Brutal Truths About Startup Founders That Nobody Told You

Believe it or not, being an entrepreneur can look cool on the outside, but it’s far from what you’ve imagined when you’re actually one. If you’re now planning to begin your own startup business, then you’re in the right place, because I’m going to share with you the lesser told hard truths I’ve experienced.

Although I am not good enough to share ‘the success formula’ yet, I’m going to share with you some barriers you’ll have to overcome if you want to be a successful founder and the methods I’m using.

1. Only 1% founders succeed at last

Starting a startup can be a very odd choice of a career actually. If you want to get rich, investment banking and stock trading are probably easier ways. Startups have a very low percentage of success in nature.

Let’s look into some statistics. According to recent studies, 92% of startups will eventually fail. However, not failing is far from success. In the remaining 8%, most of them got stuck in issues such as competition and are still earning very thin profits.

To be successful in a business perspective, i.e being hugely profitable, getting acquired, or going IPO, chances can be as low as 1%.

What the general public is wrong about startups

Press interviews are always focused on the good news — how a company goes viral overnight or gets millions of dollars of funding. Little do the mass public actually drill into what really caused them. It’s amusing how most people think it’s just a great idea or just a smart strategy in hindsight. However, I can firmly tell you that these are still just the outcomes instead of the causes of success.

What we want to learn is how they come up with the strategies but not the strategies themselves. We have to look into patterns and correlations. It’s pretty complicated so I’ll try to include my approach to it later in this blog and in future ones.

In a general rule of thumb, this is what I discovered from my best mentors:

Successful founder = Excellent attitude + solid execution power + high intelligence + great habits + big vision

You have to tick all of the above, not one or two of them. To me, self-awareness and self-discipline are the most critical factors to maintain a founder’s ability. Doing a self-reflection regularly on whether these are being met is a good way:

• Am I learning fast enough?
• Have I hit a bottleneck on any of my hard/soft skills?
• Am I doing what I should be doing for the business today?

2. You’ll have 3X less social life than your peers.

Before COVID-19, it’s very common to see on Instagram that your friends have several social gatherings a week and several trips a year. To be a successful founder, sacrifice is beyond doubt.

You always have to be aware of how much you can learn as a founder and how much the business has grown on a week-to-week basis. For business growth, 7% growth per week is desirable.

Long run vs 100m sprint

Startups are different from small businesses. One of the core differentiation is getting 100X growth across 10 years versus only making it profitable.

Time is the most expensive resource and speed is your enemy. However, running startups is like running an ultra-long marathon. You can’t sprint like a 100-meter race for a decade, nor can you be too patient such as taking lots of weekends off. Everything is about the perfect balance so you can achieve optimal growth.

2 years ago, my co-founder Jerome Tse showed me the 4 Burners Theory.

The Four Burners Theory says that “in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”

We joked that we’d switched off the other 3 except for work since we avoided nearly all social gatherings just for the sake of growing the business. I even stopped exercising for a year, which gained me 8kg of weight, which was a total disaster.

After a year, I finally realized that it’s not sustainable. Sleeping for 5 hours kills my creativity and productivity. Over-limiting my social life makes my vision narrow too.

My own approach to time management

My current approach is that I’ll spend quality time whenever I’m with people. For health, I start to realize that it’s the best investment ever, you almost gain for sure in long term. This is why I have built up my habit of hitting the gym every morning before work. Both work really well for me so far!

3. You have to learn everything yourself really fast and be good at them simultaneously

‘Being the boss means you don’t have to know everything, you just hire people to do things for you!’

This is what successful entrepreneurs with billions of net worth share with you on stage. However, this is not for an early-stage startup. When they started, they still know everything pretty well.

The T-shaped Skills

The T-shaped skilled model is a good demonstration of what a talented person should look like. You have to at least know how everything works and be an expert in one field.

However, to be a successful founder, I believe one has to be a Pi-shaped or even Comb-shaped person, especially in the early stage.

This can be a very controversial topic on which you should be and there’s certainly no right or wrong. But the point I want to make here is that money mostly can’t solve the core problems, only abilities do.

The bad news is you have to learn strategic planning, growth hacking, UI/UX design, management, pitching, data analytics, hiring, financial budgeting, marketing, content writing etc. all at a time and be good at them.

The good news is, you don’t need a university degree in order to learn them. With time and effort, you can learn it on the way when you’re running your company.

4. You are not the boss.

Although literally speaking, the founder is the boss. However, when you’re really one, you know you're not one.

Your №1 Boss: Customers

Customers are always right. The main point of this isn’t that you have to uphold a good attitude to customers even they are nonsense, but always know there is a reason why every customer says something. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re the right one and the world doesn’t understand you.

Well, if you’re an artist, you totally can think in this way. If an entrepreneur thinks it’s just customers who don’t understand the product, it’s probably signaling a big problem, such as the product is not solving the right problem. This is why sometimes entrepreneurs don’t have the ‘freedom’ to do what they think is right but what customers think is right.

Employees and investors are your bosses too

I usually say the 2 other bosses are employees and investors. I’ve heard stories of how bad employees create lots of company politics and bad investors drown the business to death.

I’m thankful that Freehunter’s investors gave us enough freedom while offering us valuable connections when we need them. I also have a one-to-one review with every one of my employees every 2 months to make sure everything’s great.

Thinking if you should start a startup?

If you’re the kind of person who feels reluctant to what I mentioned while you also want to be a successful startup founder, chances are you’ll end up torturing yourself for several months and then realize entrepreneurship is not ideal for you.

However, if what you wish is just to have a small business with some decent income, everything I said is not that applicable. No worries!

BTW, we’ve private launched Jupitrr!

In my previous blog, I talked about why I started my second startup Jupitrr after Freehunter. 2 weeks ago, we private-launched Jupitrr for internal runs. If you want to be part of it, click here to sign up!

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(Updated 2/8/2023)
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