The Biggest Challenges You’ll Face When Running a Startup
Starting and growing a company is incredibly hard. There’s some things I’ve learned along the way that might be helpful to you. Here they are below:
1. Raising money
Raising money for your startup is likely one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. Investors are the biggest skeptics of your product, your abilities, your team and your plans for execution. Investors are always interested in how quickly can you grow the company with their money. Proportionally, every entrepreneur who sets out to create and grow a big company has the ability to scale with the right tools. If raising money is becoming your biggest challenge, keep going, but focus on one important thing: building your company. Grow your customer base, double down on making your product better and more useful for your customers every single day. When you wake up one day, you may have a massively successful company. Your non-believing non-investors may be knocking themselves on the head or not. But either way, keep going.
2. Product
Your company product is why you exist. To provide a service to your customers you must give them a product that solves a problem or brings a certain value for them. You’ll need to iterate on your product until your customers are seeing the perfect value, are loving it, and can’t stop raving about you. Which leads me to…
3. Your Team
If waking up and starting and running a company is hard, then you have to go it with a group of people that believe in your vision. Your team must be one you enjoy working with every single day. And if you’re lucky to have investors, you must enjoy working with them equally when you do catchup. At Delect, I’ve been fortunate to have an incredible team to work with every single day. Here is why that matters: You’ll be making iterations, updates and all sorts of design and product improvements all the time. You’ll be chatting at midnight, at 3am, early in the mornings, all the times in the afternoon, and every time in between. So it’s important to have a team that’s committed and that you enjoy working with every single day — Every. Single. Day. (Just making sure you got that there :)
4. Product/Market Fit
Are customers using your product? Are they coming back? Are new ones coming in? How quickly are they coming in? What are you doing to get them in? Are you learning anything? The myriad of questions you can ask yourself are endless here. But each one is incredibly important. You want to build a product that customers love. If you’re in B2B, you want your customers to tell their friends and other businesses. If you’re in B2C, you want your users to tell their friends, their family, their next door neighbor, and their extended cousins. You want them to tell their pets how exciting your product makes them feel. Likely the dog will not understand, but you get the picture. If you’re in B2B2C (a marketplace), you need all of them. You need company executives to be comfortable telling other company executives about you. You want the new neighbor to want to be the first to tell their neighbor, you get where I’m going here. In short product/market fit takes time, but it’s a sweet spot to be in. If you haven’t found it yet, keep going.
5. Your Race
There are asians, latinos, whites, blacks, and a myriad of other shades in there — in short, humans. There are humans. But I’ve found it particularly harder for blacks to start and grow companies. Your race or skin color determines how quickly you’re able to grab someone’s attention. It determines how quickly people believe in what you’re saying. It determines how quickly people believe you’re an expert in something. Possibly I wish I could say this shouldn’t be something I add to this list, but race factors into our lives equally everyday so it’s important to add to this list. I’ve found that blacks tend to have to work harder to be believed in. That goes with connecting with investors and customers. That goes with the fact that 1% of venture capital funds go to blacks. But you already know the fact here. It’s been plastered in the news for some time now. So if you’re black, as bleak as it is to say, keep going.
6. Your Mental
Mental health when running a startups is always debatable. There are very good reasons your friends, family and everyone else around you think you’re crazy when you’re starting out. And there might be even good reasons why they think you’re crazy even at a later stage in your company (maybe when you wake up early on a Saturday morning to go gliding, to get a new perspective, for instance), but it’s fair to say any endeavor you take is not without its nay and yay sayers. So when it comes to mental health, get some workouts in, read excessively, have a few ideas what you’re doing for every day (really do have a lot of ideas), learn every single day, and really do wish the luck of the Irish is on your side.
Summary
Starting and running a company is no small task, but it’s not impossible. You need to surround yourself with people who believe in you, and equally people you’ll work like hell for. Put a solid plan together for your fundraising, and go at it. Focus like hell on product, team, and product/market fit. Be a decent human being and keep your mental in check by working out, reading, and having an idea what’s going on. If you’re lucky, you’ll make it.
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About The Author
Serge Amouzou is the founder and CEO of Delect, a platform that connects restaurants directly to consumers and improves the interaction between the two. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
About Delect for Restaurants
Delect provides iPad point of sales systems that enable restaurants to manage marketing, operations, enable mobile payments, take orders for delivery and in-house dinning, and reservations.
About Delect Mobile App
Delect provides a mobile app that enables consumers to make cashless payments at restaurants, bars and coffee shops, make reservations, and track rewards and loyalty points at select restaurants. Find Delect on Android and iOS.
