Great Founders Do the Scary Things

Because the Scary Things are Important

It’s easy to convince ourselves that the non-scary stuff is really important. The easy stuff: like writing a first draft to a blog post, like sending emails, like holding a “strategy” meeting. Like running long QA cycles.

Many of us get so caught up in these easier tasks, because we love them—we convince ourselves they are necessary. They are our safe-haven. We convince ourselves that unless we keep preparing, we’ll later fail. But that’s not true. Deep down inside we know it’s not. We know we should be doing the scary stuff now. That it’s the scary stuff that pushes us forward.

Great founders do the scary things first. Making a sales call is terrifying. It’s the moment when we find out whether or not a potential consumer will actually buy our product or not. It’s that moment we give someone a chance to tell us that the thing we’ve poured our whole heart and soul into is not worth his or her money.

You know what’s not scary? Planning a sales call. Deciding who to reach out to, coming up with a list of names, doing research on those people, setting up a CRM—but it’s the founders who take the leap that are great. They take the leap early, before times are desperate—while there is still time to adjust if things fail. They do the things that make it hard to sleep at night. They make the sales call.

They face moments of truth every day. It’s those moments of truth that provide the real feedback and help the great founders truly move forward.

You don’t know your product sucks until you’ve made 100 sales calls and haven’t landed a contract.

Hiring someone and giving a new employee a salary is scary. Firing someone is scary. Pushing code is scary. Publishing that blog post is scary. Announcing a fundraising round is scary. Sending out a bill is scary, and following up with a client when it hasn’t been paid is scary. Negotiating is scary. Taking responsibility for something is scary.

They are scary because they serve as moments of truth.

Building a company is about taking each day head on—facing huge challenges, huge obstacles and finding ways through them, not around them. It’s about being brave.

Go be brave.

If I can ever be helpful, always feel free to reach out: ali @ coventure .us