What I copy from working at seven startups, and what I would leave behind

I have always been a little different.

Most of my classmates went to well-known companies...

Marketing at L’Oréal. Analyst at Goldman Sachs. Consultant at McKinsey.

I wanted to be closer to actually building a business.

So I joined a small startup in Munich, Germany.

And that meant continuing to learn on a very steep curve.

Within the first few months, we made a major pivot. That pivot allowed us to build one of the best companies in our field, eventually working with clients like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Nokia.

And that was just the start.

You can call it luck.

Some of it probably was.

But I had a pretty good hand picking startups that would eventually be acquired or merge with larger companies.

That is what many startups are trying to do. Build something valuable, find an exit and create a return for the investors who funded it.

Somehow, that became my thing.

Join a startup. Help build and scale it. Move into a leadership role, although leadership is a funny word in a startup where everyone wears several hats and the job changes every other week.

Then help integrate the company into a much larger corporation and culture.

Leave and repeat. 

After seven startups, I became quite good at moving between both worlds.

Being scrappy while also navigating red tape. Moving quickly inside systems that did not always move quickly. Knowing when the startup needed more structure and when the corporation needed to get out of the way.

Many of my roles were close to product management.

Which meant sitting at the center of what would make a real business out of a startup.

Answering questions like...

Who is the customer? Which problem matters enough? What should we build? What should we stop building? Is there real demand or are we just telling ourselves a convincing story?

Product-market fit became my core expertise.

Working at seven startups has shaped my entire career.

And there are a lot of things startups do really well that can also help when you are building your first business of one.

Here is what I would copy as a solopreneur, followed by the few things from startup life that simply do not make sense in this world.

What I would copy

Get close to customers and run small experiments

Before you build anything, make sure you have tested what you are trying to build.

That means talking to as many potential buyers as possible.

Be super curious.

What is their biggest pain point? How are they dealing with it today? What have they already tried? Why has none of it worked well enough?

But here is the part many founders skip...

Ask someone to pay.

A nice conversation is not proof of demand. Someone saying, “I would totally buy this,” is not proof either.

Put up a signup page. Sell a paid pilot. Collect money for a cohort you will run later.

You do not need to build the whole thing first.

Actually, I would much rather scramble to build a program people have already paid for than spend three months building something nobody buys.

That is what a small experiment is supposed to do.

Give you real evidence before you make the larger investment.

Be scrappy and build for the stage you are in

Use the tools you already have.

Do something manually before spending weeks automating it. Deliver the service before building the perfect process around it.

Nobody cares whether your backend looks impressive.

The customer cares whether you can solve the problem.

Scrappy does not mean putting out shitty work. It means doing enough to create value and learn what deserves more investment.

Building a business means living in the messy middle for quite a while.

Your first offer will not be perfect. You probably will not sell group calls or cohorts from the start. You still need to learn what people really need, how you help them and which parts of the delivery can eventually become repeatable.

One step at a time.

The key is to keep learning and adjusting.

Not optimizing operations for a business you do not have yet. Not polishing the sales pitch for an offer nobody has agreed to buy.

This is something many of my clients struggle with at first.

It can be learned.

Give a f*&k about competitors

I am actually one of those people who also says: Forget about the competition.

Well, mostly.

Care enough to know roughly what is going on in the market. And honestly, I would rather enter a market with plenty of competition than one with none at all.

Competition means people are already buying something.

But do not obsess over what everybody else is doing. And definitely do not start copying them.

Most markets have room for many players, especially in the areas where businesses of one tend to operate.

You do not need hundreds of buyers.

You need a handful to start with.

The key is becoming the one offer that sounds like you.

I seriously doubt you will find somebody with experience even close to mine. The same should be true for you.

Capitalize on that uniqueness.

And when people tell you to tone it down...

DIAL IT UP 📣

Have honest conversations about what is not working

If nobody is buying, say nobody is buying.

If customers are not using something, say they are not using it.

Do not turn weak demand into a “visibility problem” because that feels easier to fix.

Do not fall in love with the thing you hoped would work.

Fall in love with the experiment and the data.

The best startup teams I worked with could look at uncomfortable evidence without spending the whole meeting defending the original idea.

That becomes much harder when the company is yours and the idea was yours.

Still necessary.

Ask fellow founders for help

I have never met a founder who knew how to do everything.

Yet once we become founders, we somehow think we should be able to figure out every problem alone.

Sometimes another founder can see in ten minutes what you have been staring at for three weeks.

They have made the decision. Had the difficult customer conversation. Built the wrong thing. Recovered from the quiet month.

You do not need another hundred opinions from LinkedIn.

You need a few people who understand the context, understand the midlife mindset, ask good questions and tell you when you are making something harder than it needs to be.

What I would not copy from the startup world

Hiring too early

Startups often treat headcount as progress. A growing team looks successful.

In a small business, hiring before the work is clear creates expensive confusion.

Now you have another person to manage, more pressure to generate revenue and someone waiting for you to explain a process you have not figured out yet.

And remember, you will have to train every new team member.

You want to be reasonably sure about the process you are teaching before you spend another month retraining them because the whole thing changed again.

Hire when there is enough repeatable work, the economics make sense and you know what success in the role looks like.

That does not mean you need an FTE.

Targeted support for a specific function can be more than enough in the beginning.

Get the help you need without building a team the business is not ready for.

Making everything about scaling as fast as possible

Venture-backed startups have reasons to chase aggressive growth.

Most midlife founders I work with do not want the seven-figure company, at least not within the first three years.

They want to build something profitable that supports the life and identity this business was supposed to create.

You are allowed to do that.

You are allowed to build a profitable business without turning it into a machine that needs to grow every month to survive.

Working 60-hour weeks

Long weeks happen.

A launch goes wrong. A customer needs something. You are working through a difficult stage.

But working sixty hours every week is not a business model I want to copy.

If the company only works because the founder is always working, the company does not really work.

You have built yourself a demanding job with an unpredictable salary.

And probably the exact hamster wheel you wanted to escape.

Can't believe you made it so far. 

Those are some of the biggest lessons I took from working at seven startups.

There are many more.

So if you are building a company and have questions about customers, offers, product-market fit, what to test or what you should focus on next, reach out.

Seriously.

Tell me what you are building, where you are stuck and what you have already tried.

The more specific the question, the better.

And most importantly, I will not pitch-slap you. I wrote a whole post about it here.