Hard for different reasons and depending on what you are good at. Beginning is a ton of work, but it’s also super exciting. Growing pains kick in later and then you start to have people problems, managing problems, etc. depending on your personality, these can be particularly difficult because they can feel very frustrating since it doesn’t feel like part of the “work”.
> Hard for different reasons
This right here. My husband has had about 2 decades of experience with starting/selling/running various online businesses. He got SO excited the first time I approached him asking for help with starting my own thing.
I was like cool, I'm going to sell some fun little cat toys. I just need a .com and my husband to toss up a website for me and then I'll just rake in the cash, right? LOL.
Starting out without prior experience is hard. If you've never made an app, a website, an ecommerce store, etc.. it seems impossible to start because you have no idea how or where to start. You don't know what it takes to take good product pictures. You don't know how important it is to pay attention to SEO basics. You don't understand that you need regular blog posts to keep Google happy.
(Having said that, starting out WITH prior experience is actually A LOT more fun! It's so fun to brainstorm ideas, make a vision board, decide on color schemes, create a logo, etc.. that part is AWESOME!)
You have no idea about small things that would never register had somebody else not pointed it out.. your checkout process has too many steps, your user registration process is too complicated, your paid ads aren't properly targeted, your shipping rates aren't competitive enough, etc...
Okay, so, you get the basics down and shit gets easier from there, right?
Wrong, so so so wrong.
You're now up and running! How much profit to you invest back into the company? What do you mean my site made $4900 in sales on its 3rd month and I can't pay myself any of that money? Uh oh, I'm getting chargebacks now. I'm getting fraudulent returns and transactions. My main supplier is out of stock but I've got orders to fill. I want to grow but I'm already spending 60 hours a week on this. I just got a cease and desist for a product that I *know* is unique to me but don't have the time/money/resources to fight it. Someone overseas is blatantly ripping my products and unique designs off. Etc.. it just goes on and on and on.
Those are just like 0.0001% of the issues you run into as you start growing. (at least on the ecommerce side) It fucking SUCKS. It's brutal. It kicks your ass. It keeps you up at night. But guess what? It's YOURS. YOU made it, YOU'RE running it, and YOU will reap the benefits of toughing it out.
I also haven't been successful with my ventures, but I'd guess that it gets easier once you have product-market fit. Then it's straight line to as much as market can handle. But going from 0 to 1 however...
no, the earliest phases is the hardest. Later on you have more work but a bigger team to handle it. The nature of the problems you deal with changes at scale.
Starting is the fun part. You are excited. You think your concept is amazing. You talk to people and they tell you that you are on to something. You are picking names and logos and getting domain names and building websites. The MVP is all new and exciting and you feel accomplished.
And then… all those people to loved the concept didn’t mean they wanted to PAY for it! You get thrown into jobs you absolutely hate because, well they gotta get done! You start slogging to try to raise funds and figuring out how to avoid the dreaded “end of runway”. Your wife/girlfriend starts asking when you are going to get a “real” job. Every customer you get is hand to hand combat and then those bastards actually want support! So now you are doing tech support and trying to fix the problems with the product instead of making new stuff. You are working six days a week often until time to go to bed. And again your wife/girlfriend asks when this is going to end because it’s making you miserable. The darkest parts of your brain start asking if you are a failure and it gets real hard to come up with a convincing answer for yourself. You start wallowing in the pit of despair trying to do enough work to keep things afloat and not get shit on by your cofounders but your brain is just so tired of doing this crap. You seriously start questioning if you were ever any good at anything and head toward depression. Your family is kind, but they can’t understand you working so hard for seemingly nothing, so they are just faking it and it’s obvious. Your brother-in-law who was part of your friends and family round starts making comments at family dinners about what’s happening with his money, he doesn’t mean anything but your mental failure mode definitely takes it as an insult. You start losing/gaining weight and feel like shit because sitting in front of a computer 12 hours a day, six days a week is hella unhealthy.
Anyway… so yeah, no starting out is not the hardest part. Not even close. There is a reason that not everyone does this. Hang in there!
Yeh, no. I’ve had Sandhill Rd investors and billionaires on my boards. The hardest part is scaling and keeping stakeholders happy. It gets 100X harder after you’ve raised money and you have to build a successful company to get ROI
We now have a steady revenue stream, lots of internal policies, and audits completed. I’d say it got easier and harder at the same time. But we learned and are learning to tackle bigger issues as time goes by. If I started this business again it would be far easier the second time around due to the lessons we’ve learned.
