Choose your own adventure, but don’t make the journey alone

For every problem a startup chooses to address, there are dozens of solutions that initially appear feasible. The difficulty is that when founders finally choose a course of action to take, it realises a dozen new possibilities. Depending on which of these they choose, each will spawn a dozen new opportunities unique to the combination of decisions made beforehand, and so on.

In that respect, a startup is very much a Choose Your Own Adventure title, but you don’t always have the ability to flick back a few pages if you make the wrong choice. In fact you hardly ever realise you’re on the wrong path until it’s too late, because no single decision results in a binary outcome. You appear to be taking rational, logical steps towards success.

Unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure title, death in the world of startups isn’t over in the turn of a page. You rarely plunge over a cliff without warning, or see your starship swallowed by a black hole. Startups are slowly poisoned by their own choices, extrapolating failure from decisions made over months, sometimes years.

It’s often said too many startups build solutions in need of a problem. The truth is that often that solution is the result of a very logical process. In the beginning, there was a genuine pain to be cured, but a meaningful solution was lost to an excess of opportunity. And all of the decisions made sense when considered in isolation, they were informed and entirely sensible, but collectively they amounted to failure. They still resulted in a solution nobody wanted.

You can make nothing but right choices, and still fail. This story can be recounted by tens of thousands of startups. If you’re a founder reading this, there’s a very good chance this is resonating with you. You may have just felt that dull thump of adrenalin in your chest, the smallest realisation your startup may already be dead, slain by choices made months ago. It just hasn’t stopped moving yet.

Can you better navigate decisions to reach success? Is there a way to cheat the inevitability of choice?

One way is to try again, having learnt which sequence of decisions killed you the first time. There’s an increase in probability you’ll conclude the adventure successfully, but chances are you’ll die again, just further along in the story. So try again. And again. In time, your process for making decisions will change; you’ll learn shortcuts, make smarter decisions, skip whole story arcs which add colour to the journey but ultimately waste your effort.

There’s a second way to cheat the inevitable, and bypass the need to fail quite so many times.

Read the book with somebody that’s already read it. They may not have finished the story either, but they can help you choose the right path when it matters. You need to appreciate that no one person can help you from beginning to end; people has their favourite characters and chapters. The chairman who helped you raise your seed round might be out of their depth when you start raising Series A. It’s ok for your team to change, but it’s important to have one.

This might seem like common sense, but it really isn’t. Obvious problems are often hidden in plain sight, obscured by comfort or mundanity. It’s taken me three years of working with over 100 founders to finally put my finger on it; because we work with startups on a daily basis, I’ve started recognising the process as it occurs in real-time.

If this was common sense, the majority of startups would live longer than they inevitably do. Despite thousands of blog posts and hundreds of events that share experiences and preach best-practise, the majority of founders will make a series of decisions before they even launch that kill their startup within a year. It’s the reason that one-to-one coaching for early-stage teams is invaluable, but good coaches have finite bandwidth and most aren’t prepared to offer anymore time than it takes to drink a coffee.

If you’ve already been on the journey and have the scars to prove it, then consider supporting somebody as they take their first steps. If we truly want startups to prosper, we need to find a way to give more than we do, without reservation or reward.

Only the tiniest fraction of founders stumble onto the right path from the beginning, and fewer still make the hundreds of right decisions at the right time in the right order that ensure they stay the course.

Chances are you’re not that person, so choose your own adventure by all means— but don’t make the journey alone.