“Don’t Take Advice” & Other Startup Advice: 7 Lessons Learned From Champio & Farmplicity Founder Jolijt Tamanaha

This articleย was originally published on Medium Byย Jolijt Tamanaha.

My name is Jolijt Tamanaha, and Iโ€™m a recovering entrepreneur. Iโ€™m the co-founder of Champio, software that helps the 70% of Americans who hate their jobs. If only we could make those 70% of Americans actually want our software.

Jolijt Tamanaha
That’s me.

Weโ€™ve been cramming out iterations of Champio for over a year and still donโ€™t have the traction we need to raise a full seed round. And since we all do need to eat real food and cover real bills, itโ€™s time for us to go find jobs thatโ€™ll pay us real money.

Iโ€™ve spent the last 6 weeks or so at Champioโ€™s bedside, thinking about all that I couldโ€™ve done or shouldโ€™ve done, and Iโ€™ve come away with seven lessons.I hope these help you (and future me) build great things.

1.ย Solicit a ton of advice and then actively ignore most of it.

When I co-founded my first startupโ€”an online local food market for restaurantsโ€”I wasnโ€™t trying to be an entrepreneur.

During my sophomore year at Washington University in St. Louis, I signed up for an entrepreneurship class. Myself and three other students cobbled together some simple software and sent a press release to a grand total of four journalists. Farmplicity was born.

All four journalists covered our launch. Eighteen months later, we sold Farmplicity to a food distribution company after signing up more than 200 farmers and 1/3rd of the independent restaurants in St. Louis.

The day after we sold Farmplicity, my new co-founder and I began working on Champio and I said: โ€œthis time, we can do it the right way.โ€

As a newly bonafide member of the startup scene, I was inundated by people with descriptions of โ€œthe right wayโ€ to launch a company. And โ€œthe right wayโ€ slowed us down dramatically.

I no longer had the audacity to charge from Day 1 because โ€œthe right wayโ€ meant launching in beta and iterating. I put together decks โ€œthe right wayโ€ so they had all of the standard information but lacked a heart and soul. I tried to fund the company โ€œthe right way,โ€ which meant searching for investors instead of bootstrapping (and look where we are todayโ€ฆ weโ€™ve done neither successfully).

Now, let me be careful. Iโ€™m not saying I was a better entrepreneur when I co-founded Farmplicity. And I am not, not, NOT saying Champio is floundering because I was given bad advice.

Iโ€™m saying: adviceโ€”by natureโ€”is simple and straightforward while starting a companyโ€”by natureโ€”is not.

Iโ€™m saying: read this article, devour every book you can get your hands on, and ask anyone smart to sit down and tell you what she thinks. Listen quietly and intently.

But understand every source of advice as an opportunity to learn about approaches to the problem that you might otherwise not know exist. Never, ever turn to a source of advice in search of an answer.

Nobody can give you an answer because nobody has successfully done exactly what youโ€™re trying to do.

2. Time is King.

Time is King. Time is King. Time is King. Investors love saying โ€œcash is Kingโ€ but cash is only King because cash buys you time. And time is King because time does whatever the hell it wants to do.

via Dollar Photo Club
via Dollar Photo Club

Before you start MVPโ€™ing and iterating, come up with a way to get yourself plenty of time.

Notice that Iโ€™m avoiding the word โ€œbuyโ€ in that sentence. Unless youโ€™re a prodigy with an engineering degree from Stanford and a multi-million dollar exit under your belt, no one is funding your way to product-market fit.

So how do youย getย the time you need?ย Work on your startup as a side project while you grow in a full-time position or as a student. Set up sources of passive income that give you a small salary (not scammy scummy stuffโ€ฆ look up โ€œprofiting from a niche siteโ€ to get started). Charge customers from Day 1. If thatโ€™s not possible, start the company as a consulting practice while you finish building whatever it is you need to execute on your main business model.

I know all of that sounds exhausting. I know you just want to focus on the brilliant idea youโ€™ve had. I know youโ€™re trying to innovate and disrupt, not add yet another niche site or consulting firm to the mix.

But time is King and without timeโ€ฆ lots and lots of timeโ€ฆ your idea is a peasant that canโ€™t grow corn. Once you have time, hold onto it.

To hold onto time, avoid momentum. Thatโ€™ll be hard. Entrepreneurs crave momentum. But when youโ€™re still looking for product-market fit, momentum is dangerous because itโ€™s distracting and addicting.

