Startups: Plowing, Building, and Fatal Assumptions
The price of entry
On your startup journey, you’ll encounter many people who say they want to go on the journey with you. But many of these people are pretenders. They don’t actually want to pay the price of entry. They just want to experience the fun parts of startup life without any of the pain or risk.
But the price of entry is the risk you are willing to take on to help achieve the impossible—to create something that otherwise wouldn’t exist. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It isn’t for everyone.
When we started Pushpay, I spoke with thousands of people about what we were building, and I invited them to join us on some level, whether that was a financial investment or joining the company as an employee. But most of these people, though excited about the opportunity, couldn’t bring themselves to part with something valuable or to leave something known for something unknown.
I was reading the story about Elisha recently in the Bible. He was called to leave what he had to follow Elijah. Interesting that someone who already had something good was willing to sacrifice what he had to follow the call. But sometimes we are actually called to give up the good things we have and step into the unknown. We know it when the opportunity arises.
There are also those who simply thrive on risk and ambiguity. They love diving into the unknown and figuring it out. My recommendation is to seek out those who do well with risk or those who believe they are called to the work. It’s much easier for people to take on risk when they believe it is their purpose to do so—when they can’t imagine themselves doing anything else.
Plowing and building
Interestingly when Elijah found Elisha, he was in the field plowing.
Plowing is such incredibly hard work. So is building. But the concepts of plowing and building have something in common: they don’t happen overnight. Whether you’re plowing a field or laying a foundation, one thing's for certain: you’re going to be very tired at the end of each day. And you’ll have nothing impressive to show anyone for quite some time.
But the early, foundational work is critical to later success. You must plant the seeds to eventually see the harvest.
Plowing a field is like…
Content marketing work that might not pay off in search engines for months.
Hundreds of prospecting calls to people who may not purchase for years.
UX work that won’t actually be built into the product for another three quarters.
A top-notch billing system designed to scale for lots of happy customers.
And more.
And just like building a house requires laying one brick at a time on top of a great foundation, great companies are built on one good decision after another good decision after another good decision. There’s no other way.
It’s easy to look at a finished house and forget that each and every brick was painstakingly placed and stuck in place with mortar one brick at a time. When we step back, we just see a completed building. But when you see a brick house being built, you notice that it takes a very, very long time.
Beware fatal assumptions
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, every startup is different. It doesn’t matter how many companies you’ve helped launch, each needs to be approached with a fresh perspective and new eyes. Assuming you know what to do can actually be a fatal assumption.
For example, as you start to build your organization, it’s possible you may not get the results you expected. It’s pretty easy to analyze why: you didn’t put the bricks together the right way. And that means you may need to undo some of your work and rebuild it the right way. The structural integrity of your organization is counting on you testing and measuring at every step along the way to make sure you’re on the right track.
In conclusion, if successful businesses are built one brick at a time, that means that anyone can achieve it if they are willing to pay the price of doing the hard work of plowing. Maybe as you start to see your house take shape, what's really risky is staying with the status quo. Because if you can glimpse really hard, you can see what the finished building will look like even though we only have a few bricks placed right now.
→ Your turn. Have you ever made a fatal assumption? What did you learn in that moment?