Thinking start-up? Stop and consider this.
1) You don’t know scrappy — stop living in a fantasy world. Think you need a website, a fancy logo, a founder’s mission statement, and a buttoned up perfectly perfect product to start selling your great idea? Nope. Get the simplest, easiest form of your product together, take a nicely lit picture and throw it up on Etsy (or Amazon or whatever fits your product’s channel). That’s it. See if ANYONE buys it. Then ask them why they bought it. That’ll do way more for you in determining where to put the money into the website and the product before you sink it in there. That’s scappy. Everything else is idealistic BS. This is the one that I most wish I had internalized and spent less time agonizing over words and more time seeking market realities. No matter — we are now.
2) If you build it, they most certainly won’t magically just come. Oh how naiive and idealistic we were when we started off, mere months ago. “Oh don’t worry, we’ll tap into those cultural associations” or “As soon as friends of friends see what we’re doing…” or “Once the press gets wind of what we’re building”… Yeah. Right. There’s a reason that everyone that has spent more than 2 minutes in the start-up space asks first what your customer acquisition plan is. It’s because it’s frickin hard. And there is no silver bullet. Oh wait, yes there is. A shit-ton of money. Which amounts to a silver bullet that we can’t afford. So like point #1, figure out first, after your initial product but before everything else, how in the heck you’re going to get your first 100 paying customers. Because that’ll determine how you’re going to get your next 1,000 or 10,000.
3) Don’t raise money — you won’t know what it’s for. If this is your first start-up, start with enough money that you can do this early and painful learning on your own dime, which means relatively inexpensively and without a lot of attention. We’ve definitely talked to our fair share of potential investors and learned first hand that just because you can get money, doesn’t mean you should. Having our bank balance hang in a precarious position daily makes us hungrier, scrappier and more creative than if we had taken on early money. And when we do go out to raise money, we’ll be more clear on what it’s for and you’ll know we really, really need it.
4) Don’t do this for some misguided notion of “flexibility”. It still amazes me that anyone thinks I’m doing this for additional flexibility at home. If anything I’ve been a much worse mother, wife, friend and daughter in the past 6 months than the previous 6. Like any other entrepreneur, I’m living and breathing this thing day in and day out. I have to regularly tell friends that I can’t do lunch or go to the pool with the kids because I have to work. Sure in a pinch I can be home for a sick kid or a furniture delivery but it’s just as disruptive to my schedule as yours. So, yes, I’m a total nutcase for doing this at all when I have a 2.5 year old and expecting another in a mere 6 weeks. But I’m a nutcase that is crazy excited about what we’re bringing to market and am therefore obsessed. Pretty much the opposite of laidback and “flexible”.
5) Focus on why you started this — every. single. day. Make a little collage or frame a sentance and put it front and center of where you work. Don’t get distracted and waylaid by all of the voices in your life. I thought that if I talked to a ton of people it would make our idea a better one. In some ways that’s been true, for a small group of people. But in general it’s been a lot of people telling us what we should do or why it won’t work, which has at times caused us to spin and doubt ourselves. It wasn’t until we shut all of the voices out and got down to the hard work of just bringing our vision to life that we not only found the most traction but the right kind of validation.
6) You may not be cut out for this. It seems these days it’s the trendiest thing to be doing — launching a start-up. I mean there’s an HBO series about it for god’s sake. But this is some of the hardest stuff I’ve ever had to do. And for me, I’m loving the humbling mental ass-kicking. But some days I wonder why I signed up for this. I am so glad that I decided to spend some time at Julep so I could better understand if I was cut out for this lifestyle, pace and investment of self. If you can, go work at a start-up that is somewhat in the space you’re thinking about. It’s the single best determinent for whether you want to build a start-up for the right reasons. And you’ll learn like crazy. Plus you might discover that you’re not actually that into this whole scene. Which is totally okay. And you’ll have been able to find out on someone else’s dime.
It truly is remarkable what I can say I’ve learned in a mere 6 months, which of course extends beyond a neat 6 bullet points. In a lot of ways, that’s a big reason for why I’m excited about what the next 6 months holds.
I almost cringe at how naiive we were when we got started. But I’m encouraged by how quick we’ve been able to learn and get better. Which is what I hope for anyone else starting on this crazy journey today. And I look forward to 6 months from now when I’ll be able to look back and cringe at what I think I know today.