7 serious lessons I learned from co-founding a startup

Photo credit: Sasint.

If words like startup, entrepreneurship, venture capital, and angel investors excite you, then this article is for you.

It’s been a year and a half since we started our business and I would like to share some important lessons I’ve learned from co-founding this startup.

1. Don’t say yes to everything.

This might sound strange and confusing. You may have heard and read that in the early stages of a business, the founder has to do everything to save on costs. But one of the lessons I learned is you don’t actually have to.

Let me explain: As any founder does, I used to do everything for my startup—product development, market research, vendor sourcing and tie-ups, business development, marketing, and staff recruitment. But after a few months, my partner and I realized that each of us should focus on our core skills. Mine were market research via various online tools, digital marketing, recruitment, motivating teams, and setting and executing processes.

I did fairly OK with vendor tie-ups and business development but I ended up losing my focus on other tasks. Since we didn’t have enough manpower, things like research, tech development, and working on clients’ feedback were eventually neglected.

This is why you need to be very clear on which tasks to say yes or no to. You can base your decision on a critical evaluation of your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

2. Set daily goals.

Determine what exactly you want to achieve at the end of each day. It can be adding five more paying users or partners, completing a team, or finalizing plans on vendor outsourcing. Whatever they are, your daily goals must be established as this will help you analyze and monitor your day-to-day progress as a startup. Do this exercise with each team in your company.

3. Accept negative feedback from your customers.

I have seen many fellow entrepreneurs who are not willing to accept negative feedback on their product or service. We all need to remember what Bill Gates said: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

As a startup founder, you have to be open about listening to your customers’ negative opinions because this can improve your product or service. If you think a comment is not worthy, you can choose to ignore it but you must still listen to it.

You can also make a journal to take note of your customers’ suggestions so you can track improvements. In the future, you can say your product has improved because of a customer’s suggestion. This creates huge goodwill with your customers and it is also very important to have a feature or some way where your customers can easily share their feedback on your product or service.

4. Have an open culture.

By open culture I mean founders and employees should be talking and exchanging ideas and feedback openly. Good and bad news must be shared with everyone in the team. You can also party together.

The open culture concept will drive more accountability in your startup. In the early stages of a business, you only have few people working for you so you need to make sure they are all on top of their work. You can make them accountable through open feedback and open appreciation. Except on very few critical and confidential things, keep an open culture for your startup.

5. Bad news must travel fast, but with plan of action.

Yes, contrary to what people normally think, bad news about your startup has to run fast and must be disseminated to all teams ASAP. It may be about firing someone, losing one paying customer, or a system failure. Whatever it is, you will earn your team’s trust if you declare it openly. When you announce bad news, always mention the reason of the news and share the mitigation plan.

6. Party with good news.

7. Have some laughs.