The ball will get rolling. Youโ€™ll get impatient. Youโ€™ll hire a team because that makes you feel like the ball is moving faster. Youโ€™ll pour money into marketing because it makes the ball look shinier. Youโ€™ll dedicate your soul to finding more investors so that you can spend more money on more things to improve that ball.

And when you canโ€™t find those investors, the ball will come to an abrupt stop and youโ€™ll realize that itโ€™s hit the bottom of the mountain. Youโ€™ve run out of time. And guess what? That pretty little village you were aiming for is 50 miles South of where your ball ended up.

3. Focus on the numbers.

You have time and youโ€™re holding onto it. Now how do you find product-market fit so that the ball does end up where youโ€™d like it to be? Focus on the numbers. Obsess over the numbers. Put the time (see, youโ€™re going to need a lot of it) into tracking and analyzing every quantitative measure of demand that you can think of.

If youโ€™re anything like me, doing that is going to take some real mental discipline. I like ideas. I like people. I like conversations. I like design. I like code. I even like legalese. I donโ€™t like numbers.

Numbers feel disconnected and useless (are you surprised I didnโ€™t say the same about legalese? Both parents are lawyers). But numbers form trends and trends are everything. Trends tell it to you straight. If you donโ€™t have product-market fit, the trends in your user numbers will say so.

Trends are important because people will tell you what you want to hear. Thatโ€™s not news to you. You know that your mom will always think youโ€™re brilliant and beautiful. Butย thisย might be news to you:ย even complete strangers on the subway will tell you what you want to hear.

Why? Because youโ€™re so damn charming. No really. Most entrepreneursโ€”especially the ones who end up actually doing the user interviewsโ€”intuitively sell the hell out of what theyโ€™re building.

I can list at least 200 people who told me that they have the problem weโ€™re working on solving, that itโ€™s a priority, andโ€”later in the conversationโ€”that the product weโ€™re building will solve their problem. But when it came time to actually use the product that they so desperately wanted, few put in the effort needed to give our solution a fighting chance.

Thatโ€™s not their fault. Itโ€™s mine. I tried to get to the heart of their issues, listen between the lines, and avoid leading questions. But Iโ€™m still me: a woman with big dreams, a lot of energy, and an eagerness that you can smell from a mile away. I smile when you give me some answers and wince at others. If you want to encourage me (and you do because thatโ€™s what feels good), itโ€™s easy to figure out what Iโ€™m hoping to hear.The minute Champio started systematically recording and analyzing our numbers, we realized: โ€œholy crap, weโ€™re solving the problem and nobody cares.โ€ A pivot was in order. We buckled down and finished a new version of the platform in a month but it was already too late. We ran out of time.
So please, focus on the numbers.

4. Hire for challenge-fit.

The nine people who have worked on Champio at some point or another were all amazing in their own ways. But we got the most out of the team members who were in it for the challenge.

via Dollar Photo Club
via Dollar Photo Club

Yes, it helps tremendously if your people are passionate about the problem youโ€™re solving, and of course, itโ€™s nice when theyโ€™re also pleasant to be around. But when youโ€™re building out an early, early, EARLY stage team, build it by looking for people who want to do something incredibly difficult.

If theyโ€™re in it for โ€œthe startup life,โ€ theyโ€™ll bail. Lobster rolls and nap pods are the Google life, not the startup life. If theyโ€™re in it for the money, theyโ€™ll bail. The money comes after years and years of thankless, moneyless work. There are easier ways to earn dough.

Your early stage team needs to be in it because easy things bore them. You will be hit by challenge after challenge and when that happens, you need a team that gets excited. They should to look at you, smile, and say: โ€œletโ€™s figure out how to solve this.โ€

Build a team energized by difficulties and youโ€™ve won half the battle.

5. Celebrate small successes with Champagne*

*Or Prosecco since itโ€™s, you know,โ€ฆ cheaper.

via Dollar Photo Club
via Dollar Photo Club

Once youโ€™ve built that team, cultivate them by celebrating them. Whenever I look at somethingโ€”whether itโ€™s a website or an email or a sandwichโ€”I immediately see 10 things that can be done to make it better. And those 10 improvements drive me in a positive way. I keep going because the world is a wonderful place filled with opportunities I can take to make it more wonderful. Thatโ€™s why Iโ€™m an entrepreneur.

But I often forget to pull myself out of that approach to recognize todayโ€™s accomplishments. When we landed a meeting with a Fortune 500 company, I celebrated by preparing the deck for that meeting. When we pushed a big feature, I celebrated by emailing users for feedback. And while that type of thinking keeps me motivated, it doesnโ€™t keep everyone motivated.