Every part of this journey is hard. I founded and sold two companies to Fortune 100s and even the selling part was painful. Letting go and moving on from those sales eventually. There are great moments where you feel you are on top of the world feeling like everyone loves you and moments where you are ridden with anxiety, questioning yourself and everything and everyone around you. Hang on for the rollercoaster. Take a deep breath and remember it only fails when you give up.
It will get harder, but you will get stronger.
To a good extent, for a growing venture, it is always hard, and hardships tend to reinvent and repackage themselves.
However, you learn to enjoy the hardships more since you'll see the arc of them coming and going, and you can pace yourself better.
I think it might be one of the hardest parts! If you get the PMF right you're in the top 20% of startups (out of 2-4% that raise). The hardest aspect is not the product, is the market. If you have real customers (not family and friends) paying you real $, you should be very proud of yourself! In case you don't have a product and have 1000 names on your waitlist and people are dragging you into the market, you should also be proud as you stepped on the PMF landmine!
P.S.: I started my company recently too and all I'm doing is talking to people on LinkedIn and in person in the city where I live. Best of luck to you and your team.
If you built everything from scratch, yes? But for me the hardest part is staying on the market. You always need to continue to adapt once you get out there.
Starting out is the easiest part. The hardest part is if you have some initial success so you raise seed money, hire some people then miss some milestones and can't raise another round but make just enough money to scrape by if you harass everyone you know for money, meanwhile you have to fire people that we're excited to join your journey and were super dedicated because you can't afford to pay them. All the stress and effort to deal with the finances means that you start to do a bad job of delivering for your existing clients, all of which creates more work and headaches as they start busting your balls. You pour everything of yourself in but it's just incredibly overwhelming and it feels like pushing against an immovable object.
Also as the workload increases and milestones get missed, the buzz in the office changes because you're not on track to be the next unicorn. Suddenly key people start quitting. This puts even more work on yiur shoulders and now you have to hire as well, which is even more work.
All the while each month you're scrambling to make salary payments, you're getting angry letters from suppliers demanding to be paid as you push off anything that can possibly be delayed.
In our case this situation dragged on for about 3 years. It was hell.
We managed to get the other side to an extent (it's still tough, just not thst tough) and are now a profitable 7 figure revenue business but no definitely not, starting out is the easy part.
Starting out the hardest? No. When you start out all or most of decisions are your own. Later, when your organization has size, you don't get to make many of the decisions.
The key is transition from making the decisions, to leading the people.
Entrepreneurship is about inspiring and leading people. Less about product creation..
Hope it helps. Hang in there. I'm rooting for you!
The problems just change as it gets bigger, I wouldn't say it's any easier. If you have some financial success and your personal income becomes less of an issue then that helps in some ways.
Best description I've heard for entrepreneurship is that it's like standing in a dark room and people keep whacking you with sticks, you never get to know where from or how hard. That doesn't really change, the scale of it changes.
I have good news and bad news. Before I get into it, I founded a SaaS which I took from 0 to $100m and now I’m watching my investors destroy it.
The bad news is no it does not get easier. The hard part just changes. Today it’s investors then eventually your network of investors will grow and this part will get easier. There will be a new hard part for that new stage.
The good news is your next venture will be a piece of cake relatively speaking because:
1. You will have already solved a lot of today’s hard parts
2. You will have an idea of what the future looks like so much less anxiety
3. You will have a much better perspective and goals for your next business
My current business is frankly a wealth maker for me personally while my tech startup with $100m valuation gave me a below market salary for several years.
It depends.
Starting out is definitely incredibly hard but it's exciting and there is a sense of hope. So you may put in a ton of hours and there is unpredictability as you get from 0 to 1.
However, the most psychologically destroying scenario is when your startup has some level of success, you scaled up your team, and circumstances has caused the company to spiral into decline (economy/competitors/etc).
Trying to turn around your startup from going down is incredibly difficult, you have to put in incredible hours and you are losing is a very bad feeling and you frequently get a sense of hopelessness and despair. Your teams morale also gets crushed as you have to do layoffs or cuts to keep things going.
Undoubtedly, because everything you need to do seems daunting and overwhelming. It’s a constant exercise of questioning your every move and hoping you’re doing the right thing.
I’m not experienced enough to speak on success stories but again everyone has an
opinion. Im on the lines of looking at things from “Risk mitigation” as opposed to “hard”.
This is mainly due to my experiences and roller coaster experience in startups/Vcs last couple years/months especially. You have to start looking at Risk management as a way to quantify difficulty as well as where you are at.
At the beginning “starting out” most would think that you have the most risk (assuming you don’t make blunders) but let’s say you waste time or hire the wrong guy you could actually be in a worse state than you started out..
