Startup founder, overcome your 3 big weaknesses

Every startup founder was once wishful, amateurish and focused on the wrong things. Some conquered those weaknesses and became winners.

The three weaknesses often appear together. The sooner you identify them in yourself, the sooner you can fix them. The sooner you fix them, the closer you are to startup success.

Let’s look at the three weaknesses in more detail.

1. Wishfulness

We are all wishful because as founders we must believe in something other people don’t believe in. We must see a wonderful future that will happen once our startup gets to deliver on its promise. It is essential for founders to be visionary. But hope is not a strategy.

When we overstep that characteristic and start hoping for results that are not doable, we are setting us up for failure. We start dreaming of sales growth that will never happen. We start hoping that the product is already good enough. We dream of funding rounds that have no chance of closing. We wish and hope and this clouds our judgment.

The fix is not in reducing one’s visionary powers. The fix lies in inviting scrutiny and calling for the devil’s advocate. For your product roadmap, ask a seasoned founder if they think it’s doable. If you have a sales projection, ask an experienced sales leader what they think. You can even ask a VC. Typically, your projection is overoptimistic in the short term and not optimistic enough in the long term.

Stay visionary and optimistic, because that’s what you are and how you win. Learn to solicit and embrace opposing views. Ask smart people to give you brutally honest feedback. Soon your forecasts and plans will be doable. And when they are doable, they will happen. You will ship a product, grow sales, and close a funding round.

2. Amateurishness

Founders start by knowing next to nothing about building a business. They are incompetent amateurs. They don’t know how high to set the bar because they have never done this before.

Knowing nothing is actually fine. The risk is not that you don’t know what you are doing. The risk is that you fail to learn fast and raise your own bar.

Many new founders seem to think it’s enough to be a good person with a positive mind. They hang out with other amateurish founders and feel they belong to the right club. They think they are onto something. In actuality, they are amateurs who build mediocre products and don’t know how to sell. They settle for less. As a result, they don’t impress job seekers, potential customers, or investors.

Don’t worry, the fix is easy. Learn fast, improve every day, and do better next week. You need a lot of humility and an equal amount of ambition. You need stamina too, because it takes time to become an expert at something. Make it your goal to be better. Every day.

3. Focused on the wrong things

Nothing in this world is the way it looks, and few things are the way people commonly speak about them. If you don’t know this, you will become focused on the wrong things, doing too much of stuff that doesn’t matter.

When I ask a startup what they have achieved, they often say “We got this mention in the media!” That’s not an achievement.

A trickier situation is when the CEO is focused on improving the strategy when they should focus on improving execution. Many startups are focused on making a name for themselves when they should focus on hiring a few capable employees.

There is a lot of non-essential content in pitch decks. When you pitch your company to a VC, ask them which slide(s) they found inconsequential. Remove such slides (unless you know the VC was wrong).

Egos also come in the way. Founders may want flashy offices and cool company merchandise. Those can be useful, but they are not essential. They don’t build the business.

It is not easy to determine at each time what’s essential and what isn’t, but that’s what separates the winners from the losers. To be focused on the essential, you have to go against the grain. What people talk about at large is often a superficial matter. The essential matters are not talked about that much.

As a startup founder, your time is your most precious resource. Every minute you spend on something inconsequential is away from building value. You must truly learn what’s essential and what isn’t.

It is not easy to know. The fix is to apply your own critical thinking and to invite critical thinking from others. To do that, you need confidence to admit you don’t know. You need to be open to input from others. You need smart people around you.

Knowing what’s essential is hard. You will spend your entire life improving your skill at finding the essential in the noise of non-essential stuff. That skill is ephemeral and needs to be trained and kept strong, otherwise it will wane.

In summary, three main weaknesses keep many promising startup founders from succeeding. Instead of giving up on startups and going back to boring corporate employment, confront your weaknesses and fix them. The fix is not that complicated. It just takes determination and stamina. You can do it. And remember, you will never be done fixing your own weaknesses.

You will just be more successful.

Marten Mickos