When people use the words “startup” and “fear” in the same sentence, they are usually talking about the fear of failure. Failure, as the antonym of success, is a rather vague concept that means different things to different people. That’s not what I’m talking about here. Instead I’m pointing to a few categories of fear that I’ve witnessed or experienced in my startup journey.
Fear of Embarrassment
Fear of embarrassment usually manifests itself in the form of not shipping quickly enough. Mostly people intuitively understand the benefit of shipping a minimally viable product as quickly as possible. But in trying to avoid embarrassment, apathy, and critique, people often delay launching way too long, sometimes getting stuck in an endless cycle of polishes and redesigns.
Fear of Decisions
Decisions, especially irreversible ones, can be rather scary [1] .Think of the hypothetical startup CEO that ends up not responding fast enough to critical situations due to indecisiveness. Or people that can’t decide between their day jobs versus starting a startup, and end up dragging along personal projects “on the side” for years, often into frustration and burnout. Another example is during product design where one can get caught between two different designs and end up implementing both (with a toggle in the settings), when just choosing one of the implementations would have resulted in less work, a simpler product, and superior user experience.
Fear of the Unknown
Unfamiliar things can be scary too. One example is non-technical folks or mediocre engineers that are afraid to peek underneath the black boxes of technology. I noticed that a distinguishing mark of mediocrity in programmers is the reluctance to read or modify open source plugins, or hack into the layers beneath public APIs.
Being based in Beijing, I see a lot of foreign companies that are reluctant to operate within China due to the fear of the unknown. Vice versa, many Chinese startups are wary of venturing into the global market, even though returns can be spectacular for those who do so [2].
A personal example, one that prompted me to write this whole thing, is my fear of operation and distribution. When I initially started building ClassBox, I put almost no thought into things other than coding and design. I knew that acquiring users is important, but I kept putting it off because I didn’t understand the field. As a result, competitors with inferior products but superior resourcefulness were able to creep in and co-occupy the niche.
Disguises
Evolutionarily, fear helps keep organisms alive. Similarly, fears such as those of competition can help keep companies alive. After all, many successful founders are famously paranoid. However, the ones listed above tend to be counterproductive and potentially demoralizing. Worse, they can easily be mistaken as something else because it’s often easier to rationalize away our fear than to admit that we are afraid. Fear of embarrassment can be mistaken as perfectionism, fear of decision can be mistaken as keeping options open, and fear of the unknown can be misinterpreted as focus and staying true to ones strengths. It’s important to be brutally honest with oneself regarding ones fears and insecurities.
Systematic Desensitization
The treatment for arachnophobia is simply to expose patents to spiders. In my experience, the above fears can be overcome through exposure therapy as well. At one point we as a team decided that we needed to do something about all the competitors and copycats riding on our tailwind, and vowed to bring in an experienced COO to build an operations team from scratch. The funny thing is that although we’ve yet to find a suitable person, the search effort taught us enough about what the role required that we just ended up doing everything ourselves. In less than half a year we hacked together a cheap but efficient offline distribution network spanning over 800 universities across China. At the same time, we began partnering with Android marketplaces [3] and other startups to cross-promote our app. In addition we began to heavily leverage social and traditional media to expand our reach online. As a result, our growth rate increased by 20x over the past 12 months.
This distribution shenanigans that we initially thought of as black magic [4] ended up being just another game with another set of rules. Looking back, it’s silly that fear of the unknown kept us from doing this stuff even earlier.
Fear can act as a compass. For fear implies risk, and risk often leads to reward.
Footnotes:
[1] Many years ago at a scholastic chess tournament I witnessed a rather extreme example of this. A player with 52 minutes left on his chess clock, up a piece and facing a much weaker opponent, sat there and thought about a single move for 51 minutes and eventually lost due to running out of time. Afterwards when I asked him what in the world he was thinking, he said: “I had two equally good moves and just couldn’t decide which one to make!”
[2] Last year I attended a talk by the developer of a game called Little Empire. One of the founders talked about their initial hesitancy to develop a game for the non-Chinese Market. He feared that US players would have a different taste in style, gameplay mechanics, and pace. His worries were true, but by simply looking at metrics and talking to users, they were able to accommodate for all of these differences rather quickly. The game went on to become a huge success on Android, and the company eventually got acquired for over 200 million USD just a couple of weeks ago.
[3] marketplaces is plural because there are over 20 relevant ones in China.
[4] A word that foreigners in China like to throw around is “guanxi”, which means relationship. When we started building apps in China I was really worried about the “guanxi” factor. When I asked around for advice, a local mentor said this: “guanxi is just a word losers came up with to explain their failures. Real entrepreneurs just find ways to get things done.”
