Learnings from 1 Year of Being an Entrepreneur.

12 min readDec 23, 2021

Holiday Blog Series — #4

Introduction.

This isn’t a data-driven analysis of how to be successful as an entrepreneur or the 5 things to do to crush your sales numbers. It’s a reflection of what I learned, appreciated, and deem important after having worked intensively with two wonderful people on a tech startup for a year now.

I hope that this will inspire thoughts and emotions in you and that’ it’ll help you understand if entrepreneurship is for you, what to consider when going into, and what it’s really like.

#1 Your Co-Founders Are Everything

I’d never advise anyone to start a company all by themselves. It’s neither fun nor feasible.

The benefits of having co-founders are endless:

You’ll Match Skills: While I can focus on our brand, Krzysiek builds the product, and Sebastian builds our machine learning algorithms. I couldn’t master all of this. As Sebastian says, “individually we’re ambitious, together we multiply.”
You’ll Balance Each Other’s Flaws Out: We all make mistakes, we’re all bad at something, we all have our knowledge gaps. But, together with your co-founders you’ll reduce the total number of flaws.
You Empower Yourselves: When you’re down, you’ll have your co-founders to lift you up again.
You’ll Share Successes: In German, we say, shared happiness is twice the happiness. Celebrating a closed investment or a customer is so much more enjoyable than doing it by yourself.
You Jump In For Each Other: Face it, you’ll get sick, life will happen. It’ll be so much easier with a few good friends around who can help out.

#2 Effective and Immediate Honesty Is Crucial.

Speak up! Don’t hold your opinion or your thoughts, or even worse, the things that truly bug you back. It’s gonna lead you into a stage of dissatisfaction and your co-founders will be left out of your valid thoughts and feelings.

Every co-founder should be valued and listened and every co-founder should feel like they can speak and that they must speak openly.

The two major risks of not doing so are:

You’ll Avoid Making Important Decisions: If you don’t speak up and keep things to yourself, chances are that your co-founders won’t notice something or will avoid something that might be truly important. So, don’t do it. Speak up.
You’ll Build Up Harmful Tensions: If you can’t speak your mind for too long, you’ll get frustrated. You’ll end up making assumptions in your head of what others think of your ideas and thoughts. It’s unhealthy.
You’ll Lose Your Motivation: If you don’t speak up for yourself, nobody will speak up for you. And, others will continue speaking for themselves. So, slowly but steadily you’ll lose connection to your own company, which will ultimately demotivate you. And, this is dangerous for a company that relies on your work!

If you can’t speak up with your co-founders, something’s wrong. Change it!

#3 There’ll Be Conflict! You’ll Need It.

I’m a strong believer that great decisions are the result of the deliberation of different experiences and mindsets. And, deliberations can cause conflict.

But even beyond this, you’ll spend day and night with your co-founders; this will inevitably lead to conflict. At some point, their laugh will bug you, the way they speak for hours on end will make you impatient, the stupid garlic bread they eat will drive you nuts.

Sometimes, you’ll be pissed and you’ll need a channel to let it out. And, if you aren’t careful, which you can’t be all the time your co-founders will become the outlet. Although, they don’t deserve it.

So, no matter if it’s due to moments where you feel low or when important decisions are at hand, you’ll have conflict. So, rather than trying to avoid it at all cost, make sure you use it effectively and that you get out of it without anyone’s feelings being hurt.

#4 Commit. Focus. Do.

I highly recommend you watch the video above because Michael Seibel is right that the most successful entrepreneurs are those who continuously execute.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to get out of state called “motion” and get into one called “action.”

The easiest way to explain motion is to think of New Year’s Resolutions. Motion is the state where something is new and exciting. You make plans, you set yourself up for doing something.

Action is when you actually do it. It’s when you sit down — or get up (whatever it takes) — and do things. You planned your marketing strategy, now you do the hard work. You decided what features your product needs, now you develop them. You figured out which investors to approach, now you prepare the materials and call them.

When you start a company, you’ll need to do things. If you’re in for the outcomes but not for the journey, you won’t enjoy it. And if you won’t enjoy it your motivation will fall flat. And, that’s one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a startup. Lack of motivation can be the end to your entrepreneurial endeavors.

#5 Your Product or Service Will Change. Don’t Get too Attached to Your Idea.

