The life of a startup
The reality is, life at a startup isn’t easy. There is a ton of uncertainty, unexpected challenges and a pressure to succeed. There is a struggle with getting a startup off the ground. Paul Graham, Co-founder of Y Combinator, developed a term for that struggle — the Trough of Sorrow.
Trough of Sorrow refers to the period of struggle a startup faces after a setback. Following the initial excitement of starting a company is the challenge to find product market fit, this can sometimes take years. Finding that fit requires significant amounts of determination and perseverance.
Andrew Chen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz provides some further tips for those deep into the trough.
The Question
The big thing is, while you’re in the Trough of Sorrow is, what do you do? How do you beat it?
Traditional business literature won’t help you solve it- most of that stuff is focused on life after product/market fit, after the Trough of Sorrow. A lot of startup stuff is focused on the initial phases, when you don’t have a team, idea, or investors.
What happens when you have a team, an idea, and investors, but it’s not quite working yet? What do you do there?
How to beat the Trough of Sorrow
I have some notes from my personal experience, and from others who have beat the Trough of Sorrow, and wanted to share them. First off, there’s both an emotional component as well as an analytical one.
Dealing with the emotions
Let’s start with the emotional first. First, a couple important things to remember:
- Getting to product/market fit is hard, and even though you feel like you’re uniquely failing, you’re actually not. Turns out every startup has to go through this, but not every startup survives it. Entrepreneurs will blame themselves for failing, but it’s OK, this is hard and we all start the journey by failing a lot.
- A corollary to the above is, expect to face the Trough of Sorrow. It’s hard to avoid. Quitting, starting over, executing a “too big” pivot, and other avoidance strategies won’t keep you from hitting a difficult point again, it’ll just delay the inevitable. Instead, just figure out how to work through it.
- Expect to fight with your cofounders. When things are going great, cofounders tend to go along since the focus will be on keeping the momentum up. When things are mixed or going badly, there will be meaningful disagreements about what to do next
- Quitting is your decision. There’s a huge spectrum of tools you can use to fix up a broken thing. You can change the product, switch customer segments. You can recapitalize the company, reset the team, and fire your cofounders. You can (usually) find a way to keep going if you want to. Whether or not you want to quit, that’s up to you, but don’t think that quitting and starting a new thing will let you start something up without passing through this difficult phase
- Churning customers, employees, and cofounders isn’t failing. While you’re going from one iteration to the next, people will fall off the wagon. It just happens. That’s OK! That’s part of what happens, and even though it’ll feel like it’s a failure, don’t let it discourage you. The question is, does the new strategy make more sense than the old one? You only fail when you fail.