Your First Startup’s Always the Hardest
I saw a question on Quora the other day. An entrepreneur was asking what to do when it looked like his first startup was failing. Whether he should give up or start another.
It’s interesting, because I think experience changes the answer for a lot of people. When my first startup failed, I felt like a failure. Like it was all my fault.
In reality, your first startup will probably fail anyway. No matter how good you think you are at the time.
My first startup was Timelock. We were making personal scheduling software to make meeting people easier. Except the software didn’t actually make meeting people easier. It made it more complicated.
The reason? My cofounder and I had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t know anything about startups. All I did know I’d read in books. Probably that week.
More importantly we didn’t have any idea how to build product, sell or market. We knew startups were about building things, but not what that looked like in practice.
We built something people kinda wanted, but only if it was free.
Free isn’t a business model.
We shut down the ‘startup’ after a couple weeks of beta because we couldn’t think of an easy way to make money from it.
You might notice a slightly bitter theme in all this. It’s that looking back on it now, the reason the startup failed wasn’t that it was a bad idea. It wasn’t a terrible product. It wasn’t that we never could have made money.
The reason Timelock failed was because I was a bad founder.
When you’re starting out, every problem seems insurmountable. As soon as one person says your product sucks, that’s it. You start to think you can’t do it. That you should just give up.
We made all the mistakes possible. Even in our second and third startup we made a ton. But it gets easier.
Each time I build a product, company, service, it gets easier. You don’t learn what not to do from a book, you learn it from experience. And experience usually means failure.
Now I’ve failed a ton, I know what works and what doesn’t.
Not what works for everyone, not for every startup, but for me. I’m pretty great at cold email. OK at paid acquisition. Awesome at product. Terrible at cold calling. Surprisingly good at content marketing.
Knowing what works for me helps me build stuff faster. And sell it. Y’know, basic startup stuff.
If you’re struggling with your first startup, or second, or third, and thinking about giving up, don’t. It’ll get better. Everything about it will get better. You’ll get new problems, for sure, but the old ones will be easier. And you’ll make it.
