Founders’ silent struggle — the biggest pains
Parties, pitches, dinners, drinking, racing, raising, igniting, and innovating are not the only words that describe founders’ living. Some words are seldom used but always present such as doubt, despair, exhaustion, anxiety, hunger, jealousy, insomnia, poverty, pain, fear and finally being constantly and completely lost.
Founders’ life cannot be more opposite and full of contrasts living. The lowest lows and the highest highs are always around. The expectations and reality are the furthest apart.
The startup failure rate is high. The reasons are various but most of them could be solved with fast learning, correct pivots, and adjustments. However, every failure and decision to make a transition brings immense pain and devastation, they leave deep emotional and mental scars for many.
Founders have to keep the image of problem solvers, visionaries, a source of inspiration to breed the teams’ and investors' trust in them. Not many like to admit the reality behind the office doors when they are alone.
The price of losing sanity and a startup is too big to continue the silence.
I interviewed founders from all around the world, in different startup stages, from those who self-financed their businesses and those who raised 25 million dollars. Founders gracefully shared the struggles they faced and the invaluable insights they learned for others to help.
The biggest startup problems
Bright lights glaring in the city sky like stars. You take an array of stairs to arrive at the rooftop to meet the most daring souls and world-changing minds. Drinks, music, the chatter seems like a glamorous festivity.
However, founders have a different meaning of a party. It is a heat of networking, promoting, fundraising, and pretending to celebrate a glorious life. In these places, everyone is defined only by what product or service they are building, how much they raised, hired, and scaled.
The biggest problems that founders have to solve in order to survive a crash are:
1. Money
Everything costs much more than you could ever account for because of how many expensive mistakes need to be corrected in the process of innovation.
“Our product will revolutionize the industry. We are about to sign big clients. In a year we will be earning millions” passionately tells every founder. Many times behind a confident posture and a wide smile is a racing heart from knowing that only two months left of funds before collapsing a startup and personal life.
The biggest mistake that founders make is by putting all their savings in the company and losing the safety net. It makes them desperate in negotiations rushing into destructive deals.
“You cannot build a stable startup if you have everything to lose” emphasized Dr.Wasim Mohideen, founder of TechMed Healthcare.
Interviewed founders advised starting raising money not too early and not too late, accounting for around 2 to 6 months before closing the round. The key is to find investors who also will help to manage a startup or to whom you could return when you would need to raise the other rounds.
2. Team
Raising money is a very demanding task and at the same time founder is obligated to run a company that would be worth new investments. Many times the team needs to step up for a founder.
“Too many startups consist of the personalities that were focused on building too big of the egos during their life. The heightened ego gets them accomplished in their careers, however, in the startup life, it stagnates the growth due to its inflexibility” noted one of the founders.
Unfortunately, in many cases, a lot of people internally in the startup find all the reasons to say “no” instead of “yes.”
The hardest part for startup founders is building a team that would be independent, mature, motivated, and is able to pivot quickly.
Energy is contagious and when so many things are failing especially in the early days of the startup it’s very important to have a team that boosts each other’s spirits up, knows how to fail, and gets up with more power.
“Finding a good team is core. I invested a whole year to build my team. It’s not about talent it’s about how they are eager to learn, grow, and update themselves” shared the interviewed founder.
3. Validation
Many times the initial idea has to mutate multiple times looking for the perfect fit that is not only workable but the most importantly sellable and scalable.
Founders especially coming from the technical side make the mistake to underestimate the complexities of sales. No matter how beautifully the product will be functioning it will never be sold if no one will know about it. Marketing and sales are not as straightforward as it sounds and it requires a significant investment of time and money. Sales strategy development cannot be discounted at the beginning of the product or service creation.
“Spend more time speaking with users from the first steps of the product or service development so you would not have a chance to fall in love with your creation that is not working” one of the significant learnings that, Tommaso Troiani, founder of swabit.app had.
To find a sweet spot is a calculated miracle that demands a dedicated focus on studying and serving a consumer. Testing with the real customers every step of the new product and service development for validation becomes a core in a startup.
The math is simple: no customers and no sales mean no future for the business.
The daily headache
On the road to change the world or make significant impact founders have to be fit in many ways to deal with daily uncertainties and emergencies.
“What are your daily challenges as a founder?” the answers were overwhelmingly similar and marked by exhaustion:
1. Right resources
“You start with one skill that you are very good at and suddenly you have to know it all” stated Paul Rapacioli, founder of “The Local”.
There is no time or resources to hire experts in IT, marketing, design, HR, PR, finance, taxation, law, negotiations, sales, customer support, leadership, team management, and so on. Founders have to gain understanding fast in all those fields themselves.
“I don’t know what I don’t know and I need to know it now” founder from Australia reflected.
The biggest wish between my interviewed founders was to have a comprehensive startup blueprint of everything that they need to know…
2. Communicating to personalities
Dealing with people and their personalities is one of the most demanding parts of the daily startup life admitted founders.
Finding an understanding to keep moving forward is key.
Communicating effectively ideas and visions with a team, investors, and customers is an art that has to be mastered daily.
3. Finding time for everything
On top of hundreds of emails, team issues, investor problems, errors in products, the founders also need to manage their mind that is constantly flooded with millions of new visions and ideas for current or new startups to develop.
In a startup, there is never enough time for anything and everything had to be done already yesterday.
