While it is fantastic to see new faces with energy instilling into the startup scene which is reaching the plateau, most of those freshmen do not fully realize what the road ahead looks like
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There is a growing trend in media and press. They only talk about the bright side of startups and they love covering the romanticism of the start, new milestone of expansion, or latest fundraising round.
The finish is also an eye-catching topic with merger and acquisition deals (M&A), initial public offerings (IPO), and bankruptcy frequently hitting headlines. As a result, the majority of the coverage attract thousands, or even more, young enthusiasts to join the startup scene that is challenging and unpredictable.
While it is fantastic to see new faces with energy infusing a startup scene with fresh enthusiasm, most of those freshmen do not fully realise what the road ahead looks like. They jump into startups mainly because they want to pursue the get-rich-quick dream, have a desire for working for themselves, or crave the spotlight. All that is just like a modern gold rush but, this time, the circumstance is far harsher.
Unsurprisingly, most of them can not grapple with overwhelming challenges due to the lack of clear mission toward their company, empathy with customers they serve, and, most importantly, the commitment to risk, let alone perseverance and resiliency. Their failure can all be attributed to “the messy middle”.
The messy middle in every startup
The messy middle which, in startup language, refers to untold stories and unreported difficulties in the process of building a startup. There are a great number of obstacles and struggles of different kinds deterring founders from making the correct decisions and moving forward to the right track. Notable examples include internal conflict with co-founders, messing up the product-market fit.
But, the messy middle is a stage every Founder must experience.
According to Scott Belsky, an early-stage investor of Uber and Pinterest, in an interview with Business Insider, there are two critical factors determining whether a startup can survive the stage: endurance and optimisation.
Building a startup is always lonely. It requires remarkable endurance.
It is an incredibly long path with criticism and hassle showing no sign of stopping. The lack of financial reward and spiritual compliment can be disheartening. Thus, the strength of your mind, in essence, is the defining factor of the startup lifespan.
Constant optimisation, on the other hand, is the key to accelerating the process of the messy middle. The believe that you can make what does not work work, or optimising the good to become better,
Optimisation does not refer to a concept all. Instead, It represents a series of persistent executions.
Cases Study 1: Tinder
Sean Rad, the founder of Tinder, experienced similar issues while developing the most successful dating app of all time. Incredible and outstanding as the company’s growth curve was under his lead, the young and ambitious entrepreneur was asked to step down from CEO role due to the board’s suspicion about his capability of running an increasingly big company and his experience of making the right judgment calls.
In addition to that, he was just bumped by a series of awkward conflicts with respect to an increasingly blurry line of accountability with other co-founders. These two undesirable incidents made him fall into depression and doubt himself about his entrepreneurship and leadership. Thankfully, he recovered shortly after resetting himself back to the beginning of building Tinder.
Most importantly, he realised that what really matters is not the title and money but the love and passion for what he is doing. An adverse situation turned into the best harvest.
Although he is no longer the man running the ship, he now helps run parts of the company as chairman and provides the current leadership with a better understanding of Tinder’s original intention.
Case study 2: Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed, a social news and entertainment company. It had trouble generating steady revenue from native content at the beginning. While their branded content, such as news and quizzes, is of high quality, but most of the time it was not going viral.
Take videos content for example. Those appealing videos didn’t perform very well on both the Buzzfeed site and Youtube and could not generate enough revenue. After much effort and resources were dedicated to inspecting the cause, they discovered there was a shift in user behaviour— the audience was moving from traditional channels to social networks. More explicitly, online users prefer to read content on Facebook or Twitter.
What is more, they found the very critical disadvantages of banner advertisement— it is relatively interruptive on mobile devices.
On top of that, with more and more people becoming addicted to mobile phones, there was no reason to work against consumers’ desire of digesting content in a user-friendly way. Therefore, they started putting content on Facebook to see if they could make some magic.
Of course, it was a very wise decision, making Buzzfeed the first media company to capitalise on Facebook in a really meaningful way and helping them receive billions of content views on the social platforms since.
The truth of building startups
Startup is hard and certainly not glamorous. It is a lot like video games; they would not be fun if the games were not challenging and difficult.
The hardship and struggle are the best part of the startup and undoubtedly the greatest reminder of why you are doing this crazy thing.
Chasing the wonderful dream of startup is unrealistic. All of existing startups, whether they have exited or remain struggling to find a niche, have countless untold stories that are full of sweat, tears, and a mix of all kinds of emotional turmoil.
Are you considering building a startup? Think twice!
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