Start With Why
You’re jumping a fence, breaking into a welcome back dance at a nearby college in order to pitch your events app to as many college students as will listen. You look around and realize that you don’t care whether any of these students use your product. You don’t want to make a college party app and you’d rather be doing any other job. This existential crisis was me last September. I didn’t want to do what I was doing because I no longer knew WHY I was doing it.
Startups Are Hard
Everyone knows it, but the truth is that the difficulty has nothing to do with the hours. Nothing to do with the fact that you might need to break some rules to get your product in front of people. The difficulty is that nobody cares. No one cares what you’re building and what we as human beings want more than anything else is justification for our own actions. Validation as to why we’re doing every little mundane action we take. Verification that it’s not all useless. In almost every aspect of our lives, we have people around us to validate our choices — but in startups, we’re usually building something crazy and not everyone thinks it’s a good idea. This makes our own personal answer for WHY massively more important.
It’s Not About the Hours
My longest day of work was 30 hours. That’s nuts. The truth is that I didn’t mind it, but I don’t suggest it to anyone. I took the next day off to recuperate, but I knew I NEEDED to work a 30 hour day. I was filming a project and we only had that 30 hour window to capture a massive amount of footage. Almost everyone I know in the startup world has this “Get It Done” work ethic. People I work with every day will do anything and everything to finish a project and finish it well. The problem in the startup world is that the END is not clear. Because your actions may never bear fruit, it’s very difficult to rationalize why you’re doing them. This is par for the startup course — you’re running down a dark hallway, attempting to open every door. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s an endless row of locked doors — you’ve got a huge janitor’s keyring and you’re just praying to find the match.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s an endless row of locked doors — you’ve got a huge janitor’s keyring and you’re just praying to find the match.
Start With Why
“Start With Why” by Simon Sinek is a must-read for startup founders. The majority of the book focuses on how your answer for why you’re building something is the best way to market and explain your product to people, but I took away something much more fundamental to startup life. WHY is the only thing that will keep you going through all the ups and downs. When you’re in the depths of the Trough of Sorrow and you can’t find any external validation, you HAVE TO sell your product to yourself. You have to remind yourself why you aren’t taking the cushy job, why you’re paying yourself 30% of what you made as a contractor prior to doing your own thing. You have to market your idea to yourself on a daily basis to validate the furious doubts and self criticism that have faced every startup founder I’ve ever spoken to or read about.
You have to market your idea to yourself on a daily basis to validate the furious ups and downs that have faced every startup founder I’ve ever spoken to or read about.
I Found My WHY
As I jumped that fence last September, I couldn’t sell myself on why I needed to be there. On why my vision for a product we called Momunt required these users. That night, I decided to pivot to our new company, Zero Slant. I wouldn’t have done this if I hadn’t asked myself WHY I cared about the technology we were building. It had nothing to do with college events and therefore had nothing to do with the annoying work of breaking into a college party and then promptly being accused by freshmen of being too old to be there (apparently, my beard gave it away).
Zero Slant is our new take on a problem we started to solve with Momunt. The biggest difference this time around is that I can very clearly answer why this is the right way to go. Not what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it, and why this is the way it should be done. Even if no one else believes this why, I do. Our team does. And that’s really the point.
Startups are hard. They are long days and often nights. You can’t only sell your startup to potential users. You have to sell your startup to yourself each and every day. So start with why.
