11 Ways Being a Startup Founder is Pretty Brutal
Are you a startup founder? Welcome to the suck. Last week I emailed StartupYard alumni to ask them one question: “What has been the most brutal part of your startup journey?”
We talk a lot about the joys of success and the feeling of accomplishment our founders get from overcoming their challenges. Actually though, being a startup founder can be pretty brutal sometimes, and there are plenty of situations where there is no real silver lining. A big part of making it as a founder is relying on your friends and your mentors when things go bad. Even if there isn’t a way to fix it, we can help you move past it and use the experience to grow and mature, even just a bit.
Brutal Doesn’t Mean “Not Worth It.”
It’s rare that a negative emotional or inter-personal experience as a founder is enough to make our alumni give up- in fact we’ve never seen it. Still, it can make the world of any entrepreneur lonely and discouraging, sometimes for long stretches. The best founders have to stick out those patches and make it through anyway.
I’ll be quoting our founders in this article without revealing names. There are some things we can learn from, that are still best not discussed in detail. Here is what a few of our alumni had to say:
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Partners Suddenly Change Directions
“Representatives of [A Big Tech Company] said we would ‘build an ecosystem together.’ They got us really excited. 3 months later they ended that initiative and nothing happened. Everything we thought was going to happen never did.”
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People Waste Your Time
“I traveled hours to meet this VC, only to find out he wasn’t interested at all. I talked with him for 20 minutes, then traveled hours home for nothing.”
“People want to meet you and they want to cooperate with you, and they can’t do anything. They don’t have anything for you. They’re doing it just to do it. You have to be able to say no at some point.”
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People Break Apart
“I had to break up with my co-founder, whom I have known since childhood. It was for the sake of the company, but it made me very sad.”
“I saw that our vision of [my co-founder’s] role, was not the same. He wasn’t doing what we had agreed, and we suffered for that.”
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Investors Get Cold Feet
“We shook hands on an agreement. I followed up with him the next week, and he never returned my email. He didn’t even say why he was backing out.”
“We were going to sign, literally that week. The papers were all finished, and they backed out. We had to start from zero.”
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Customers Are Harsh
“You change one crucial feature in a way [your users] don’t like, or it doesn’t work for 1 day, and they kill you in the [app store] ratings. They absolutely kill you.”
“The product was just not working well, and I was trying to ignore it. I was trying to be positive, but we needed to really close in and refocus on our existing customers. It was very hard to admit the product was not what we were promising.”
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Sometimes Nobody Cares
“We invested in this whole campaign. We thought it was really valuable and people were going to like it, and share it, and buy the product. Nobody did. Not one person.”
“Some features you think are going to be a killer, and nothing happens. Other times it’s something stupid, and everybody loves it, which is confusing.”
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You Have to Let People Go
“I had to reduce the staff. It was very hard, even though they knew it could happen. I have since felt cautious about getting close to new people I hire. I am afraid of having to do that again.”
“She was really a great fit for the role, with the right personality and the talent, but she just didn’t want to do the work required. She didn’t have the commitment, and I had to let her go.”
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You Run Out of Money
“We were going to be broke in like a month or two. It was either fire everybody right now, or we make a product and sell sell sell. That was a scary time. We kept everybody, but we worked our asses off to do it.”
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You’re On Your Own
“You feel a real let-down when you leave the [StartupYard] program. It feels like there was all this momentum behind you, and now you are flying on your own and you don’t feel so confident all of a sudden.”
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Your Relationships Can Suffer
“She put me on notice. I knew I couldn’t make her happy and do this, and I had to do this, so we took a break, mutually. So many people depend on you, it’s not possible to be everywhere.”
“[My co-founder] and I were friends since we were in high school. I think we will get past this and be friends again. But not right now.”
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You’re Not Always Sure Why You’re Doing it
“It just wasn’t working. It wasn’t happening, and I was just sticking with it ‘to the end.’ I felt very alone.”
“I fear the risk of failing, so I just try to keep things going, but why am I doing this if it’s going to be like this forever? I don’t want that.”
Luck, and getting Getting Past the Brutal Parts
Every founder in our experience has at least one story like this one. Usually they have lots. The only thing that separates the startups that fail from those that succeed, apart from a lot of luck, is sticking through the hard parts. One of the best ways to do this is to build a very strong network of advisors and mentors. That’s something accelerators like StartupYard can help you do.
Are you ready to build the network that will take you to the global market? View StartupYard’s Open Call for Startups:
