What It’s Like Working with a Startup: To Relieve Stress, Work Harder
Exciting, exhausting, and enervating. That’s working with a startup summed up in three words. You’re in a fast-paced environment, clinging on to the last bit of sanity you’ve got, trying to make things work. I’ve been with a startup a year, and I’ve learned an immense amount. There’s something exhilarating about building an organization from ground up, you become personally invested in it, and let’s say you really do believe in the company’s vision — you will go out of the way to enable growth.
The Most Important Skill: Problem-Solving
If you decide to do something, find a way to make it happen. ‘Blockers’ (most of them) are not really blockers, we just tend to hyperbolize them. If you’re hit with a limit, find new channels. If you’re stuck because it’s manual and therefore inherently limited, find an automated solution. Most of it is about how we proactively think to problem-solve. It’s pretty helpful to see things with an objective view — sort of take a step back and see it in a broader scope. We tend to get stuck in the details sometimes. In a way, this also translates into being self-sufficient. Unless I really can’t, I try to fully own what I’ve taken up.
Agility & Iteration > Perfection
You’re usually working against time in a startup, so it’s imperative to keep things quick and agile. When I say agile, of course I don’t mean rush and botch things up, but accelerated innovation is great. This also would depend on what kinda industry you’re operating in — a B2B tech company can take this approach, but say a marketing firm might have to make perfection a key factor. (I fall in the B2B side, so this becomes super important).
So you make things, don’t harp on making it perfect, put things out, and iterate as you learn. I’ve seen drastic messaging changes from one value to another, just based on quick learning and iterations — which helped us test it in the real market. You have to be comfortable with change.
The Planning Fallacy: It Always Takes More Time Than You Think
Like Daniel Kahneman preaches, we all tend to fall prey to the planning fallacy. We almost always assume something will take less time than it actually does — that’s because we take the best case scenario (we don’t consider the possibilities of a last-minute crisis that’ll derail a plan) and even fail to accept the data (the fact that it has happened a million times over).
Since we’re pretty attuned to this fallacy, it’s a bit difficult to actively avoid it. But whenever I’m planning out tasks or a strategy, I try to consciously think twice before putting an ETA. And also iteratively adjust the ETAs as I’m working.
Do things that don’t scale, sometimes
The famous Ycombinator advice really does matter. When we are initially acquiring customers, it’s okay to go out of the way to give them support, which won’t easily scale when you grow, but you do it anyway.
We were trying to get some good feedback for the product, and I personally reached out to people (I could only reach out to a limited number), and that worked a lot better than sending an automated email campaign to a ton of them. Even trying to get user feedback on UX was extremely focused, and personalized. But not everything can be this way, as you have more things to do, there are some things that just have to be standardized and put on auto-pilot (product trial emails, for example).
How Much Being Goal-Oriented Matters
A golden rule — always work backward from the goal. See what you need to achieve, define all the tasks you can or will do to achieve it, and then devise an intricate strategy that elaborates what you need to do everyday. The opposite of this approach is a task-oriented mindset, where you’re pretty much doing things in silos, and hoping it’ll eventually mean something. Even a goal-oriented approach involves focusing on tasks, just that it’s explicitly connected to a goal. It actually helps you to diligently perform that task, otherwise it just sort of wavers off, in an incomplete manner.
Take an instance of cold outreach. If our goal was to have 10 demos in a month, and we knew 1 out of 20 people we reached out to agreed — we’d do 200 reach outs a month, and 8 a day. Sounds pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people work the other way around.
The Trade-Off Between Patience and Time
There have been times when I’ve tried a new approach for too short a time, and assumed it doesn’t work. And there have been times where I’ve given months of leeway to a particular strategy and hope it works. I personally find it difficult to know what’s the right duration to try something. Of course, it depends on what you’re talking about, for instance we know SEO and organic activities take a while to actualize. But there are times (for instance, cold outreach), you don’t know whether to write something off or keep going. I’d love to have a clear cut answer to this, but more often than not, it’s just trial and error, basic & intuitive judgement and taking a chance based on a cost-benefit (and risk) analysis.
You Wear a Lot of Hats!
Working with a startup means you’re doing a little bit of everything. You may or may not be able to master one particular domain, that really is subjective, but you have your hands in every pot. You usually don’t have to deal with middle management, so you’re dealing with the founders and learning from the best. To me, at a young age, this has been a truckload of experience and learning, whether or not it pays off, I’ll have to find out.