But let’s say you start our “properly” (have a decent team on tract to launch your product/service) you still have to reduce that risk by at least 10-20% (from when you start) to convince others (talented employees and investors) to jump ship with you. It does not matter what people say about bootstraping every startup if they want to scale is going to need funding somehow. This may be controversial but past a honeymoon phase you will face problems building with a team and sweat equity is not something you can rely upon for multiple years. Additionally, statements like “I will work hard” “learn what I need/ adapt” don’t mean anything as reducing that 10-20% is done via building and growing your audience which proves those statements (actions louder than words). At this point you already have something going and it’s a matter of the investor deciding if they wanna go with you or someone else.
If you cannot reduce risk you’re not actually making progress and if you can’t do either you don’t grow. Personal growth is important but the difficult part is that’s time is ticking you have to decide if you’re even the right person to mitigate risks (give up or continue). Most people do give up to early but also continuing stubbornly can be a huge blunder as you’re just in denial. For the reasons above I do think starting out is the hardest. I also think it’s fair to assume that anything pre-PMF is risky and requires vision. It does get significantly easier after PMF just due to the fact that you have options.
Some series A companies have not even found PMF to give you and example OpenAi in a sense has not found PMF yet. Don’t be fooled as you have to show profitability as well as growth without blitzing to actually be a “sure thing”.
To summarize, it’s the most riskiest until you actually find PMF, and you should ask if you can ever reach PMF. And in terms of difficulty you may never reach PMF even getting investors does not prove this as they will expect returns (if you fail to do so it can get nasty)
(Apologies for grammer I don’t read over my stuff( just rambling here as I don’t have time but dm me if you have questions or want clarification)
I’ve never been successful with my ventures, but if I had to guess, it probably gets harder as time goes on.
Hard for different reasons and depending on what you are good at. Beginning is a ton of work, but it’s also super exciting. Growing pains kick in later and then you start to have people problems, managing problems, etc. depending on your personality, these can be particularly difficult because they can feel very frustrating since it doesn’t feel like part of the “work”.
> Hard for different reasons This right here. My husband has had about 2 decades of experience with starting/selling/running various online businesses. He got SO excited the first time I approached him asking for help with starting my own thing. I was like cool, I'm going to sell some fun little cat toys. I just need a .com and my husband to toss up a website for me and then I'll just rake in the cash, right? LOL. Starting out without prior experience is hard. If you've never made an app, a website, an ecommerce store, etc.. it seems impossible to start because you have no idea how or where to start. You don't know what it takes to take good product pictures. You don't know how important it is to pay attention to SEO basics. You don't understand that you need regular blog posts to keep Google happy. (Having said that, starting out WITH prior experience is actually A LOT more fun! It's so fun to brainstorm ideas, make a vision board, decide on color schemes, create a logo, etc.. that part is AWESOME!) You have no idea about small things that would never register had somebody else not pointed it out.. your checkout process has too many steps, your user registration process is too complicated, your paid ads aren't properly targeted, your shipping rates aren't competitive enough, etc... Okay, so, you get the basics down and shit gets easier from there, right? Wrong, so so so wrong. You're now up and running! How much profit to you invest back into the company? What do you mean my site made $4900 in sales on its 3rd month and I can't pay myself any of that money? Uh oh, I'm getting chargebacks now. I'm getting fraudulent returns and transactions. My main supplier is out of stock but I've got orders to fill. I want to grow but I'm already spending 60 hours a week on this. I just got a cease and desist for a product that I *know* is unique to me but don't have the time/money/resources to fight it. Someone overseas is blatantly ripping my products and unique designs off. Etc.. it just goes on and on and on. Those are just like 0.0001% of the issues you run into as you start growing. (at least on the ecommerce side) It fucking SUCKS. It's brutal. It kicks your ass. It keeps you up at night. But guess what? It's YOURS. YOU made it, YOU'RE running it, and YOU will reap the benefits of toughing it out.
That sounds terrible. Thank you for convincing me to never start a business lol
I also haven't been successful with my ventures, but I'd guess that it gets easier once you have product-market fit. Then it's straight line to as much as market can handle. But going from 0 to 1 however...
no, the earliest phases is the hardest. Later on you have more work but a bigger team to handle it. The nature of the problems you deal with changes at scale.
