Growing your business in a pandemic: Advice from this year’s Top Startups founders

Dutchie had a leg up on most companies when the pandemic outbreak began in earnest in the United States in March. 

While the cannabis delivery startup is headquartered in Bend, Ore., half of its employees are scattered around the country and already worked remotely. Its Bend employees are also home now, but the company had processes in place to manage remote talent and successfully maintain productivity and engagement, a feat firms of all sizes have spent the past months grappling with. 

Running your own company is strenuous and challenging in the best of circumstances. In the midst of a pandemic that doesn’t have an end in sight, it can feel herculean. But areas of opportunity are emerging as e-commerce continues to flourish, telemedicine and at-home workouts become vogue and software is cemented as business critical as many workers continue to stay home. 

To seize the moment, however, startups need to learn not just the ins and outs of running a successful business, but also how to manage in an unprecedented global crisis.

Dutchie, for example, which ranks No. 12 on LinkedIn’s Top Startups list, learned that it’s important for colleagues to connect on a personal level, especially now that everyone’s remote. 

Even before the pandemic, the company had virtual trivia night every other week for all of its 100 employees—and it has maintained that tradition in quarantine. Employees are also emboldened to highlight their achievements outside of work, whether that be running a marathon or getting married.

“There is a huge overlooked correlation between outside-of-work achievements and a willingness to work together,” said CEO Ross Lipson. “The more you learn and the more you feel connected with them outside of work, the better engaged you’ll be.”

We reached out to founders from LinkedIn’s annual Top Startups list — the 50 young, resilient companies where America wants to work now — for advice on everything from knowing when it's time to move on to another idea to the value of office culture. Whether you’re a restaurant or bar owner or launching a startup, there are nuggets of encouragement and recommendations for you.

You don't need to solve every problem — just one big one

Manny Medina doesn’t think of himself as an entrepreneur. 

“I consider myself a guy who had one good idea and chased that to where it is now,” he said. 

Yet the skill comes in knowing how to refine that idea into something with staying power.

Medina’s one good idea, for instance, was initially an entirely different product. His company Outreach, a sales engagement platform that ranks No. 6 on LinkedIn’s Top Startups list, started by focusing on recruiters but Medina and his three co-founders recognized after a couple of years that that wasn’t the right approach. 

“When you don’t know what to build and are trying to develop some kind of spark, that’s when you know you’re in the wrong business,” he said. “When clients tell me they can’t do their jobs and you work all night to fix the screw ups, you know you have a product market fit.”

The team realized that engagement was the problem they needed to solve and that has stayed at the core of its sales engagement products and services ever since. Outreach now has $289 million in funding and more than 500 employees.

For Rachel Katzman, finding product market fit for her online fitness company P.volve, holding strong at No. 38, meant getting a viable product into the marketplace and iterating from there based upon customer feedback. As a founder, she says it’s easy to get caught up in the small details but it’s critical to let them go and let the consumer tell you what’s important to them.

Be ready to pivot

In January, when the world was just beginning to confront the magnitude of the novel coronavirus outbreak, Isaac Turner and his two co-founders launched Curative, which ranks No. 17, with the goal of creating a sepsis diagnostic test. Two things quickly became apparent: Hospitals would not be inclined to give the company access to ICU patients. And the coronavirus infection rate was going to dramatically increase.

“If you track exponential function, small increases in the beginning tell you horrific things about what will happen in a few months. But it’s incredibly hard to grasp,” Turner said. 

Not only did Turner see the writing on the wall, Curative also had the connections and skills already in-house to develop a coronavirus test.

The startup’s founders met while working on a diagnostic tool for sexually transmitted diseases and had a network of contacts in the community that they could tap to transition the company to focus on creating a mouth-swab coronavirus test that has since been given emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.

The lesson, Turner says, is to maintain good terms with everyone you work with and create a network in your field who can both help you transition to a new product and give you advice along the way. 

At No. 9 on LinkedIn’s Top Startups list, Loom’s pivot was not quite as drastic as Curative’s. The workplace-centric video messaging platform began in 2015 as a marketplace to connect product experts with companies that needed feedback on everything from design to code. Early-stage startups were interested in the service, but Loom had bigger clientele in mind.

“Knowing we wanted to serve larger companies, we asked what they needed and felt like they were missing. We heard consistently that they wanted to learn from real-time users,” said CEO Joe Thomas.

It was clear they needed to shift the product, so within a few months in mid 2016, they turned toward the video recording tool Loom is known for today and focusing on what people were willing to pay for.

Medina of Outreach similarly recommends concentrating on the impact of a solution to one small problem and what revenue it will incur. Instead of going after the big problem right from the get-go, take incremental steps, innovating and increasing your prices along the way. 

Don’t underestimate the value of culture

Culture, mission and values get a lot of air time when entrepreneurship is the topic of discussion. It may sound like fluff, and perhaps less crucial to the business than the product or the team you’re building, but every single founder interviewed for this story emphasized its importance. 

Throughout skincare company Tula’s transition to remote working, the mission and the culture CEO Roshini Raj cultivated at its founding has been instrumental to keeping employees engaged and keeping up with the influx in orders.

For Raj, that means making sure a person is a culture fit and that they share the same values and mission of maintaining a healthy balance and being confident in one's own skin before hiring them at Tula, which comes in at No. 30.

“We work so hard together that it’s very important that there is a personal fit,” she said. “If the hiring is done well, it’s a seamless integration.”

Build a team with talents you lack

Family-run businesses often call to mind stories like Succession, the HBO series about intrigue, backstabbing, family politicking and long-held grudges playing out in the boardroom. Sometimes, that’s exactly what happens. Other times, you find a partner whose skills offset your own and build a $53 million company in just three years. 

As luck would have it, that’s how life has played out for Dutchie, the cannabis company. Its founder, Ross Lipson, started it with his brother Zach. 

Like the makings of any good family business saga, the brothers grew up with a father who ran his own firm and instilled in them an entrepreneurial spirit, encouraging their ventures and connecting them with those in the professional world who could help make the idea a reality.

So when Ross came up with the idea for Dutchie while standing in line to buy marijuana, the first person he called was Zach to talk him out of it. Ross describes himself as the “go fast, wilder thinker” who counts on his brother to bring him back to reality. Far from discouraging the endeavor, Zach agreed to help him build the platform and uproot his life to move to Bend from the East Coast. 

It turned out to be the perfect pairing, marrying Ross’ acumen for scaling a business with Zach’s product design know-how.

The trick to making it work is define the roles and swim lane of each partner and do not deviate from them, Ross said. 

“Sit down before it starts and map out the strength and weakness of each other and make sure they don’t overlap in the business,” he said. “You want to create a blue team and red team in all your decisions.”