You have this great idea. It’s truly brilliant and you start working on it. You continue developing it. People love it. They tell you, they love the potential. You get excited. You continue developing it, and all of a sudden your 6 months in but you don’t have a viable product that can go to market. There’s just no market fit.

Your idea might be amazing but there might still be no market for it. Either it doesn’t solve big enough of a problem, or it’s too expensive to develop, or it takes too much time. Or, whatever it is.

Go for your idea, start developing it but do it in a user-centric way:

Decide on an idea.
Make an assumption what problem for what personas it might solve.
Do persona interviews to verify assumptions.
Develop a prototype. (Only the crucial things in a well-defined short timeframe)
Test the prototype with users.
Iterate.

Don’t think the idea in your head is worth anything. Collect data to verify it is. And, if you learn it’s not, iterate. Otherwise, you’ll set yourself up for failure, waste of time, and disappointment.

#6 You’ll Have Your Doubts. It’s Your Responsibility to Get Over Them.

I think it was Michael Seibel of YCombiantor who said that every startup needs an evangelist who runs around and tells everybody about their great idea. If you don’t spread it, nobody else will.

People will doubt you and if you can’t handle it, your company will die.

A few things that worked for us when handling this were:

Bring Doubts to Team and Discuss Them as A Group: Not being alone with doubts makes a huge difference. When one person is down by it, the others can bring him or her up again. And sometimes, you can realize that a concern is legit and you can tackle it together.
Separate Opinions from Facts: You know a lot about your market. You spend every day working in it. Some things that people say are just opinions based on their assumptions. Make sure that you won’t get down based on someone’s mere opinions.
Surround Yourself with Other Entrepreneurs: Top athletes get better when they’re around other top athletes. The same goes for founders. If you surround yourself with doubters, you’ll become one, too. If you surround yourself with successful entrepreneurs, you’ll become one, too.
Test the Doubts: If you can’t let go of a thought, test it. Find ways to test if that person was right. Get data.

#7 You’ll Be Wrong. If You Don’t Make Mistakes, You’re Not Doing It Right.

You’re starting something new. You’re most likely doing something no one has ever done before. You don’t have all the experience. So, assuming that you’ll do all of it right is wrong.

You might have heard “If you fail, fail fast.” I’d say, cut the first part. Just “fail fast,” and after many failures, you’ll find a successful route for your business.

If you don’t fail it usually means one of three things

You’re not trying the things you should be trying. Most likely because you’re afraid.
You’re blindly neglecting your mistakes. Which means that you don’t act although you’re failing which, in itself, is bad.
You’re a wizard and you just never fail.

If #3 is true, please cast a positive spell on me that I can be like you.

No, honestly, embrace your failures until you find success. To do this effectively:

Set Specific Campaigns at Specific Times,
Define Key Performance Indicators,
Track Your Progress,
Review Your Progress,
Make Decisions if You Should Continue or Switch Gears.

#8 You’ll Need to Get Creative and Resourceful.

“An entrepreneur is someone who builds something regardless of the resources.”

I loved it when I heard this sentence for the first time because it’s so true.

If all the resources to start a company were easily available to everyone, everyone would do it. But, they aren’t. Entrepreneurship sounds sexy at first but gets hard once you stop dreaming about it and start doing it.

You’ll need to find ways to get users, to convince large companies to trust you. You’ll be asking, then bugging your friends to test your products.

You’ll need to do marketing on a dime while realizing that a click on LinkedIn costs $ 5. No, not converting someone into a user; you pay $ 5 just for someone clicking on your advertisement, no matter if they buy or not.

You’ll need to get incredibly resourceful. A few things that can help with this are:

Listen to Podcasts.
Read Books, Many of Them.
Get a Mentor. (Life is too short to only learn from your own successes and mistakes.)
Have Brainstorming Sessions.
Monitor Your Competition and What They Do Right.

If you include all these things into your schedule and commit to them, you’ll surely find the tricks that’ll make you successful.

#9 Your Co-Founders Become Your Family. This Is Wonderful and Dangerous.

I love and value my co-founders and I know they love and value me as well. We work together intensively, at times we live together, and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about them.

No matter what success comes around, we celebrate it together. No matter what problem comes up, we share and brainstorm solutions.

If you’re truly committed to growing your company, you’ll invest a significant part of your heart and soul into your company and you will become crucial to your company. So, when something important happens in your private life, it directly affects your company and, therefore, your co-founders.