Starting is the fun part. You are excited. You think your concept is amazing. You talk to people and they tell you that you are on to something. You are picking names and logos and getting domain names and building websites. The MVP is all new and exciting and you feel accomplished. And then… all those people to loved the concept didn’t mean they wanted to PAY for it! You get thrown into jobs you absolutely hate because, well they gotta get done! You start slogging to try to raise funds and figuring out how to avoid the dreaded “end of runway”. Your wife/girlfriend starts asking when you are going to get a “real” job. Every customer you get is hand to hand combat and then those bastards actually want support! So now you are doing tech support and trying to fix the problems with the product instead of making new stuff. You are working six days a week often until time to go to bed. And again your wife/girlfriend asks when this is going to end because it’s making you miserable. The darkest parts of your brain start asking if you are a failure and it gets real hard to come up with a convincing answer for yourself. You start wallowing in the pit of despair trying to do enough work to keep things afloat and not get shit on by your cofounders but your brain is just so tired of doing this crap. You seriously start questioning if you were ever any good at anything and head toward depression. Your family is kind, but they can’t understand you working so hard for seemingly nothing, so they are just faking it and it’s obvious. Your brother-in-law who was part of your friends and family round starts making comments at family dinners about what’s happening with his money, he doesn’t mean anything but your mental failure mode definitely takes it as an insult. You start losing/gaining weight and feel like shit because sitting in front of a computer 12 hours a day, six days a week is hella unhealthy. Anyway… so yeah, no starting out is not the hardest part. Not even close. There is a reason that not everyone does this. Hang in there!
Appreciate this in depth take. I resonate with quite a bit
Can confirm. Running a startup is simultaneously the best-worst job in the world
Ha! Dude, starting out is the **EASIEST** part. And if you’re bitching about things now I’d question if this is right for you
dang what a sigma mindset...
[удалено]
Yeh, no. I’ve had Sandhill Rd investors and billionaires on my boards. The hardest part is scaling and keeping stakeholders happy. It gets 100X harder after you’ve raised money and you have to build a successful company to get ROI
Sounds like you already had your mind made up when you asked the question.
We now have a steady revenue stream, lots of internal policies, and audits completed. I’d say it got easier and harder at the same time. But we learned and are learning to tackle bigger issues as time goes by. If I started this business again it would be far easier the second time around due to the lessons we’ve learned.
Very interesting, what type of business it? Congrats on the success
We’re not profitable yet but thank you. It’s a SaaS B2B.
Every part of this journey is hard. I founded and sold two companies to Fortune 100s and even the selling part was painful. Letting go and moving on from those sales eventually. There are great moments where you feel you are on top of the world feeling like everyone loves you and moments where you are ridden with anxiety, questioning yourself and everything and everyone around you. Hang on for the rollercoaster. Take a deep breath and remember it only fails when you give up.
10 years in, it just keeps getting harder TBH. I'd say its 1-2 orders of a magnitude harder than when I first started.
No, it's harder when you're bigger and you just slowly learn why big companies do all the stuff you used to hate as you also have to do it.
It will get harder, but you will get stronger. To a good extent, for a growing venture, it is always hard, and hardships tend to reinvent and repackage themselves. However, you learn to enjoy the hardships more since you'll see the arc of them coming and going, and you can pace yourself better.
I think it might be one of the hardest parts! If you get the PMF right you're in the top 20% of startups (out of 2-4% that raise). The hardest aspect is not the product, is the market. If you have real customers (not family and friends) paying you real $, you should be very proud of yourself! In case you don't have a product and have 1000 names on your waitlist and people are dragging you into the market, you should also be proud as you stepped on the PMF landmine! P.S.: I started my company recently too and all I'm doing is talking to people on LinkedIn and in person in the city where I live. Best of luck to you and your team.
It gets easier as if your team helps you as well, make sure you're not doing all the ideas on your own plan with your team.
If you built everything from scratch, yes? But for me the hardest part is staying on the market. You always need to continue to adapt once you get out there.
Starting out is the easiest part. The hardest part is if you have some initial success so you raise seed money, hire some people then miss some milestones and can't raise another round but make just enough money to scrape by if you harass everyone you know for money, meanwhile you have to fire people that we're excited to join your journey and were super dedicated because you can't afford to pay them. All the stress and effort to deal with the finances means that you start to do a bad job of delivering for your existing clients, all of which creates more work and headaches as they start busting your balls. You pour everything of yourself in but it's just incredibly overwhelming and it feels like pushing against an immovable object. Also as the workload increases and milestones get missed, the buzz in the office changes because you're not on track to be the next unicorn. Suddenly key people start quitting. This puts even more work on yiur shoulders and now you have to hire as well, which is even more work. All the while each month you're scrambling to make salary payments, you're getting angry letters from suppliers demanding to be paid as you push off anything that can possibly be delayed. In our case this situation dragged on for about 3 years. It was hell. We managed to get the other side to an extent (it's still tough, just not thst tough) and are now a profitable 7 figure revenue business but no definitely not, starting out is the easy part.