The greatest challenge becomes how to manage it all without spiraling into the unsolvable rails of startup obsession leading to sacrifice sleep, food, health, family, sanity, and even themselves…
“Don’t let the short-term fires to distract you. Don’t get panicked looking at how others are doing or comparing the journeys. Stay focused on your journey, your pace, and your learnings. The road is long. There is a place for everyone’s success” shared Dr. Wasim Mohideen founder of techmedhealthcare.com that revolutionized lab systems in India.
The toughest times
Staring at an enormous $500,000 debt, 3 months not paying salaries to 110 employees and 1,5 years not paying yourself were the past experiences of the interviewed founders.
Would it be founders splitting up, not finding a market for a product, bankruptcy, not working product or business model? The first time failing was one of the toughest moments in the founders’ life.
Bankruptcy
“We knew that as a startup we have a big chance to reach a point of bankruptcy, but we had no idea what it really meant until we actually ran out of money” admitted Dr. Wasim Mohideen, founder of www.techmedhealthcare.com.
With experience one gets the ability to spot the dead ends sooner to avoid significant disasters. The founders mentioned that dragging the decision to pivot was their biggest regret.
“You cannot surrender, you need to do what needs to be done so it would not collapse. I hope that on another side it will be much better. This is how you grow stronger” continued Dr. Wasim Mohideen.
A clear understanding of the root of the failure and making everything that needs to be done attitude helped many to recover from painful setbacks.
Burnout
Waking up in the middle of the night unable to stop a never-ending noise of worrying and unresolved thoughts in their heads.
Interviewed founders admitted that all of them experiencing extreme levels of anxiety or panic attacks at least once a month. Half of the founders achingly remembered times when they found themselves suffering the dire consequences of burnout that led them drowning into a heavy depression and painfully quitting their startups.
Many are in startups because they are addicts to the adrenaline rush, the thrill of achieving something great that might change the world. No one can avoid or prevent hard situations from happening in the startup. That’s the nature of pushing hard for growth. However, there is a line that should not be crossed.
“You cannot afford to burn out” stated, Paul Rapacioli, founder of “The Local”.
Bankruptcies, pivots, failures, or just daily fights with crushing emergencies seem like anomalies that burden founders with heavy feelings of shame and embarrassment. However, they are normal realities of growth. What’s not normal is our attitude towards struggles and setbacks.
Founders need to learn to walk on the edge of stress and not to slip to harm themselves. That requires a very high self-awareness to detach from worries and to take a break to take care of themselves until it’s not too late.
Personal pains
“Everyone is doing so much better than me” you find yourself thinking in the founders’ community. One raised more money, another closed a bigger deal, you only hear the shiny success stories in the sight of your dark struggles, feeling like a loser, a failure who cannot catch a break.
While founders find themselves swallowed into the deep waters of anxiety gasping for air in a dark, they have to appear as confident leaders on a straight road to a dream despite all the problems that may be going on.
Often founders quit too early on absolutely great ideas and startups. The fight to succeed is long and very exhausting. We should properly address and recognize how hard a founder’s role is.
1. Balancing life
“As soon as I will raise money I will have more time for myself,” I hear founders say. The time imagined that would be dedicated to celebration, rest, recovery, finally paying attention to the personal life gets swapped by new and even bigger startup demands.
The most significant founders’ personal challenge becomes finding a balance between personal and professional life, health, and the intense life of the entrepreneur.
“It doesn’t matter how important your startup is for you, you cannot sacrifice family and your life for it” emphasized the majority of the interviewed founders.
Founders shared that having a clear structure in their days, taking care of the body, committing to have at least 7 hours of sleep daily, devoting time for not thinking about work, having a hobby, the most importantly dedicating time for themselves and their family helps them to keep the sanity and more balance in their life.
2. Internal stress
In a startup life every founder is faced with investors backing down at the last minute, product failing before presenting, business partners quitting, clients not paying, constantly hearing rejections and all other scariest nightmares unfolding in a reality…
These events are not only making one oblivious to what to do next but also crushed under enormous feelings of shame, embarrassment, and disappointment.
“As a leader, you have to deliver for a team without dumping emotional stress on the team” recognized one of the interviewed founders.
Emotional and physical fatigue from the constant pressure of the responsibility to deliver the dream into reality kills the ability to be rational and patient. Not long and you can see exploding characters, complete withdrawal, and attempts to self-destruct.
Learning to manage yourself, emotions, anxieties, fatigue, and how to relax becomes a big personal challenge for startup founders.
3. External pressures
Besides founders putting all the pressure on themselves to succeed there is also a heavyweight of social pressure to handle.
Expectations from investors, teams, and families who put their beliefs in you are always weighing on your shoulders making it hard to pivot. By trying to show that everything is “great” frequently founders are covering everyone’s bills at the bar or restaurant with money they don’t have.
“The fake it until you make it” attitude is strong in startup life. More often pretending breaks everyone sooner than it makes them.
Successful founders have to be brave not only by setting up scary goals but also to look deeply into themselves. To handle pressures they have to clearly know what are one’s strengths and weaknesses. The key is to keep the expectations of the progress more realistic.
Inga Stasiulionyte, Olympian, Master Performance Coach, and sports industry consultant, shares the high-performance insights and case studies of the challenges that her clients face.
