Teaching an Old Dog

Why the Startup Life is the Best Kind of Challenge

One of the things I love most about the startup life is the constant opportunity to learn new tricks. In my corporate days, it wasn’t that I didn’t have chances to learn, but I was often stuck in a loop, spending over 90% of my time doing things I had already mastered. Let’s face it: when you’re working for a big company, especially at the senior level, they’re paying you to do what you’re good at. The higher up you are, the less time you have to step out of that comfort zone and explore new territories. Managing a department means juggling team leadership with your own responsibilities, and self-initiated learning often gets pushed to the bottom of the list. If I wanted to develop a new skill, it was usually on my own time—and on my own dime.

But in the startup world, you’re forced to adapt and evolve, often daily. With a lean team— at Zonder there's just two of us, plus an intern when we’re lucky—we don’t have the luxury of outsourcing. If something needs to get done, we roll up our sleeves and figure it out, whether or not it’s in our skillset. That theme hit home for me this past week as I dove back into lead generation to boost our sales funnel. I started experimenting with new platforms, eager to explore a fresh approach.

I had already tried three different lead-generation tools, all promising to scrape the internet for email addresses or phone numbers to add to LinkedIn profiles. They were easy enough to trial, but the results were underwhelming. The best of them only managed to find accurate contact details for about 1 in 7 profiles—and those were often outdated emails or landline numbers I could have Googled myself without wasting credits.

A colleague from my startup cohort suggested trying a fourth platform. This one promised not just scraping the internet but also maintaining a large, pre-filled database of LinkedIn contacts. Even better, it offered automated campaign tools. Now we were talking! There was just one problem: I’d never actually built a campaign from scratch.

Now, you might be thinking, “Wait, aren’t you a marketer?” Yes, but I’ve been in the game long enough that when digital marketing came on the scene, it was handled by those I managed—and more recently, by the people who managed the people I managed! So while I know the foundations of a strong campaign and have overseen plenty, I’ve never been the one to code them myself.

The good news? The tech has come a long way since I was one step removed from the process. These days, it’s all no-code. Instead of battling with weird {{}} symbols and cryptic commands, everything is point-and-click with dropdown menus. Simple, right? Well, kind of. It’s simple once you know what you’re doing. The tricky part was getting there.

Setting up my first automated campaign felt a bit like using an iPhone for the first time: sleek, intuitive, and utterly devoid of instructions. I dove into the platform’s library of video tutorials and quickly found myself drowning in options. Instead of sifting through endless titles, I decided to search for help on Google with specific tasks as I encountered them. That was more efficient, but those tutorial videos? They made me feel like I was running in quicksand. The hosts whizzed through steps, moving cursors across the screen faster than I could blink. Rewind. Pause. Toggle back to my campaign. Where’s that button again? Rewind. Pause. Try again.

It took me what felt like an eternity to build that first campaign, but the satisfaction I felt when I finally hit ‘Run’ and headed out for dinner was priceless. I did it! Emails were being sent on autopilot, perfectly timed to avoid spam filters. I was on cloud nine.

Then came the next morning. I logged in, eager to check my progress, only to find the campaign had stalled before reaching the second touchpoint—a LinkedIn connection request. Why? Because the platform couldn’t access my LinkedIn account. Turns out, I had set up the tool on a different browser under a different user profile. After an hour of troubleshooting and Googling workarounds, I threw in the towel and started from scratch.

But here’s the silver lining: rebuilding a campaign once you know what you’re doing is way faster the second time around. Sure, it’s not perfect (I already realized I’ve duplicated at least one contact from a manual outreach earlier this summer), but I’m learning, and I’m making progress. And that, to me, is one of the greatest upsides of the startup life: you’re always growing, always stretching.

This Week's:

Ask: We'd be very grateful for any warm introductions to GP practice leaders (UK only for now).

Lowlight: The campaign glitch that made me feel like a rookie, but hey, it’s part of the process.

Highlight: Beyond mastering new skills, I think the tech curse that plagued me last week has been lifted. I found my fitness ring! No thanks to the GPS that swore it was lost in Barons Court. I discovered it 1.5 miles from there, at home under my dresser, behind a pair of shoes.

Starting something new can feel like an uphill battle, but once you get to the top, the view—and the pride—are worth it. Whether you’re an old dog or not, there’s always room for a few new tricks.

Find out what my cohort colleagues are up to here:

A Founder’s Story – Marjo Palanee , is now focusing the spotlight of her blog on under-represented founders and their startups whilst offering her services in building communities on social media. I highly recommend her workshops!

Air Aware Labs - providing personalized health insights from air pollution data

Kuma Health - transforming immune mediated disorders care through personalized medicine

Deep Roots - Securing additional revenue streams for farms and building resilient supply chains through agroforestry

Ultra BiOmics - improving your metabolic health

Smart Shift Energy - empowering consumers to reduce their home energy costs