Worrying about the wrong things Sep 21 2010
12 comments Latest by EH
Starting a new company is full of chaos and uncertainty. There are plenty of very reasonable things to worry about, like, will we make any money? Do we have the right product? How do we find any customers? But these are often not the things starters choose to worry about.
Instead, they worry about things they should be so lucky to encounter. Will my software platform scale if I get 10,000 customers per day? Do we have the right strategic plan for the next three years? What should our stock option plan look like so it’ll cope with 100+ people?
To make something of yourself, you can only worry about so much. There’s a certain set of worry slots available and if you fill them with all these possibly-maybe concerns, there won’t be any left for things that’ll matter tomorrow.
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12 comments so far
Justin Jackson 21 Sep 10
True; I can definitely identify with having a limited number of “worry slots.”
Danijel Šivinjski 21 Sep 10
So true. Short but interesting post David!
David Andersen 21 Sep 10
Superb advice. A great reminder as I tend to try to get everything perfectly lined up before moving forward, which is dumb.
Carlos Lorenz 21 Sep 10
That’s for sure. I totally agree with you David
Jason M. Klug 21 Sep 10
I think this has to do a lot with survivorship bias; the stories we hear most loudly on the web are from businesses with the loudest voices and the biggest reach (i.e. the ones for whom scaling has become an issue).
No one hears from the Mr. Small Business, who was all set for scaling but whose idea / execution failed to take root in the first place.
Chris Dunn 21 Sep 10
Great post. Startups (especially w/ technical founders) worry about the technical to avoid worrying about the sales and marketing. A mental decoy with the attitude, if we have good product the customers will follow. Stepping outside your comfort zone is when you enable yourself to create something truly great.
I know I’ve had to refocus my “worries” more than once.
ryu ramirez 22 Sep 10
What if you worry about all the correct things and appropriately fill your worry slots only to find this was the wrong question to try and answer (what should I worry about now)?
And a more appropriate question to ask is,”If I am worried about it should I even start this thing at all?”
The best starters are the ones answering the “worry questions” with a smile/ arrogant smirk on their face, not a look of concern.
If I am starting a shop to build bikes and I’m passionate and pretty damn good at it, i won’t be worried about how I’m going to get customers. I’m going to have this uncontrollable urge to hit the pavement and show people my great bike.
I won’t be worried if my bike is the right product, I’ll back up my work with the same passion I used to create it.
Maybe not a question of what worries I should fill my worry slots with, but how can I start a business that won’t be worrisome. One that can be an extension of my passion, that’s when the worries melt away and you have a smile on your face.
James 22 Sep 10
Agree with Jason here, the worry for me personally is always whether the idea will work/be understood/be needed.
Gregor McKelvie 22 Sep 10
Not sure I agree. In reality, how can a start-up with no customers, no software and no income worry about a 3 year strategic plan?
As for scaling – if you get bright people on board surely part of the platform selection / build will be driven by how much you want to scale.
As a founder or co-founder you need to focus on making a profit whether you’re boot-strapped or VC funded. If there was only one “worry slot”, then it would be filled with worrying about profit. So you should always remain focused on this.
Deltaplan 22 Sep 10
I think it really depends on the project you’re on. If your product is a free iPhone game with revenue solely generated by ads, you should really worry if anything will go smoothly with 10000+ daily users, because that’s the minimum needed to earn even only a few bucks.
But if you’re in a business where you can generate enough revenue with a few customers only, then you’re right, you’ve got better things on which to worry.
My biggest personal failure was not to worry enough about how my team will be able to respond to growth in demand from our recurrent customers. We quickly found a few customers, they were very happy with what we did for them, then they all kept asking for more, and we were more than happy with that… Only to realize that doing more for each customer would mean that the projects would be completed slower, since we would have to split our work into much more projects, and that wasn’t something our customers were ready to accept, each of them expected us to work 100% of our time for them only… And as you know, when dealing with overdue projects, you can’t finish them any quicker by hiring new employees, it only makes it even worse…
Martin Edic 22 Sep 10
One approach is let someone else worry about scaling- like publishing a line of eBooks on Amazon or Apple iBooks. You still have create great books with the reader/consumer in mind but scaling is not an issue. Amazon can scale.
EH 26 Sep 10
No one hears from the Mr. Small Business, who was all set for scaling but whose idea / execution failed to take root in the first place.
Sure we do, they’re all over the place. They’re every failed startup who thought they had to give Rackspace $20K/month because the C-levels would lose face with their peers and prospective investors if they couldn’t say they had “a hundred servers.”
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