You are going to fuck up and that’s ok!
Lately there have been a lot of stories attempting to help people with their startups. Given the landscape of the economy, the amount of accelerators popping up, and the startups attempting to make a run at success, I thought I would throw my two cents into the mix. I’ll do what I can to explain my journey so far. I will also preface this by saying I’ve never built a startup to an exit. I’ve never built a company that got acquired. However, after reading countless articles and listening to a lot of podcasts, I figured I would put my thoughts down and hope that it helps give some context about what you will likely run into when you try to build a company.
As you build your company it’s important to note that you are going to mess up. The faster you come to terms with that, the better off you will be. Despite all of the advise you will get, despite all of the books you will read, despite all of the podcasts you will listen to, and despite actually fucking up, you are going to continue to fuck up. This is ok. Don’t dwell on it. Learn from it. Grow a thick skin. Treat it like you would an incident. Break it down. What did you do? Why did you do it? How can you avoid doing it again? And more important, what did you learn?
Don’t be afraid to journal what you’re doing. I use Evernote like it’s my bible. I put everything there so I know what I’ve done. It helps that I can organize things in notebooks. I have a notebook that actually is labeled “Fuck ups!” I refer to it frequently.
This is one of the biggest things I continued to hear from both investors and advisors. “When are you going to go ‘all in?’ This is a question for you to answer yourself. I will caution to say, this is one of the most important questions you will need to answer. And here’s why….
Not everyone has money saved up to just work on their startup full-time. Everyone’s situation is different. As I’ve been building up my business, I’ve had to maintain a full-time job. Same goes for my co-founder. This doesn’t mean we will have any less chance of success than anyone else. It really doesn’t and I believe this. Anyone that tells you differently is full of shit.
All you need to know about startups comes down to three things.
- You need to prove your hypothesis by getting someone to actually pay you for your idea.
- If you haven’t done the above, you are not ready to get funding.
- You don’t need to be first to market.
That’s really it. It’s ok if you are reaching out to VCs/Angels, but expect to get the same answer until you have shown some traction, “You’re a bit early for us.”
If you’re going to reach out to investors, keep a log of who you have spoken to and the date you spoke to them. Keep them up-to-date, but no more than one update per month. They get hounded and you will just get filtered out if you pester them too much.
Someone has come up with your idea or is currently working on your idea. Chances are you are not doing something that anyone else hasn’t already thought of or tried. If you are, it’s even more important to have someone pay you for your idea so you can show traction and eventually find investors. This is something a lot of people don’t spend enough time saying. Seriously, get someone to pay you for your idea. If someone asks you, “How can I help?” Tell them, “Be my customer!”
Use your network of friends and family to get your idea out there. Identify your user profile. Find your go-to-market strategy. I know this may all seem like common knowledge, but trust me, you’re still going to do this wrong. I know because we did.
I read a recent article about pitch decks and giving the advice that you should avoid pitching until you’re ready. WRONG! Fuck that! Pitch! Pitch until you are horse and you can barely fucking stand. Why? Because your product message will change. Your product will change. As long as you are out there talking about it, you will be able to hone your message better. Not pitching until you are ready will mean you’re late to the game. I’m going to go off on a tangent for a bit, but it will all make sense.
I used to have a fear of crowds. I hated getting up and talking to a big crowd of people because it freaked me out to have all eyes on me. I still get a little nervous and you can often see that if you’ve ever seen me speak at a conference or event. I rush things. That’s on me. I’m still learning how to slow things down.
However, the way I got over my fear to simply get up there was to do open mic nights at comedy clubs. I have a pretty quick whit so I thought this would be a great way for me to write something funny and test it out on a small audience. This is where startups and standup comedy are the same. You write down your hypothesis, test it out on a few beta users, fix things, and then get it out again.
Comedy is the same process. You write a joke, test it on a small open mic audience, fail miserably (i.e. they don’t laugh), fix the joke, and keep going until the laugh. Unless they never laugh then you stop telling that stupid fucking joke. Same goes for startups. If you never get anyone to pay you for your idea, stop telling the same fucking joke!
In the early stages of your company, it’s going to be really tempting to just seek funding from anyone you think will fund your idea. I’m here to tell you how stupid that sounds. If you just want money, go to a bank. A big bank. This was something we fucked up early on.
However, if you want the best chance for success, find someone who can give value to your company in the form of advice and guidance. At this stage the only thing you really have to offer is a piece of your company. However, if you find someone that believes in your vision this will be valuable to them as well. Typically advisors are given between .5% and 2% depending on their involvement, but each situation is different so you should talk to your advisor about this.
Keep your advisors updated all the time and keep communication open. Thankfully Rick Turoczy has built an awesome tool called Reportedly which I highly recommend. It’s customizable, scalable, and gives you the ability to add as many people as you need to keep up to date.
This is the biggest source of contention in a company starting out, but the most important piece. Brightwork is my 4th startup and one I see the biggest chance for success. Earlier startups were great ideas, but where we fucked up was that we didn’t set up the proper expectations and hold people accountable for those expectations. We assumed everyone had the same amount of passion and understanding about what was expected of them. That was stupid!
The one thing I always start with at companies is the culture. Setting up values for your company is important because it helps set the benchmark of what is expected by everyone. The company doing this right is Twilio. They have the “nine things” that help new employees understand what they’re getting themselves into. They are the values that are important to the company and what they should be thinking about in their everyday job function. I firmly believe it’s the biggest reason Twilio is growing to become the leader in the cloud communication space.
When you are thinking about your own values, think about how it will drive your growth. Think about how new people coming into your company will react and use these values to grow your company. If you find anyone in your company not living these values, even investors and advisors, call them out on it. Ask them why they’re not adhering to the values they agreed were important.
By now you’re probably wondering how you are going to get your product out to market. Well, that’s a good question. You should be looking at who your customer will be and how you’re going to reach them. Who would benefit from using your product or services? What pain does it solve for them?
Until you have answered those questions you won’t be ready to go to market. That shouldn’t stop you from trying though! So while I have spent a lot of time talking about fucking up, I’m going to give you a piece of advice that may seem counter intuitive. Build the product and put it in the hands of your users, even if it’s fucked up. Why? Because those early customers will tell you what works and what doesn’t. If you’re opening a beta, see if you can offer it for free to some people.
One of the best pieces of advice we got from the folks at Founders Pad was to get some consultancy gigs. To be honest, I initially dismissed it as a waste of our time. However, after talking to a few of our customers I realized how dumb I was. If our product could solve a real problem for a larger customer, then why not see if we could get it into their hands? I was so worried we would end up with 5 different versions of our product. Instead, I should have been worried about never getting a customer at all.
At the end of the day all of the advise you will get doesn’t matter. Every situation is different. I can only tell you what we went through (and are still going through) in the hopes that something resonates with you enough to look at what you’re doing and focus on what you really need to be focused on. Building. Don’t worry about what your website will look like. Don’t worry about how many followers you have on social media. And don’t worry about what your pitch deck looks like. Just worry about getting someone to validate your product by paying you.
And just to shit on your Wheaties on the way out the door, the chips are stacked against you. Unless you’ve had a successful exit you will have a tough time raising money. This is why it is so important to validate your idea. But then again, if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t be reading my blog post.
Happy building!
Josh Carter
Co-Founder
Brightwork
