I’m Concerned About Your Startup Addiction and How It Kills Your Dreams
I originally wrote this article in May 2017 but didn’t publish it at the time.
I found the drafts and had a blast reading it because I know exactly how much our company grew after I did what I invite you to do here.
I’m glad to share it with you now and I hope it will inspire you to get over your startup addiction and onto the next stage.
Do you know that feeling when you think about building the “Uber of Pets” or the “Airbnb of Videogames” at 3am on a Saturday?
Have you ever felt that rush of excitement for being able to come up with such a revolutionary concept by accident? The feeling deep in your guts that this is the one idea that will change your life?
Well, if you’ve been having those ideas for a while you might have felt there’s a superpower you acquire from being an entrepreneur or product manager for a long time: intuition.
As you gain experience in the different areas that compound for the success of a product, from design and development to sales and marketing, you start to develop your intuition and can feel it in your guts when you’re heading the right way.
And, as it goes on, it becomes more effective. You learn to filter out ideas that seemed brilliant at first but not so much after a good night’s sleep. As ideas and strategies compete for your focus and you execute and fail time after time , you become more selective but also more trusting in your own intuition.
And when — ever more rarely — an idea really speaks to you and you feel that tingling in your stomach saying “HOLY SHI* THAT’S IT!” the excitement takes over and you just have to execute it.
Well, I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’m yet to see my face on the cover of Forbes.
In that time, I built 60+ projects for clients, running a small web development agency. I also launched, from when I was 19 to 27, eight complete side businesses — micro startups that ran their course.
Every time I started a new product, it was because I was struck with inspiration from my intuition saying “this WILL work”.
And every time I followed it, it rewarded me not only with opportunities to learn new things, but with an truly exhilarating journey of ups and downs that must not be very different from how people with a gambling addiction feel.
Psychologists studied extensively how much random rewards can make you compelled to repeating behaviours in the hopes that the next time you’ll the the big payoff. This trick is commonly used in most apps we use daily to keep us hooked in.
As it turns out, I just learned it has to do with oxytocin.
Your brain produces different hormones when you work on something which you see as a big opportunity for the near future (like when you put in extra hours for a promotion) and when you work on something that is good right now (like the job you already have and pays really well).
Let’s call the first one the excitement stage and the second one the reward stage.
On the other side, when you have none of those — meaning it neither pays well today nor gives you excitement for what you’re building — it feels like, well, work. Boring, tiresome, pointless.
The rush I got from building new products and following ideas, doing market validation and first sales, building MVPs and seeing audiences grow to their first thousands came from these rewards our brain gives us for trying hard.
It’s what moves most entrepreneurs when they start and, as the author of The Power of Habit so eloquently puts it, it’s not much different from an addiction.
Business is not Gambling
Unfortunately, because we’ve been bombarded with fabricated tales of overnight success, we approach building a startup much like gambling.
We’re told that you should validate the market and fail fast so you can get on to the next idea as quickly as possible if this one flops.
Needless to say, that sets you up for failure.
People call them startups because they don’t think of them as traditional business. That screws up your perception on how much effort needs to go into getting your startup off the ground.
People will try to raise capital on the back of power point presentations — without a product or, more importantly, an audience — and simply give up 3 months ago if they fail to impress an investor. They’ll scrap together a prototype and throw it in the trash at the first sight of slow adoption.
However, differently from gambling, there’s always a chance to win in business if you put in the time and energy. If you truly invest on it, listen to your clients, improve your product and have enough time, almost any idea can be turned into a real, profitable business.
That means your startup will, if you persist, reach a point when it has already been through this first excitement stage but is not yet on the reward stage.
At that point, your energy suddenly starts to wear off. You’re not making real money. You don’t have resources to tackle the next interest challenges, like hiring and scaling. When you close a new customer it doesn’t feel like an amazing accomplishment anymore, like it did the first few times.
It’s at that limbo between excitement and reward that you’ll have to face your startup addiction.
As I reached that point, I’d start to look for something tom change, to make things new again. A pivot, a new customer profile, a spin-off. Sometimes a new side project all together.
Unfortunately, that held me back from doing the only thing that would take my business to the next stage: doubling down on what works, managing and building processes.
My startup, Proposeful, has been in that stage for about six months.
We have clients, but not in the thousands. We have revenue, but not enough to catapult our growth. We have a good sales funnel, offer great support and can see how our work help our clients close more sales, but it feels neither like a challenge nor a reward at this point. It feels like work.
This has made me spend a lot of time searching for a hack, a new idea that I could test and suddenly get us to a 6 figure MRR. Almost every week we tried something different. And it worked, to some extent. But we were only chasing our tails. It kept us small for a few more months that we had to be.
The only thing we truly need is to double down and work hard.
Deep inside, I know that. And if you’re in the same scenario, you know that too.
So I’m saying no to the good old oxytocin this month. I will run our company, polish our campaigns and delight and customers just like we’ve been doing so well up until now. I won’t look for a “growth hack” or get sidetracked by a new shiny idea.
I’ll put in the hours our company needs to get to the next stage, to the bigger challenges.
And if you feel just like I’m feeling, like you’re always stuck in second gear, I invite you to join me. Try to double down on what works as well. Invest in your best performing chanel, not on an experimental one. Call more leads instead of reviewing your pricing structure. Improve your conversion instead of building a new funnel.
After all, the fastest way to go from A to B is in a straight line, not zigzagging like a madman.
Hey, it’s me from the present again! I did exactly what I said — I doubled down, said no to distractions and put in the work.
And now, over a year later, I can say I was right about this. That moments was pivotal to us and we’re much larger now, we went from about 800 to close to 10,000 users in that time.
Working on our start-up now feels challenging and rewarding again and I’m glad I overcame my addiction to trying new things and got us to this point.
I hope this story helps you do the same. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Also, leave a like if you’ve enjoyed this, it will let me know I should write more about the lessons we learned bootstrapping our startup. Thanks for reading!
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