Take the red pill. Kill your startup

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Like any 30 something writer, I take any opportunity that arises to (mis)quote lines from the matrix.

How many times have you read or heard someone discussing ‘giving founders the red pill’; hardcore, unfiltered candid advice designed to rock their world and maybe, hopefully, make them cry a little. On the inside at least.

Here’s the thing about the red pill. Do you remember what happened in the Matrix when Neo took it? We seem to have this warped notion that Neo’s life got drastically better. We equate taking the red pill with having a wake up call that has a positive effect on our life / relationship / startup.

But notions of freedom aside, do you remember what ACTUALLY happened to Neo?

He spent the rest of his life living in caves, fighting, eating slop and hiding from robots.

Reality or not, Neo’s life seriously sucked after taking the red pill.

Given the same choice a few years later, I’m not entirely sure he wouldn’t have been back in his cubicle ready to work and fully compliant.

Right now you probably need inspiration, at worst, a hug but not reality

This article is for people in a similar situation to myself.

You have an idea that you know will change the world but you’re still searching for product market fit. IMO, this is without a doubt the hardest part of building a startup. You take a lot of rejection and failure but unlike the latter parts, you don’t really have many wins or success to validate what you’re doing yet.

Doubt sets in and you start to question every part of what you do. Worst still, everyone else does now too because you’ve been working on this big deal for months and you still don’t have anything tangible to show.

Didn’t they tell you? Startups are seriously hard.

We all need a dose of reality sometimes, but taken too early we can kill our fledgling startup before it has a chance to happen. In this early stage, our naivety about the parts we’ve got wrong is what keeps us from fixing them and taking focus and resources away from building the one thing that’s most important first. That thing is whatever gets you feedback and one step closer to product market fit.

Reading is for dummies

After listening to an interview from the SaaStr conference with Darmesh Shah from Hubspot (sidenote … The interview was one of the best I’ve heard in the last few years on SaaS startups and Darmesh is a seriously smart guy, but I’m also totally conflicted with Hubspot after reading Disrupted, but anyhow ….), I had a sharp reminder that knowing too much in the early days can kill your chances of ever getting off the ground.

You have a great idea but you listen to some 30 podcasts that tell you how and why you need to validate, what stack you should be building with, why you’ll never make it as a single founder, why SMEs / SMBs aren’t a good target market etc etc. By the time you’ve inhaled all this wisdom, you’ve changed an idea or concept some 50 times before you’ve had a chance to get real feedback. On top of that, you’ve probably set yourself back several months with a task list of things to do to ensure you do it ‘right’.

We live in an information age, where our largest asset is also our biggest enemy (in the early days at least).

If Hubspot had listened to conventional wisdom they would have been an enterprise company, and probably far from the giant they are today; the same goes for Mailchimp, Infusionsoft and Xero among a whole load of other SaaS companies targeting a similar market.

Likewise, the single founders of Dropbox, Alibaba and Tumblr would arguably have spent a significant amount of time looking for co-founders rather than building a truly great product first.

So, do you have a point?

Yes. It’s just taking me a while to get there.

The point of this rant isn’t that you should ignore conventional advice or live in a fantasy world of your own invention.

It’s that consuming too much information in the early days of building your startup is likely to do more harm than good.

The one thing all successful startup founders seem to have in common (the ones that make the news and the ones that don’t) is focus in the early days.

The question you need to ask before taking advice or consuming more startup information is “Will this get me closer to achieving product market fit?”

If the answer is no, it’s a ‘later’ problem. Archive it, save it or thank the person for their advice and get back to working on the one thing that matters.

That ignorance or naivety in not knowing how messed up one part of your business is, is EXACTLY what you need to focus on the other part that eventually gets you to product market fit.

It’s time for a fast

The time for the red pill is later. Start by going on an information diet.

Find a really useful podcast on content marketing? Unless your problem is finding more users to validate the product, archive it on something like Pocket and pull it up in the future if you need it.

Someone offering yet another [downloadable] set of insanely converting email funnel templates? Pass, until you have a working product to ‘funnel’ people to.

You get the idea.

For now, take the blue pill and go on an information diet. If it isn’t relevant to the problem you’re solving this week, don’t read it. Get back to building, validating or marketing the one thing that gets you to product market fit.