The 87 things you learn after 9 months at your first startup
- You have to show up every day. The endless days where nothing works have their own arithmetic that adds up to breakthroughs of genius. The sun will come.
This is what learning looks like
- Everybody works for free at first. Free doesn’t really mean “free” though. Free means that you’re an investor. If you’re the entrepreneur, it means you’re an investor in your own company by working there every day. If you’re an employee, free means you’re proving that you can add value to justify your salary. Places like IBM or Dell do not demand this level of accountability.
- Don’t build it until someone has bought it. No, for real. Seriously. No exceptions. Get the signature and the check. Those two things mean your idea doesn’t suck.
- Everyone has a skill-set that makes them uncomfortable. They medicate this with their comfortable skill-set. That’s why when your startup has a sales problem, you can’t find the engineers: they’re all hiding in the basement coding a new feature.
- Stop blaming anyone else for everything else. It’s your fault. Until you admit it’s your fault, you can’t be in control of the necessary changes that will fix the problem (leads into #6).
- Be ready to change things all the time. That’s part of why you have to keep showing up. What you did on Day #1 didn’t work then, and it’s still not working. You don’t figure out the right model until many days later.
- But don’t change things without a hypothesis. Changing things randomly and without a purpose goes by “schizophrenia” in the DSM.
- Your idea is worth absolutely nothing until you’ve executed and sold something.
- Entrepreneurship can be a self-cleaning oven. It gets hot and miserable in there sometimes. The pain is how you know it’s working.
- You always have a choice each day. You can love it, or you can leave it. If you don’t love it, but you haven’t left it, ask yourself what you love hiding from more.
- Leverage a community of people. You will not do it alone. You have to find a group of people that you can help and get help from. If they’re the right people, this will make more difference than you can see in the windshield.
- Take critical feedback in silence. Once the feedback is done, say thank you and go apply the feedback. NEVER use this as an opportunity to tell why the feedback isn’t relevant to your situation. If someone cares about you enough to share criticism with you, don’t tell them that they’re wrong. That’s an efficient way to lose your connection to reality.
- Stay connected to reality by varying your sources of advice. If your technology is a bleeding edge hyper-green technology, you better go talk to a business development guy who likes capitalism. That’s the only way you’ll know if your idea is worth a dime.
- Read all the business books that challenge you, and do it until you’re overwhelmed. At that point, switch to fiction and then go to sleep. CS Lewis should take the edge off.
- Tomorrow, start again. Learn from screw-ups. Be willing to screw everything you do up. But always remember that success is 10x more powerful than screw-ups, and way more fun to be excited about.
- Minimum Viable Product is enough. In other words: Less is more.
Good list of 16. where are the other 61?
Less is more
This is my MVP.
I’m building the list, and will post the remaining as they crop up. It will be a meme.