Why Startups are Difficult and How to Support Your Startup Friends

For many years, tech startups have been perceived as super glamorous. Successful startups are touted as overnight successes. People supposedly get funding on the hint of an idea and suddenly get super famous. The reality is that most startups fail, and the small number that succeed have many obstacles to overcome.

There are many reasons why startups are difficult, and I’ll scratch the surface here and revisit them in depth in the future.

• Expectations are relentless. You are expected, with almost no reason, to be able to do everything needed to make your business successful. And if you don’t, someone else will.
• Funding can be a crapshoot. A first-round or first investor rarely means that. Unless you have a track record of successful exits or have created a once-in-a-generation product with exponential growth, the expectation is that you have raised capital from friends, family, and angels first and have more to show and more figured out. Most people want to be the last first check so they don’t miss out but have removed most, if not all, risk from the investment.
• Questions on the surface are not what they seem. Simply terms like product market fit and go to market are loaded questions that most founders don’t have a real answer for until they’ve figured it out.
• Investors often favor hype and youth over results and experience. Everyone loves the story of the super young founder, but in reality, most successful startups have older founding teams. Often the teams that cheat or lie get funded and the honest teams do not.
• As soon as you have metrics (users, revenue, etc.), you are now measured on those metrics to see if you are growing and scaling at venture speed.
• For several reasons, many investors will lead you to believe they are interested when they are not. Until their money is in the bank, assume they are not interested.
• You start an idea thinking there’s very little competition. Before your great idea gets funded, you might discover dozens or hundreds of competitors. And that is normal, but you’re expected to differentiate from every obscure competitor, most of whom you haven’t heard about previously.
• It’s nearly impossible today to reach your entire network of friends efficiently. Social media is fragmented and doesn’t show every post to every friend or is ignored. Send too many emails and get labeled as spam. Use a mailing list and watch people unsubscribe. SMS doesn’t scale well. Not everyone is in every Slack or Discord group.
• You often feel alone. Your friends don’t understand the pressure you feel to make things succeed. And after you accept their money, the pressure gets even worse. Some startup founders provide a support network to each other, and that’s a big help.

I could list hundreds of other points (and maybe I will make a Living Spec guide to startups at some point). But for now, if you’re the friend of a founder, how can you support them?

• Try their product. Use it for real. Give specific constructive feedback. What do you like and why? What could improve and how? What is missing? What would it take for you to use the product?
• Keep using the product, even if it’s rough. Keep giving feedback. The idea if that if you can’t convince your friends to use your product, how will you convince customers to use it (unless the product targets a very specific niche that has nothing to do with you, there are exceptions to every rule of course). Don’t start out with “how is this different than X” until you’ve had time to play with it. It’s an exhausting question that startup founders waste a lot of time and energy answering and it doesn’t really matter.
• Become a paying subscriber, whether it’s $10, $20, or $50 per month, invest in your friends (especially if you use the product, but even if you don’t).
• Repost their messages on social media. Share your experiences somewhere with your network. Tell your friends about their product.
• If you are legally allowed to invest in their startup and can afford to lose your investment, become an angel investor.
• Offer to help in any other relevant way, for example offer to test a new feature or edit a blog post.

If you want to help me specifically, here’s how:

• Create a Living Spec account.
• Use the product
• Share feedback with me (maybe within Living Spec, or set up some time to chat)
• Consider subscribing
• Share content from our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube) and blog (and our forthcoming podcast)
• If accredited, reach out to be informed when we are raising capital
• If there are other ways in which you might be able to help, let us know!

I appreciate you sharing this with others. And if you’re a startup founder, feel free to create your own list of course! (And use Living Spec already!)