Blindspots no more
4 non-obvious lessons from a first-time startup founder
2 years ago this time I switched from being a full-time product manager to a full-time startup founder. Sharing a few non-obvious lessons that I’ve learned:
1. What happens between MVPs
When you start a startup to build a new product (one that doesn’t come with a playbook), depending on your product, chances are the first iteration(s) won’t just stick and scale miraculously.
Zero-to-one products like Spotify, Notion, Weebly, Figma, and many more all took 2–4 years of iteration before product market fit (or before public launch).
Let’s say you ship iteration 1 with some hypothesis, get 100 users, get feedback, learn what works and what doesn’t, and take a few sprints to come up with the next iteration. What happens to your users in this period? Do you invite them to a community? Do you send them email updates? A waitlist? What if it takes a longer to scope and ship the next iteration? What if you’re lost for 3 weeks? Designing new interfaces is half art half science. You can’t always manufacture art and sometimes need a different headspace/timeline to do your best work.
2. Do you have a team that scores extremely high on competence, curiosity, risk taking and tolerance for ambiguity?
It takes a particular type of person to build something people don’t want for 2–4 years but not give up and keep iterating until everyone wants what you’ve built.
There’s more to it than just mere conviction. It is heavily influenced by competence and understanding the problem and solution deeply in first principles and knowing what’s missing at each point in time and having a plan to derisk it.
It also takes a curious person to dive deep into a truly hard problem space and enjoy the unknown, and wake up every day looking forward to turning some unknowns into knowns.
Many people who are extremely competent aren’t necessarily great at consuming a lot of ambiguity and turning it into a backlog or list of hypotheses. They’re conditioned to consume backlogs. It takes some trial and error to tell consumers and creators apart when you’re interviewing people. Keith Rabois has a good analogy for this, “barrels” and “ammunition”.
3. Your geographic location comes with its own set of biases that could make you better or make you mediocre
Read Marc Andreesen’s old blog posts and you’ll instantly realise what a disadvantage it is to consume startup content that’s created in SEA. Southeast Asia is a region that has developed so fast, the culture hasn’t shed its skin to adapt yet.
There are clear patterns in parenting style, governance, media and education systems of different regions that influence the elites’ behaviour and risk taking in the respective regions.
It is not black and white, but my general hunch is that a strong need for survival that comes purely from economic struggles is more likely to lower risk taking, temporarily lower IQ [1] and encourage more conservatist growth.
Whereas a survival need that has conscious or subconscious roots in war, geopolitical or national or ideological competition (whether or not the individual subscribes to care about any of these) seems to lead to massive innovation, self-dependence and increased IQ. The intensity and aggressiveness of founders that I’ve known of who came from US, Middle East, China, Eastern Europe and India has consistently been significantly high. Much less predictable for founders from the rest of the world, although I know amazing founders from everywhere in the world.
That impacts you as a founder because if you’re surrounded by other intense and competent founders who are getting more resourceful every week and take massive calculated risks for their startups, your competence and intensity and resourcefulness grows faster.
If you’re surrounded by people who tell you “you work too hard” or “why don’t you work on something easier?” too frequently, you will eventually build something mediocre that’ll make people around you happy but leave you with “What if”s for the rest of your life.
When you’re conscious about this, you can change it. You don’t have to move necessarily, you can just change the content you consume and the people you interact with.
4. Being a founder can mess up with your mood/hormones unless you actively rewire your lifestyle for being a founder
I grew up playing football competitively, and geeked out on muscle development, recovery, sleep, the psychology of the game and different ways of training (among 99 other things).
Competitive sports show you the height of your feelings. You become happy/sad/angry in a way that most other things in your life may not impact you.
I find running a startup to be comparable to playing a high intensity sport. In fact, the only 2 things in my life that have on a regular basis made me extremely uncertain, happy, sad, frustrated, excited are sports and running a startup.
When you’re constantly on the extreme end of these feelings, it makes you seek extreme forces in the opposite direction to balance yourself. There isn’t enough content available about how fucked up this process can get, but from what I’ve heard and seen, it can get pretty fucked up unless you have pretty well formed guardrails (internally in your mind and externally set by friends, family, community etc.) that keep you in check.
When I was playing sports, I was surrounded by family, coaches, teachers and classmates at school and friends. Right now running a startup I only actively interact with my founder friends. They’re great and I’m grateful for them, but this year and the year before I was absolutely pushed to my limits, in ways that made me realise I should adopt a whole new set of constraints and human interactions in my lifestyle to avoid burnout, while maintaining my friendships.
To be continued. 4 blindspots down, 999 to go.
