What is priceless to Entrepreneurs
Reflecting on my journey as Employee#2 in an early-stage startup, I recently realised that I have come to value certain attributes in every professional interaction. These are counter-intuitive lessons because they are in direct contradiction to feel-good actions. Like many things in life, painful decisions are the ones that have the best long-term effects. This a quick post describing what I value the most.
Say No
I am going to sound a little strange when I say that I was happy to see an email turning down a meeting that I had requested. It was an important meeting from the perspective of why I scheduled it. It was a meeting to get feedback and advice on some of the areas I have been struggling with as a core member of an early-stage startup.
I was happy because the investor in question was polite enough to take 10 seconds to reply to my email. In doing so he saved me countless hours speculating if he read my email if it went to spam, should I connect with him on LinkedIn, etc. etc.
Being the second employee and a core member of the team at a startup means you end up doing a lot of things that you haven’t done before. For me it is sales. When I talk to a potential customer and they give me good feedback, I have to assume they mean it. But a lot of times they do it because they don’t want to hurt my feelings. Turns out, I can afford hard feelings.
Sales is hard and people are tricky. Nobody wants to be the one that tells you the product won’t work for them so they entice you in this intricate web of processes and passing the buck for months till you finally give up. This is draining for the startup as it is slowly bleeding its way to death.
On the other hand, if a customer told me that the product wouldn’t work for them despite my attempts at convincing them, I know the door is closed.
I can choose to be persistent, I can choose to get offended or hurt but that’s on me, not on them.
If the customer tells me its a great product, asks for follow up actions and then stops responding — That’s just painful.
Give Feedback
There is so much advice & research on the web today for startups.
- 10 reasons why startups fail
- 10 things successful startups have in common
- 1 mistake to avoid when starting up etc.
In the end, everything will allude to product-market fit, team chemistry, inability to pivot & time to market. We entrepreneurs already know these things but what we don’t know is how to spot the signs. No matter how many relationship blogs people read, they still commit the same mistakes that drive them towards divorces. Generic advice and guidelines don’t help beyond a point. Do every entrepreneur a favour: Give them feedback. Feedback means being objective by saying:
- I would choose your competitor’s product because it has the following features.
- Your product is very flexible and customisable but that is not what I am looking for, I need something more “Plug & play”
- This product only solves a part of my challenges, my other unsolved challenges in the following category will require another solution so I can’t go forward with your product.
- This is simply not that big a pain point and I wouldn’t spend money on solving it.
- Come back to me with X,Y,Z and we will consider you.
Notice that in all the above examples, the startup has a concrete next step and/or a clear metric.
- Doesn’t measure up to competition / inadequate product features
- Too much flexibility, the customer/market wants something that can work without configurations.
- The product needs to plug into an ecosystem and has to be offered with other products. This may mean building integration channels and partnerships.
- There is no product-market fit.
- There are unmet needs.
If you had a chance to save somebody’s life by spending 15–20 minutes, wouldn’t you take it? That’s what you do when you give feedback.
Entrepreneurs risk their money, time and families trying to go after an idea. When multiple people choose to be nice and not giving feedback, the entrepreneur goes broke, goes through a divorce, loses his/her home & possessions just trying to cling to something which doesn’t work but nobody is willing to tell them.
Follow-up on promises
The most precious thing to entrepreneurs is the network. The network ultimately determines whom they meet, whom they demo to, who will invest money in their company etc. Often we meet friends and family who offer encouraging words about our venture and also offer to connect us with people who could help us build our business, potential customers or even mentors. This is great but most often people don’t follow through with the action. The connection never happens, the mail is never sent, the call never made. Soon the friend stops picking your calls or stops responding to your messages. I am not saying that you should drop your work and help me out but if you made a commitment, make good on it or be frank and say that you just couldn’t make it work.
The entrepreneur won’t know when to stop reminding you because he/she doesn’t know if you genuinely need reminding or you are just stalling because it’s unimportant. Don’t keep us hanging.
Say NO as a team
Being a startup CEO is hard. Being the first level team is also very hard. The one thing that can make all this worth it — outcomes. CEOs spend their lives thinking up new ways to run the company, find more avenues for revenue, pleasing investors, etc. They are strong and opinionated but the first level team needs to keep it real. They need to say no when appropriate. You have only so much energy & resources, saying yes to the CEO just to please him/her or to get him/her to shut up for now sucks. It’s a bad strategy & should not be adopted.
If I had a dollar for every time someone told me their CEO was coming up with bad ideas and nobody in the room spoke up — I’d have a lot of money. It’s not about opposing ideas, it about making sure you don’t fall into every rabbit-hole in your path. Being in a startup is like solving a maze, there is usually one right way and you won’t know which one. Trying too many things means time runs out. Staying too long on the wrong path means, time runs out. And you usually don’t know if you are on the right track.
Say No when you have to. Do it and be open to changing your point of view when a good argument is presented.
Every single time you keep quiet can be a few months working on the wrong priorities. That time will never come back. Don’t shy away from saying any of these:
“We are NOT going to be able to deliver the committed scope.”
“I think we should tell the customer that this won’t make it in the release”
“Do we explicitly have to commit something we know is not going to get built?”
“We are better off not building something we know this little about”
Depending on the situation, all of these are very difficult statements that everybody knows but no one wants to acknowledge. A lot of times not doing things is the right thing to do.
Bring in Focus & Clarity
If you are an investor or a potential investor in a startup and you see the team lacking focus — just say it. The investor meetings that I remember vividly are the ones where they gave us clear feedback about focus & go to market difficulties. Again, if you are an investor you don’t have to be like Simon in a talent show but it helps if you can give concrete feedback. I am sure investors come across a lot of deluded & obstinate founders as well but like I said earlier, you give the feedback and don’t worry about how they react.
- I feel like you need to go back and rework your go to market strategy because X,Y,Z.
- We want you to achieve this milestone with the funds you have now and we will be happy to consider you in the future.
- Come back to me when you have accomplished this.
Again, these are actionable. Sometimes it helps to plan for scale later but give it a thought now. Most of us make the mistake of planning for scale too early and then the main problem goes out of focus. I talk a little bit about that here. Good feedback from an investor usually translates to action not just presentation changes.
Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Please take a few seconds to say “No” to somebody instead of stalling ;)
