Don’t Believe Any Startup Advice You Get. Not Even This.

Here’s why.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

A successful Venture Capitalist (VC) was asked, “What is that one thing you have learnt after so many years investing in startups?”

The VC replied — “You will be proved wrong.”

Wow, that’s one honest answer. Takes a lot of humility to reply like this. Most of the times you would hear VCs saying — “{X} is the most important thing”. X could be team, timing, market, product, distribution and so on.

It immediately struck a chord with me. The reason why it’s really hard to know which startup or which person or which idea will be successful is because no one actually knows for sure.

It's random. It’s hard to predict. It’s full of surprises.

Yes, there are guidelines. There are best-practices. There are do’s and don’t.

But, is there a playbook which if you follow can guarantee 100% success?

No.

In fact, like most things in life, this uncertainty is what makes this game never-ending, fun and challenging.

Take the Super Mario game, for example. It is so addictive because its almost impossible for even an advanced level player to rescue the kidnapped princess.

There is one really powerful insight here, which we often forget.

There is no one way to do anything, let alone a startup.

Some geniuses in our history have always proved everybody wrong by thinking different, by defying the convention.

Yet, so many of us are looking for that one advice, one book, one mentor, one quote, one talk, one growth hack, one cofounder, one deal, one “insert anything that the founder wants to get away with”.

This should stop. ✋

Don’t believe me?

Here are examples of outlier companies who have riddled the greatest startup gurus and carved their own path to success.

Myth 1 — You need funding for your startup to be successful or a unicorn.

1. Mailchimp (700M$+ revenue, 5B$+ valuation, 0 funding)
2. Media.net (An ad-tech company from India that was sold for 1B$ to a group of Chinese investors, 0 funding)

Myth 2— You need cofounders to build a successful startup or company.

1. Tumblr (Founded by David Karp, sold to Yahoo for 1.1B$ had just one founder.)
2. PlentyofFish (Markus Frind created it, sold for 575M$ to Match.com. Again, a solo founder)

Myth 3— You need to go full-time while starting a company

1. Spanx (Sara Blakely was a saleswoman before creating her shapewear company. After working her day job, she would spend nights writing her own patent and researching manufacturers. Once she finally landed a hosiery manufacturer, she worked on building a prototype on the nights and weekends)
2. Instagram (Kevin Systrom was working as a product manager at Nextstop.com. After his day job, he was teaching himself how to code at nights and weekends. He eventually built Burbn and then Instagram which got acquired by FB in 2012.)

Myth 4— If you build it, they will come.

1. Pinterest (It had an extremely slow start. Only after 2 years with the Pin it forward campaign did Pinterest start growing in any meaningful way. Persistence of founders definitely paid off.)
2. TikTok previously Musical.ly (Alex Zhu had to shut down his previous startup in the education space because of low traction, before founding Musical.ly)

See how these successful companies hacked their growth in the initial days.

Myth 5— Overnight success is not possible

1. Imgur — Online image-sharing community (It took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million page views in the first five months)

Myth 6— Successful tech startups need to start in Silicon Valley

1. Spotify — the music streaming service all of us love, was founded in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll, and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler.
2. Atlassian — best known for its tracking application JIRA was founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. The pair met while studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Myth 7 — To start a successful company your age should be in the 20's.

1. Lynda — Its founder Lynda Weinman started when she was 40 years old after stints as an animator for Dreamquest and a computer instructor. Two decades after the website was founded, LinkedIn purchased it for a whopping $1.5 billion.
2. Ford Motor Company — Quintessential American businessman Henry Ford was one month shy of his 40th birthday when he founded his namesake company.

There is so much information overload these days, that we keep chasing the best incubator, the right mentor, x$ funding instead of building the right product in our own sweet way.

Sometimes, the best advice is no advice at all.

All of us are uniquely distinct in our ways, methods, backgrounds, learning, application, etc.

My advice — Turn conventional startup wisdom on its head.

Not because it is so much fun to prove everybody wrong. Although, there is 😉. But, because only if we innovate the world grows. 🚀

That’s the only way or rather one of the ways (I should be careful while stating, by my own logic?) to push humanity forward.

From now on, connect the dots in your own way. Stop stopping yourself.