What Sustains Your Startup in Tough Times?
Tough times happen in startups. Every aspect of doing business is a potential problem: lack of leads, lack of a good product, lack of market awareness, employee in-fighting, platform risk, deals gone sour, legal problems, regulatory problems, problems at home creating problems at work, the ultimate empty bank account, and many others.
We’ve experienced several different categories of these tough times. As I have reflected on those tough times, I realize now that we had a few go-to truths that sustained us in the tough times. For us, those truths have been:
- Our products are great, delivering wonderful results to our customers
- Our products are hard for our competitors to replicate and are protected
- Our addressable market is growing rapidly
- Our team is awesome and producing enormous output per employee
With those truths in place, it has always been worth it to us to persevere in the face of adversity. Without those truths in place, we would have likely not survived the toughest challenges we have faced.
Before we had products, the thing that sustained us was the quality of the founders. We have always respected and admired each other’s talents, capabilities, and hard work.
Note that I did not include things like willingness to sacrifice (e.g. live on the cheap) or disposition to remain optimistic when the crystal ball is murky. Those are important ingredients, but not directly responsible for producing hope. Without substantive hope-generating truths, willingness to sacrifice and optimism can keep loser startups alive, when they would be better off dead.
Having a clear picture of your startup’s hope-generating truths is super valuable and something to share with employees on a regular basis.
What things sustain your startup in tough times?