Every time I have an idea for a post I throw it in my draft on Tumblr with a title line. I was looking through them for ideas about to write this week and stumbled upon this one. It was from three years ago and is ever so relevant today.
There is a lot of glamour and allure surrounding startups these days. The press is obsessed with Unicorn startups and if you read the average article they make it seem like either you are a unicorn or you are a bust. This can be very disheartening when building a company.
Building a company takes time, hard work, hiring smart people, and endlessly talking to users/customers. The press never writes about these things. They write about the byproduct of these things, namely success and failure. So to the outside looking in you get a distorted view of what early-stage companies are about.
The Wizard of Oz analogy is apt because this view on startups and successful early-stage companies is a complete illusion. And it is quite dangerous for hopeful founders, especially when you factor in depression, which is rampant with founders when things aren’t exactly going well. Seeing an unrealistic standard in the news is not that dissimilar than having stick-thin models being the face of brands and having young girls believe they aren’t beautiful because they don’t look like them.
So what do you do as a founder to keep your mind in check?
One thing is to slow down the intake of tech-beat news.
Another thing is to read the articles in newsletters like Mattermark Daily. They are more in-the-weeds helpful on building your business.
And the third thing is to just focus on your business and make sure your users/customers are happy. Everything else is irrelevant.
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