How do you handle stress and failure in a Lean Startup?

In a Lean Startup, managing stress and failure is crucial for growth. Embrace a resilient mindset. Picture a tech startup facing a failed product launch (failure). Instead of dwelling, they analyze user feedback, adapt the product, and iterate. They manage stress by focusing on small wins, like positive user responses. This iterative process reduces stress, as failure is seen as a chance to learn and improve. This mindset helps the team navigate uncertainties and drive sustainable growth.

Adopting a growth mindset means treating every experience as a chance to learn and grow! View challenges as exciting opportunities to expand your skills and knowledge.

To be successful in whatever business avenue you are in, you need to continually be able to pivot and grow. You need to reassess your goals and outcomes, as the pace of the world changes. What worked last year, is probably not working for you today. One needs to be willing to constantly learn, ask questions from "those in the know" and get honest feedback. We need to understand that there is no such thing as failing, it's just another opportunity to learn and grow.

The classic Lean Startup methodology is Build, Measure, Learn. And it is the learning that is most important as it will help you iterate quickly through multiple phases of product and business development. People with fixed mindsets tend to fall into rigidity that can be destructive in a startup. For example, they may have a clear vision of what their product will do, and will build that product exactly as they envision it, even if the feedback they are getting from potential users is they want something different. People with growth mindsets understand that they don't have all the answers and so actively seek out opinions that challenge their assumptions. As a result, they are able to build better, more enduring products.

The idea is very simple. To get to your goal you must first have clarity on the goal. Then define the attributes of the person you must become to operate at that level and then take the actions this person would take.

MVPs have been all the rage in startups for many years now, but even they are probably a step further than most founders need to go when first launching a product or startup. In fact, it might be better to validate your idea with a pretotype - something that is as low cost and low code as possible. It may be an email sign up form, or an excel spreadsheet that, in a low tech way, does precisely what you plan your product to ultimately do. By building a pretotype, you avoid getting stuck in sunk cost thinking where you may have started building an MVP and are loathe to throw away that work. Instead, with a pretotype you can iterate quickly at little or no cost at all, and only once you have nailed what users want, start building your MVP.

You need feedback. And you needs lots of it. Prioritizing feedback empowers you to iteratively refine your offering based on real-world responses.

Once you ask the right questions (see above!) you can then come up with the targeted solutions to solve problems before them become blind spots down the road. So often founders create solutions and MVPs for themselves and not for their customers. Even before an MVP you can ask your customer questions that can help you determine the most targeted solution your MVP can solve for. An MVP needs to be basic enough to test but complex enough to learn from. So what problem are you starting with? It’s important you don’t try to solve for everyone and everything at first or you’re solving for nobody and for nothing. Start targeted, test then iterate and continue to build based on these targeted tests.

This has been an invaluable component of my launch strategy. I allowed the marketplace to respond before I went too far down the wrong path. I had created four different services that were easy to share through funnels and was able to get immediate feedback. I ended up scrapping the offering that I thought would get the most interest and now massaging the Mastermind that everyone immediately raved about to their friends. This "market research" would have cost me thousands of dollars and months of time in the old days.

There has to be a product/market fit. You first design the minimum viable product after you tested if there is a market for your product. Reduce assumption and let the market tell you who you need to be.

Work harder on yourself than your business. Often a founder creates a business to solve for a problem they have encountered. It’s the founder’s job to do then do the work on themselves so they don’t get in the way of the product servicing others. In other words, it’s not about you. That’s really hard as a founder as your product is your baby and in some ways an extension of you but in order for it to scale and grow and be a value to society, you have to be an extension of your product. You have to know where you begin and end and where your company begins and ends. Without doing work on yourself, you become blended into the company’s identity. Make sure you have best practices and people in your life who can remind you, who you are.

Managing stress and failure in a startup can be challenging, but it's an important aspect of building resilience and ensuring the long-term success of your venture. Understand that startups often face setbacks and challenges. Set realistic goals and expectations to avoid unnecessary stress from aiming too high too quickly. Recognize that success takes time. Overnight success is rare in the startup world; perseverance and consistency are key. Lastly, use failures as an educational tool to refine your approach.

Embrace mindfulness. Amidst the challenges, practicing mindfulness equips you to navigate stress and setbacks with clarity and poise. Continuously align yourself!

Number one issue is to not take failure personal. Fail faster has to be a core element of your success blueprint. For the simple reason that it tells you what doesn’t work so you eliminate the dead ends.

I have always advised founders that "you are not your business". It is very easy to get emotionally wrapped up in what your business does, to the point where you take every rejection personally whether a customer, an employee or an investor. Worse, you become anxious when you're not sure how to make payroll from one month to the next, or if your funding round is taking longer than you expected. Instead, understand that whilst it is fine to care about your business and to be passionate about it, you must create some separation between it and you. 1. Ensure you have cofounders or advisors. 2. Get coaching or mentoring for your gaps. 3. Find a physical or mental outlet that is 'you time'. 4. Sleep and eat well. Trust me on this!

Before you move the goal post to the next level you want to give yourself a moment of recognition and celebrate that you got here. It is human nature to discount the wins as there is always another, bigger goal. However without gratitude of what you have achieved you are not activating important spiritual principles of success.

Know thyself. Everyone needs a different level of encouragement and/or acknowledgement when it comes to running a business. This is need just like any other need, like exercise or wellness. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely activity and particularly hard on those who need regular positive inputs. If you are feeling discouraged or overwhelmed, think about whether you might benefit from building more celebration into your routine and how you might do that. You might set aside the first five minutes of every meeting to discuss successes and wins. You might host a party once a month with the express purpose of announcing celebrating wins. You might join a group of supportive fellow entrepreneurs and celebrate wins together.

In a lean startup, set clear vision and values, integrate them in actions and operations, celebrate adherence, and regularly reassess for alignment and relevance as you evolve.

Why does it have to be a “lean” startup instead of just a “startup?” Just using this type of terminology turns people off and scares them into thinking if they don’t understand “lean,” they can’t start a business.

startups are hard !really hard. But if you're reading this, you probably already know that? Lean startups? Even tougher. They operate with limited resources, and the margin for error? It's as thin as a knife's edge. Stress and failure are like those uninvited guests who always show up to the party. But we should n't worry. We got this. Let's dissect these problems together and find out how to handle them? To make things clear from the start, stress is not necessarily your enemy. Yeah, you heard me right. In a startup, stress is more like an indicator that tells you, "Hey, buddy, things are getting real here." It points out that you're facing challenges, and man, that's the whole point of a startup! If it were easy, everybody would do it.

I have struggled to make payroll, ran out of cash in one business and am bootstrapping the other. No pundit or talking head (including me) is ever going to be able to tell you how to feel, what to do and how to react. All I can hope to do is to give you some sort of feeling for what it was like for me. I had the benefit of age, I had run businesses for 12 years before launching my own. I had made the mistakes, learned from them and been able to grow in my understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses as a result. The one piece of advice I'd give is to be transparent and open about the challenges you're facing with people. Cofounders, your partner, your investors - whoever. People care, and they will help - if they know you need it.

Timing, If you are too earlier it is hard to survive until your market develops and if too late you can find your blocked by patents and others being too established in the market. But when you get it right it can be amazing.

Stress is definitely part and parcel of being a lean startup. But there is a freedom too, in being small and agile. Relish it while you can. As scale occurs (if and when it does!), the stress certainly doesn't go away - employing people is a big responsibility. So finding ways to enjoy downtime as enthusiastically as possible is important. Work hard, play hard. And don't get too caught up with success or failure. Life goes on!