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10+ Lessons We’ve Learned Building Our Startup

Alistair Gould

10+ Lessons We’ve Learned Building Our Startup

It’s still early days in our journey as founders of Tulix but we’ve been fortunate enough to have learned a couple of things thus far. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship and startups, we share some of the key lessons we have learned so far.

Be obsessed with the problem you’re solving

Entrepreneurship often goes hand in hand with innovation. However, the most successful entrepreneurs are those that are almost obsessive about the problem that they look to solve through their ventures. Typically, it is said that it must be a huge problem but sometimes true innovators want to change the world and are even able to create solutions to problems that people didn’t know they had. Through their innovation, they change how people do things. A quote attributable to Henry Ford somewhat sums it up:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford

Customers can easily describe a problem they’re having — in this case, wanting to get somewhere faster — but not the best solution. It’s the entrepreneur’s role to bridge this gap through a deep understanding of the problem they’re solving.

When in doubt, ask

A lot of people have a phobia of asking for anything. Yet the odds are typically better than those of some bets these same people take. In the majority of situations, when you ask someone for help or advice, the outcome is typically binary i.e. a yes or a no. With 50/50 odds, people should get more comfortable asking whenever in doubt especially when starting a business. No one can work effectively entirely on their own and as such, it is important to know when to work through something on your own vs when to seek help from others who could save you a lot of time.

Work, work, work…but also rest

The entrepreneurial journey entails a lot of hours. More even than an ordinary job (even an extraordinary one). When starting any venture, it is important to put in the hours, but when you’re a small startup, the business is its founders. As such, the health of a startup’s founders is somewhat directly proportional to the health of the business. As much as you may find yourself putting in a lot of hours into your venture, be sure to get enough rest so that you can give your startup your best.

Leverage your network

This statement has no better application than when starting a business. Most people want to see you succeed. So when you take the bold step to try to start something new, many will observe from a distance, but some will ask you about what you’re doing and whether there’s any way they can help. We’ve been fortunate enough to have within our networks, people that have offered a helping hand time and time again — whether directly (offering their professional skills) or indirectly (linking us up with other people that could be of assistance to our company). Such support is invaluable to an entrepreneur.

Perspective is everything

An early lesson we learned was to get views from as many people as possible. This saves you from tunnel vision. Getting perspective doesn’t mean that you must take on any advice that’s thrown at you (there will be a lot). However, listening to different views allows you to see your business, your customer and the problem you’re solving from eyes other than your own. It allows you to regularly step back and look at what you’re building in a fuller manner. If you do not do this enough, you may find yourself losing direction and the worst part is that you won’t even realize that you’re lost. Work fast while still small

One of the best parts of being in a small company is that you are agile. A small startup of 3 people can make decisions faster than a company with 300 or 3,000. All of these are natural progressions depending on the kind of business you are building but at all times, companies must play to their strengths. And one of the strengths of a small startup is its size. In the formative stages, a lot of decisions that are critical to the overall vision as well as initial strategic decisions have to be made and these decisions have an impact on the company’s survival or death. While small, you must work very fast because if you don’t, you will likely run out of resources to keep going.

Continuous learning

Often, after spending long enough in a career, people inevitably become experts in their fields. The problem with expertise is that, as creatures of habit, this tends to create a sense of comfort in experts. This is well founded because, in truth, they know all they need to know to do what they do effectively enough for them not to need to learn more. In a startup, that thesis goes out the window and you find that there is suddenly so much that you need to learn. If you enjoy learning, try your hand at entrepreneurship. Never stop ideating

Just because you land upon a great idea, it doesn’t mean that that’s the end of your journey and you can just build that one thing. As we’ve written before, we must keep innovating. The first version of what we thought to build, is markedly different from what we will soon launch as the first version of our app. And in between, we have had very many discussions around our product. We keep our ears and our minds open to the fact that what we are building right now, we could improve drastically in a matter of months — but that will only happen if we keep on ideating and striving to improve.

Customer is King

A customer is a company’s lifeblood. They are a company’s raison d’etre and yet so often, this gets overlooked or forgotten. They are the people whose problem or need companies seek to solve or address. Customer centricity is at the heart of any successful venture and must go beyond a paragraph in the “values” section of a company’s profile in order for a venture to succeed. Furthermore, a happy customer is a startup’s biggest ambassador and will get more people to know about your product/service at no additional cost. Invest time in your customers early & speak to them often.

The value of time

As a start-up, time is one of your most valuable resources. This must be very closely guarded as it is the one resource that you cannot refill or replace. For this reason, we have seen that it is very important to know where your hours go. When starting out, everything appears equally urgent, but this isn’t always the case. The time you spend on things must be commensurate with what it contributes to your overall purpose. Where a trade-off can be made on getting external resources to spare you time, take that option as you will free yourself to focus on more critical tasks as a founder.

Enjoy what you’re doing

One of the best parts of a startup is the ability to actually do what you want. This is an elusive dream for many. If you’re choosing to start something, be sure that you enjoy it. We’ve been fortunate enough to find ourselves in this position. As has been said in various ways, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” When you truly love and take ownership of something that you want to see to full fruition, it won’t feel tedious. We’re enjoying the process of building a FinTech startup and look forward to learning more along the way. Who knows how or whether our views on any of these pointers will evolve or change over the next year and beyond? Until then, we urge you to start something!

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