First 90 days being a startup founder
Antony Ma
n December 2015, I left my job at Singapore IDA, where I had spent two years, and a month later started my own firm (PowerData2Go). Almost 90 days have passed since then, and it is time to give some reflections. Below are a few things I have learned and would like to share my thoughts regarding entrepreneurship.
1. Wear your uniform
Being a startup founder is a 24/7 job; you no longer follow the 9-to-5 schedule that most employees do. Your mind and heart are likely hijacked by the things you are trying to build. It is easy to mix your personal life with your work life, everything mix up like living in a grinder. However, in the ideal case, you live your dream and everyone is happy, but in the real world, mixing your life with your dream entirely doesn’t work. There should still be time for the non-entrepreneurial part of you -- the unmotivated, disorganised, or just purely laid-back part, if you are like me. Your family and your health also require their fair share of your time as you embark on your new venture. I am not a big fan of restlessly pursuing goals at all costs. Balance is needed.
You need a trick to separate these two aspects of your life. To segregate your work from your personal life and remind yourself that you are working, I suggest you buy yourself a set of outfits and wear them when you are at work. When you walk on the street, you can tell who is working who is not by just looking at their clothes. If someone wearing running attires sitting in front of his computer, you wont think he starts his day with a plan to work. He maybe summoned due to unexpected event or forgot to do something important. A uniform for your own startup helps you to tell the world and yourself that you are working. It actually helps me to focus and reminds me of my goals every day. A uniform for work is a simple but effective way of reminding yourself of your role as a founder. It is not a walk in the park or total freedom. There is a mission for you. On the other hand, imagine that you were to wake up and decide to wear whatever you see first or whatever you feel like wearing. You not only would spend time in making the fashionable decision, but you also would liberate yourself and let your temper determine.
Taking these uniforms out and wearing them serves another purpose: The daily routine becomes a ritual that stimulates my mind to be at the readiness of the entrepreneurial part of me.
2. Keep the bills
There is no surprise that building a new venture requires investment and money. In the first month or two, you need to set up many basic infrastructures. However, it will shock most first-time entrepreneurs that there are so many bills and invoices to process.
Keeping the bills will help you to better manage your cash flow, but more importantly, it will remind you of the price you pay for each decision. In the early days of a new venture, with so much uncertainty, a founder is more likely to take opportunistic actions, detouring from plans when new information presents itself. Over-responsiveness is a typical symptom when founders are at the Infant Stage described in Ichak Adizes' "Corporate Lifecycle". There is no cure. My experiences suggest that you should not procrastinate by waiting for the best option. Being agile and taking risk are what differentiate startup companies from large conglomerates.
I learned that keeping the bills helps you to count the cost of each decision. You cannot aviod making hasty decisions and regret later, but if you keep records and learn from them, the time and money is not totally wasted. Keep a trail of your decision is
3. Accelerate your learning
Do you look at your own stool after you go to the toilet? Not everyone does, unless they are told to do so by the doctor or are not feeling well. As a founder, I have learned that the more you look at your stool, the more you will learn.
In the corporate environments (where I had been for 15 years), you received feedback and criticism from your team and your boss. They shared with you what was not working and even stopped you from doing some tasks. Sometimes the criticism is legitimate, sometimes it is influenced office politics. The responses could be rather quick. One of the responsibilities many managers have in an office is to find supporters for their projects. In a new venture, you don’t have a big team and you can’t get feedback as easily as you can in a large company. If your product is new or different from that of your competitors (which should be the case), it will be even harder to get genuine or kickass feedback. Sometimes, those you count on for feedback will just be polite. But more often, people won’t know how to measure the success of your product/service.
To learn and gather intelligence in such bleak emptiness is very difficult. Most of the time, a startup founder is starving to death because of lack of timely market feedback. Walking in the dark alone can be fatal.You need to be self-critical and assume nothing is right, even when there are birds singing.
Ninety days is not a long time before making a self-analysis, but when a founder makes the transition from a corporate employee to an entrepreneur, the first 90 days can be a difficult period in which to adjust. Surprisingly, there has not been much written or shared about the challenges and adaptions that those with a corporate background must make when starting their own venture. I hope the few suggestions provided here will help those mature (or just old) entrepreneurs. Creating traction and product development are important. At the same time, you will need to prepare yourself for the brutal competition that lies ahead.
