen to pitches most days — were quite good at it and clearly focused on what they are looking for. Most startups when they pitch focus too much on what they do and how well they’re doing it and less on what they require from an investor (beyond money of course). I guess that this is because most founders really want to convince the investors that they are legit. Looking back at some of our own investor pitches, I had to recognise that we went into way too much detail about what we do. If an investor wants to know more, they’ll ask. But we didn’t really think too much about what exactly we want from the investors beyond their money. Now, for some funds that is okay, because they just want to allocate their capital across different startups and not get too involved with the day-to-day. But there’s also enough investors, who will get involved and actively support their investments. In those cases, making our pitch more about them than us is a good idea.
