6 mindset shifts that happened to me after founding a startup [6min read]

As someone who has started 2 companies, I felt on my skin what it means to be a startup founder. Prior to that my experience was on the business side, more specifically in B2B sales. I believed that that would be a solid foundation for starting a business, however it was very far from that.
Below there are certain situations that made me realize how my mindset and perspective have changed and I hope that it will help 1st-time founders in their journey.

Selling the vision (not the product/brand)
Whatever your role is as a (co-)founder, you will be always selling — every single day. You will be selling the vision of the company: to your new co-founders on why they should join and work for equity, people joining your team on why they should work for lower salary and equity, advisors on why they should invest their time in you, investors on why they should invest money in you, accelerators on why you should be a part of the batch, your family on why you don’t spend time with them and leaving your secure job.
If you’re a first-time co-founding team get used to rejections, in fact more than 95% of the time and that’s all right.

Selling a vision is a way more advanced sales game than selling an existing product. It’s more abstract and you need to demonstrate in a short period (a sentence or a short pitch) why you are better than existing companies that have hundreds of employees and revenue in billions of euros.
In your vision of the company, you need to demonstrate what kind of problem is not solved right now and how you will solve it better than others, what kind of innovation you will have in terms of product or price or delivery.
However, of all stakeholders, do you know who are the most important buyers of your vision? Your team and your customers. If you can get a kickass team and sell your vision to your customers in terms of pre-sale, sign-up form(B2C) or letter of intent(B2B) everyone else will come by themselves.

Pitching vs Company presentation
In-person company presentations are usually long slide shows that are emphasizing mostly on the history of the company and already existing products with detailed information about the features.
As an early-stage startup, your pitch deck with 10 pages should be delivered in around 5min (300s). You have to present the opportunity that you are seeing and demonstrate why you are the best team to seize it in a very short time.
The only way to get it is by constantly pitching (at accelerators, at events, to investors) and fine-tuning it based on feedback. Ideally, your pitch deck has different versions based on your audience (different culture, age, industry, experience).

The goal of your pitch deck is to get a response such as “I want to know more”. It’s all about finding a balance between too little and too much information. It’s like a trailer of a movie: after you watched it, you want to know more about it.

Paid ads are not the Go-To-Market strategy
When thinking about user acquisition and promotion immediately comes to mind promoting your product/service on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. This may be true for later-stage startups and corporations but not for early-stage startups. Also, initial testing of a startup should be done with different campaigns & landing pages (even without any product) to assess general interest in the problem you’re trying to solve.

However, user acquisition of an early-stage startup should revolve around non-scalable, in most cases free, “manual” ways of getting new users. Approaching them in person and communicating with them directly is essential for 3 main reasons:

Feedback — The quality of information that you will get in direct communication with a user is crucial in the early days as you will be iterating fast and constantly based on the users’ feedback
Word-of-mouth — After having a conversation with a user, the chance of being referred is immense and many times, people will recommend you to speak with some of their friends/colleagues. For having a loyal user base, word-of-mouth is essential
It’s cost-effective — You won’t need to have a big marketing budget to build an initial user base and also you won’t be competing in paid acquisition with already established companies

Nonscalable and “manual” channels could be: approaching the potential customer in person (e.g. in front of the gym if you’re providing gym-related products), hosting a meetup, direct messaging (e.g. member of the group of interest on Facebook), posting on platforms like Reddit.

You're always behind
No matter how fast you progress, you’re constantly behind. There is always someone from your competitors that is in front of you. Your goal is to move faster than anyone else on the market. For early-stage startups, the main competitive advantage is speed, speed of decisions.

How fast you iterate the product, adjust to a trend, build a loyal user base, test a new campaign or a new channel, hire people, pivot business model. All these decisions in already established companies take weeks, months or even years and at an early stage startup should be a matter of hours.

In today’s super-competitive world, speed gives a great edge. If you want to win, move faster than anyone else.

Mindset is everything
I firmly believe that for any founding team or early employee, the mindset represents the number one factor for success. Your mindset is way more important than the skills that you currently have and your previous experience. While skills and experience will give you a great initial advantage, your drive and mindset will be more important in the long run.

With the right attitude, a person can excel in any given field and learn anything.
Recently, I came across one great example that will describe this in the best possible way:
In 2009, Mate Rimac was asking questions on forums on how to build an electric supercar, today in 2020 Rimac Automobili is taking over Bugatti production.

Speaking with customers and becoming passionate about the problem
Many people (including myself) come with an idea and fall in love with a product that is designed, even without any prior conversation with customers.
For any tech company to be a successful one, you need to have an extensive conversation with your customers. Even before thinking about the solution, think only about the problems and bottlenecks about a topic that you are very passionate about — then speak with people that are potentially facing that problem. It is necessary to speak with at least 20–30 people from different demographic backgrounds to get a real picture. You will hear and realize many things that you didn’t know before, which will give you a great perspective about the problem that you’re trying to solve.

Once you realize and prioritize problems by pain level (how important it is for your users to solve a specific problem) you’ll have a solid foundation for designing a solution.

This is how currently I implement product development:
I phase — Identify problem & pains by having a conversation with customers with very open questions (why, how, what)
II phase — Analyze & prioritize pains and the main problem that you want to solve
III phase — Think of a solution and go back to your customers, describe it and get feedback on it
IV phase — Based on the feedback think how exact product would look like and sketch it together with customers
V phase — Together with a UX/UI designer make wireframes and get feedback from customers
VI phase — With a no-code platform (bubble.io) make an app based on the wireframes, get feedback and iterate regularly

At the end of the day, the most important part is persistence and working on it every single day. That is the foundation of any success.

If you would like to hear more or get my feedback, feel free to reach out to me.

Rock it!