Your startup is probably not very important. Do you act like it is?
I don’t really very much like most startups — their ambition to exit, commitment to work-life balance but that side-eye I get when I leave for the gym at 5 p.m., the explanation of your market opportunity with baked-in excuses for the low sales you have now and how that’s all going to change, but mostly… I hate how important so many startups think they are, because it makes me sad for the things that do matter. It’s scary because you’re all doing a pretty good job of convincing people it’s all so damn important when it’s fluff.
How do I know it’s fluff? Let me list for you how some of the startups hiring in New York explain themselves, briefly…
- Millions of tickets to the most popular events, just two taps away
- GrubHub Seamless for Alcohol
- Brand, media, and eCommerce converge
- Chef On-Demand
- The World’s First Responsive Wishing Well For Modern Consumers!
- On-demand grooming for men.
- Used furniture marketplace without the hassles
Now, I’m filtering to prove a point, but if I gave you the whole list I’m fairly sure you’d still come away with the sentiment “What the fuck are we spending our time on?” And also… “why is our grammar so shit?”
How did we all get to care so much about revolutionizing stupid things? It pains me because now, the few good and really valuable ideas are all competing against attention in a churning sea of schlock-and-awe. Small ideas in big packages or bright colors, as if great UX indicated how important it is to spend months (or years) building a to-do list application with multi-user features and gamification. But, I digress.
It’s not my point to say that you shouldn’t build a monthly salsa subscription service. Hell, I literally own the domain salsabro.com for exactly that reason. It sounds super fun. I would very much like for it to exist. Just take off the mask that it’s so-god-damn-important. Is your company really, truly important? Here’s a good test:
If we don’t make this product is someone going to die? If we do make it, is someone going to not die? If we do make it, will millions of lives be positively transformed? If we don’t, will they be negatively harmed?
Note how I didn’t say ‘marginally transformed.’ If you can’t honestly answer the above in favor of your product, it turns out it’s not that important. So… what do you do about that? Well, you keep building it. You launch it. You make it a successful company. Just don’t get so fucking caught up in it. It makes it hard to sit down with your hiring recruiter or your head of product and not laugh at him, if he can’t laugh at himself a little bit. It’s a lot more pleasurable to hear:
“We’re building a gamified to-do list. It’s not going to change the world. I’m OK with that. We’re having fun with it, and we’re going to make it as good and as useful as we possibly can.”
Say it every morning like a mantra. Make sure all of your employees know, and believe it. Why? Because we’re not idiots. If you try to sell a half-dollar idea for a dollar, some people will fall for your grift and pass it on-and-on down the line, but somewhere you’ll get caught. Probably, sadly, by the users. (If you’re interviewing me, I’ll catch you right then and there.) Until you do, everyone’s so damn serious it hurts because you’ve got an entire team worked up and working to death on something that’s going to pan out a bad deal somewhere in the ecosystem, either internally or externally. That’s the real problem. The input won’t match the output. Your yin is gonna fuck your yang.
If you try and sell a half-dollar idea for a half-dollar, we can at least all agree what we’re doing and it just tastes a lot better going down. We can start to have some fun with it — and you’d sure as Hell better’d be embracing that. Fun’s the secret ingredient in making half-dollar ideas — 1. worth working for, and 2. worth paying attention to. Fun means you’ll get creativity. It means you’ll get the long hours out of a sense of meaningful play, not meaningless diligence.
Keep calling a spade a revolutionary new dirt removal monthly subscription that we should all be freaking out about, and you get my dislike. You get my hate. You’re not honest to your employees, your users, and while the Kool-Aid might taste great going down, not even to yourself.
Turns out… it’s a shovel.
Alain de Botton discussed the false importance of our workplace habitats in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and I offer it as a parting gift:
“Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?”
This post was originally shared on Reddit’s r/startups community and great debate and discussion on the topics presented is available there. I’m a product lead at FounderTherapy in New York city and I’m always available to chat with companies solving problems that need help with product and technical leadership.