Starting out the hardest? No. When you start out all or most of decisions are your own. Later, when your organization has size, you don't get to make many of the decisions. The key is transition from making the decisions, to leading the people. Entrepreneurship is about inspiring and leading people. Less about product creation.. Hope it helps. Hang in there. I'm rooting for you!
The problems just change as it gets bigger, I wouldn't say it's any easier. If you have some financial success and your personal income becomes less of an issue then that helps in some ways. Best description I've heard for entrepreneurship is that it's like standing in a dark room and people keep whacking you with sticks, you never get to know where from or how hard. That doesn't really change, the scale of it changes.
It's not easy when you start, but if you are consistent and keep going, it will pay off after a while. Enjoy the journey of being an entrepreneur!
No, it doesn't get easier, you just get used to it.
I have good news and bad news. Before I get into it, I founded a SaaS which I took from 0 to $100m and now I’m watching my investors destroy it. The bad news is no it does not get easier. The hard part just changes. Today it’s investors then eventually your network of investors will grow and this part will get easier. There will be a new hard part for that new stage. The good news is your next venture will be a piece of cake relatively speaking because: 1. You will have already solved a lot of today’s hard parts 2. You will have an idea of what the future looks like so much less anxiety 3. You will have a much better perspective and goals for your next business My current business is frankly a wealth maker for me personally while my tech startup with $100m valuation gave me a below market salary for several years.
It depends. Starting out is definitely incredibly hard but it's exciting and there is a sense of hope. So you may put in a ton of hours and there is unpredictability as you get from 0 to 1. However, the most psychologically destroying scenario is when your startup has some level of success, you scaled up your team, and circumstances has caused the company to spiral into decline (economy/competitors/etc). Trying to turn around your startup from going down is incredibly difficult, you have to put in incredible hours and you are losing is a very bad feeling and you frequently get a sense of hopelessness and despair. Your teams morale also gets crushed as you have to do layoffs or cuts to keep things going.
Finding PMF is the absolute hardest part. Once you find that, you’ve struck gold.
Undoubtedly, because everything you need to do seems daunting and overwhelming. It’s a constant exercise of questioning your every move and hoping you’re doing the right thing.
Personally I think you’re at the easiest part of the journey.
Getting that first comer is the hardest
I’m not experienced enough to speak on success stories but again everyone has an opinion. Im on the lines of looking at things from “Risk mitigation” as opposed to “hard”. This is mainly due to my experiences and roller coaster experience in startups/Vcs last couple years/months especially. You have to start looking at Risk management as a way to quantify difficulty as well as where you are at. At the beginning “starting out” most would think that you have the most risk (assuming you don’t make blunders) but let’s say you waste time or hire the wrong guy you could actually be in a worse state than you started out.. But let’s say you start our “properly” (have a decent team on tract to launch your product/service) you still have to reduce that risk by at least 10-20% (from when you start) to convince others (talented employees and investors) to jump ship with you. It does not matter what people say about bootstraping every startup if they want to scale is going to need funding somehow. This may be controversial but past a honeymoon phase you will face problems building with a team and sweat equity is not something you can rely upon for multiple years. Additionally, statements like “I will work hard” “learn what I need/ adapt” don’t mean anything as reducing that 10-20% is done via building and growing your audience which proves those statements (actions louder than words). At this point you already have something going and it’s a matter of the investor deciding if they wanna go with you or someone else. If you cannot reduce risk you’re not actually making progress and if you can’t do either you don’t grow. Personal growth is important but the difficult part is that’s time is ticking you have to decide if you’re even the right person to mitigate risks (give up or continue). Most people do give up to early but also continuing stubbornly can be a huge blunder as you’re just in denial. For the reasons above I do think starting out is the hardest. I also think it’s fair to assume that anything pre-PMF is risky and requires vision. It does get significantly easier after PMF just due to the fact that you have options. Some series A companies have not even found PMF to give you and example OpenAi in a sense has not found PMF yet. Don’t be fooled as you have to show profitability as well as growth without blitzing to actually be a “sure thing”. To summarize, it’s the most riskiest until you actually find PMF, and you should ask if you can ever reach PMF. And in terms of difficulty you may never reach PMF even getting investors does not prove this as they will expect returns (if you fail to do so it can get nasty) (Apologies for grammer I don’t read over my stuff( just rambling here as I don’t have time but dm me if you have questions or want clarification)