Founders: Fail Faster, Listen More, Write More
I am sharing a short post today, inspired by conversations I have had with my co-founders at Storya and based on my recent trip to Silicon Valley. As hackpreneur say, building in public is the best way to build.
Three needs founders should keep in mind:
1. Failing Faster (the big one)
2. Better Listening
3. More Writing
On Failure: I have had too much fear around failure of ideas and business models. Perhaps a remnant of my corporate career, or perhaps just an individual trait, where we are willing to put ourselves on the line with a startup, but we are not being efficient enough in acknowledging when it’s time to pivot.
THE CASE STUDY: For us, this issue has taken the monstrous shape of a revenue model (subscriptions for our awesome Storya app readers) that has struggled to take off since we launched it in late November 2022. The reason was staring at us in the face since day 1: our value proposition is misaligned. As the first AI-backed, end-to-end publishing platform in the world, it is truly authors that get the most value out of Storya, but we were trying to generate revenue from the readers. The mission to support more diverse and under-represented authors with the best publishing platform in the world does not necessarily mean we cannot ask them to contribute to making our business sustainable. Embrace failure, and the changes that come with that.
On Listening: six months of fundraising will do a (nasty) number on a founders’ focus. I had reached a point before my San Francisco trip where one pitch call blended into the next, and I struggled to extract worthy insights from those conversations. The answer was simple: I had to change the audience. As founders, we need to be aware of the hub for whatever it is we are trying to build and go there. Physically or virtually. Connect with people you believe are most relevant to you, don’t be afraid, and just pitch. Pitch, pitch, pitch. There is an audience out there that will speak your “language”, and that will start providing feedback that truly makes a difference. This is not about the shortest route to investment. This is about the fastest route to learning. It is worth 100x any cheque in the long run.
On Writing: I am trying to bring this final lesson to my entire team at Storya. Measure your work not just in lines of code and phone calls, but in reflections and articles. This is not just about the mythical “thought leadership” every executive on LinkedIn is chasing. It is about sharpening your ideas, sharing them with people that might be helped by those ideas, and connecting with the right community.
I am still finding mine. I have worked on Storya for 15 months with a fully remote team, largely relying on Zoom and Slack tools. It has been great, but it is also limiting. Meeting people in person does add a layer of humanity to the process, but it is not always possible. So I am embracing writing for the amazing tool it has always been. A way to organize thought, share a story and connect with people.
‘Till next time.