With this, your co-founders want to and must know what’s going on in your life. You get very close because you get to know each other’s personal struggles and deep angsts. Because you celebrate great personal successes. You become family.

And, this is truly wonderful.

On the other hand, the Harvard Business Review warned companies and teams to not refer to their colleagues as “family.” And, they have a point.

If you think of your family, how many times do you really tell them what you think of their decisions, of their mistakes, of their flaws? How many times did you forgive some of them their terrible mistakes you’d have not forgiven anyone else? Be honest with yourself.

I think, you already get what I’m aiming at. Family is so close to us because we know their dreams and struggles and because we learn to love them.

The same happens with our co-founders most of the time. Otherwise, the struggles of entrepreneurship could pretty quickly become unbearable.

But, you need to tell your co-founders if they make mistakes. You need to be honest with each other. You need to have conflicts. You’ll run into situations where you’ll need to hurt them. And, they will need to hurt you. Growing a company is hard. And no person is perfect. And when hard things cross imperfections, mistakes are made. And with young companies, mistakes can make you go belly up pretty quickly.

There’s a reason that effective managers are oftentimes disliked for their decisions in the short term and applauded in the long term. They make decisions that hurt at first but lead to the better in the long term. But, on the individual level, nobody wants to get hurt.

So, co-founders need to balance the impossible: love each other as they were family while being brutally honest as they’re business partners.

Two things I can recommend from our experience are

Emotional Debt Meetings: Have an hour every week 1 on 1 and tell each other how you feel about each other. Tell your co-founder that this one thing really bugged you. Tell them that you’re worried about their unhealthy eating habits. Tell them you really appreciated how they closed the last deal. Tell them how you feel about them and how they make you feel.
Actively Be There for Each Other: Make it a habit to check in with people. Ask them how they are. Don’t assume, don’t judge, ask.

#10 No, You Don’t Have the Necessary Skills. But you won’t Have Them Either in 3 Years.

I don’t know how many times I heard someone say something like: “Yeah, I really wanna start a company. But, I wanna earn experience first.”

My friend, this is not how it works. Yeah, sure if you want to cure cancer with your company, invest into becoming an amazing scientist, earn all the experience, and then start your company when you’re 60. You might be on the right track.

But, if you wanna start a tech company or something that isn’t too complex, there’s never a better time to do it than now. And, I say that for various reasons.

Entrepreneurship in Itself Means that You’ll Do Something Most People Haven’t Done Before: So, you’ll most likely not learn the things that’ll matter to your endeavor anyway.
People Change: You change. If you spend too much time getting comfortable with a job and a steady paycheck, it’s gonna be hard to make the switch later. It’s way easier to try entrepreneurship first. And, if you fail you can always go back to your comfort. If you really tried, employers won’t look at your failure, they’ll value your experience.
The Further You Progress in Your Life, the More Commitments You Have: Being free of responsibilities is pretty amazing for someone who wants to start a business. Once you have a family of your own, once you might need to take care of your parents, or pay off a loan for a house, it’ll most likely be hard to find the time to start a business. And, you don’t wanna be in a situation where you need to pick between two things that are highly important to you.
The Older You Get, the Less energy You’ll Have. Face it, entrepreneurship is energy-draining. You need to do all the work and you carry all the responsibility. So, doing this in your 20s when you’re full of energy is easier than later in life. However, I’m not encouraging outrageous hours. And, I know amazing entrepreneurs in their 60s. I’m just addressing a general thing to consider.

And, as said in the title of this section: you most likely don’t have the necessary skills to start a company. But, that’s okay. You’ll learn it on the go.

#11 Contracts Are King

You love your co-founders, you trust your users, everything goes great. But, laws, lawyers, and contracts exist for a reason. If you start to do business, make sure you’re legally set.

I know this is a short paragraph but the message is very clear: if you want to start a business, make sure you’re legally safe:

Get legal counsel,
Set up all legal documents your company might need, and
Incorporate.

If you can’t afford this or don’t want to prioritize this, you’re simply not ready to start a company.

About the Author.

Teddy Lange is a co-founder at Resonaid and is responsible for business development and customer experience. Before joining Resonaid, he’s been a Sales Rep and Junior Sales Manager, and co-founded various companies. He has just finished his graduate degree in Public Policy with a focus on communication at Harvard University. Feel free to reach out to him at teddy@resonaid.co.