Startups and the hard parts
It's been two months or so since I departed from Matcha, a service booking platform and the startup I built with 2 other people. I've been reflecting on my exit for a while now. Tracing back what led to my decision and how it feels like stepping away from the space for now. If you've read some of the things I've been writing in my little corner of the internet, I've been crashing out for a while now haha! Discovering there's no market for the product you've spent months building is always going to hurt and experiencing it 3 times in my lifetime has truly burn me out.
So here's some quick findings and tips that I'd like to share briefly so you don't end up like me (aka burnt out):
- Find your founder-product fit! Founders spend a great deal of their time creating value for a market. If you haven't noticed, things are moving faster and faster. Capturing a market is a race everyone is trying to win thus it make sense you care about what you're building. You're going need to be obsessed with what you're doing or else it's going to feel like you're dragging your feet to the finish line. Find joy in what you do.
- Don't quit your day job to pursue your startup. Practically speaking, a lot of investors you might talk to would often question your commitment in the business if you haven't been doing it full-time. It's quite tempting to resign and make a bet that you can make it big for the next few months. I did that and I fell into depression haha. Not to dissuade you, especially if you have all the signals to go all-in, but pursuing a startup is still a gamble in itself. Don't quit unless you yourself a runway to sustain doing this. While you might hear successful startups going into debt and seeing the green because they started with quitting their day job, think about the other side of the story that doesn't get told in LinkedIn posts or media channels. No one really wants to talk about their failures unless they made it.
- Get ready to do sales. I think this kinda shook my system when we were doing Loomify and Matcha. We started doing more customer calls and I found myself more anxious than ever haha. It's necessary though. It didn't really cross my mind until Matcha that I have to participate in sales since at the end of the day the goal is to make revenue to reinvest back into the business to scale it up. My rejection sensitivity got better after a while but I think if you're going to do a startup, don't think you'll be siloed to your role.
These are what comes to mind as of now and maybe I'll come up with more when I'm not writing this in the middle of the night.