5 compelling reasons to join that early-stage startup you’ve been considering.

Sukanya Ramabadran
Nov 6 · 4 min read
Image Credits: Photo by ROOM on Unsplash

Working on revenue projections for the next year, while also designing your website, writing content for demand generation and also evaluating your product features versus your competitors, and not to forget, making a run to the nearest bistro to pick-up lunch sandwiches, while thinking through your potential reply to your first pilot customer. If this sounds like an attractive enough proposition to you, and you are the I-like-my-plate-super-full type of person, Congratulations! You are the perfect fit for an early stage startup that’s probably between it’s pre-seed and seed stages of funding.

The large company versus a startup argument comes up every so often in the San Francisco circles but most articles end with a diplomatic response of “Ah, well, it depends on the kind of person that you are, the stage of product your startup is in, the work atmosphere you are used to, the time you can afford to chop away from your personal life, blah, blah!”

What I’d like to do in this post is to give you clear reasons on how this organized chaos in an early stage startup can actually help fuel your learning goals & your career in the right direction. This is by no means a confirmation bias to get more people to do what I’m doing so I feel validated :) But nonetheless, here are my top 5 compelling reasons:

  1. The learning curve is perpendicular:

You would no longer follow any learning curve trajectory you’ve seen or heard of. You would have to grasp not-so-byte sized information from a range of topics right from how angel investors form LLCs when they like your elevator pitch to understanding how figma diagrams work. It doesn’t just end with knowing what terms mean but you would develop the super-power to deep dive into concepts within a short span of time. In other words, it would be like cramming weeks of learning into days or hours. You would definitely get more efficient at assimilating and putting information to use.

2. Running with your ideas start-to-finish:

Being a cog in the wheel is one the most cliche terms associated with large companies. Exactly the opposite of that is true of early stage startups. You run with the wheel from start to launch. If you love both ideating and executing (and who doesn’t love working to see their features see the light at the end of the tunnel?) then early stage startups are your best bet.

3. People rooting for you to succeed:

With limited human resources to spare, and most of your team members multitasking through various functional domains, one thing that drives the momentum for early stage startups is how invested every team member is in the success of the rest of the team. The camaraderie is more palpable in early stage startups because every small victory takes the team one step closer to happier customers and stronger product acceptance. The sense of pride achieving this is unparalleled.

4. Creative Independence:

You think your app should have a trivia quiz or an in-app notification that cheers your users for usage streaks? Brilliant. Your ideas will not just be heard but there is a good chance you could actually sit down with your engineering team to get it implemented. More power to ideators who love seeing their ideas come to life.

5. No more meetings!:

Remember Pam from The Office advocating for not wasting time in meetings. You’d probably enjoy what it feels like to not call for a 12 member team meeting just to discuss one Asana update. (Some large companies block calendar time just to walk through how to set up tasks on Asana!! Talk about meta-tasking!) For eg, In an early stage startup if you are redesigning your website, you might end up writing copy, putting together design mood boards, creating brand playbooks, while also prepping for a session on mission-vision statements before you call the entire team to brainstorm on what you’ve built thus far. Consider a similar scenario in a super large company, where there would be hour long debates on synonym changes to one word in the product description. Of course, large companies have brand identity, customer acquisition and public perception to protect and understandably so, every change would have to go through hoops of questions before implementation.

Sukanya Ramabadran

Written by

Sukanya Ramabadran is a San Francisco-based product marketer, marketing agency founder, rural education campaigner and an environmentalist.

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