People need to be celebrated. And not celebrated in my improve-some-more-stuff way but just celebrated. With Champagne or at least a cookie.

Champio built 4 different iterations of a platform in less than 14 months and each one was 5 times better than the earlier version on every single dimension. Weโ€™ve tested those iterations with more than 2,000 people at more than 60 companies in 7 different industries. We got into and completed theย Prosperย accelerator program. We won second place atย StrategyHack. And we were finalists forย Student Startup Madnessat SXSW.

We still have a lot to figure out (hence this blog post). But those small accomplishments were successes none the less. Champio needs me to say: โ€œWait, put down the work for a second and look at what weโ€™ve pulled off. Itโ€™s amazing.โ€

via Dollar Photo Club
via Dollar Photo Club

6. Stop trying to draw a straight line.

Iโ€™m going to go work a full time job. Is that going to kill Champio? Maybe. But I hope not.

โ€œWait,โ€ you cry out: โ€œthis is an article about your founder flop. What the hell are you talking about โ€˜maybe?โ€™ Itโ€™s over.โ€

Itโ€™s not over until the fat lady sings, and I ainโ€™t a singer (or a fat lady, really).

Until recently, Iโ€™d been looking for a straight line thatโ€™d connect all of the dots and take Champio through what popular culture tells us is the startup life cycle. Talk to peopleโ€ฆ build an MVPโ€ฆ iterateโ€ฆ build an MVPโ€ฆ iterateโ€ฆ raise a seed roundโ€ฆ launchโ€ฆ sellโ€ฆ raise a Series Aโ€ฆ sell a whole lot moreโ€ฆ raise a Series Bโ€ฆ. sell A LOT moreโ€ฆ and boom you got it!

But then I started paying closer attention and realized that thereโ€™s a dirty preface to every success story

Look at Slack, the startup that hit 30,000 users and got a $1 billion valuation in 2 years. Go by their launch date and they sound like a straight line.

But Slack actually started in 2008 as Tiny Speck, a video game company that raised $1.5 million (founder Stewart Butterfield co-founded Flickr so his search for product-market fit does get funded). In 2010, Tiny Speck released its first gameโ€”Glitchโ€”and raised another $10.7 million from VCs, including Andressen Horowitz. Then two years later, Tiny Speck discontinued Glitch and fired half of its employees.

Tiny Speck didnโ€™t have a game but guess what they did have: time. They had money left over. While building Glitch, they had hacked together an internal communication tool. They decided to use their time to turn that into something.

And even then it still took their team of 30 full-time experienced engineers another 3 months to get Slack to a product that could be beta tested. After putting companies on in beta, it took them another 6 months to launch it.

Had Stewart Butterfield insisted on finding a straight line for Tiny Speck, he wouldโ€™ve either started building another game or quit. But Butterfield didnโ€™t need a line, he focused on the dot that he did have and on creating the next one.

Remember that short story I told you about Farmplicity earlier? It ended like this: All four journalists covered our launch. Eighteen months later, we sold Farmplicity to a food distribution company after signing up more than 200 farmers and 1/3rd of the independent restaurants in St. Louis.

Sounds like a straight line right? Here are the sentences that should sit in between those two:

Then we called and visited hundreds and hundreds of farmers and chefs. Iโ€™d call a chef to ask him what ingredients he was looking for, call the relevant farmers to beg them to put up listings, and then call the chef back to tell him that โ€œsure enough, we have 20 pounds of tomatoes.โ€ I was a glorified vegetable broker for most of Farmplicityโ€™s life.

And here is the sentence that should come after the one about our acquisition: We sold Farmplicity not because it was a runaway success but because we realized that the startup needed a lot more than what the three of us could give it.

Not a straight line at all but it was easy for me to make it sound like one.

Champio Founddr Jolijt Tamanaha in Dorm Room
A photo of me in my dorm room at the height of Farmplicityโ€ฆ doesnโ€™t look like much of a straight line. Photo credit to my sophomore year roommate Taylor Miccelotta and her brief stint with a polaroid.

Now, to be clear, Iโ€™m not telling you to never give up on your startup.ย Some startups suck. Sometimes youโ€™ve a bad team and crappy investors and a lame product. And sometimes youโ€™re just too damn tired to figure all of that out. If youโ€™re unhappy, give up (itโ€™s really okay) and move on because life is too short to spend any of it miserable.

But I am telling you not to give up just because the path doesnโ€™t look like what you had imagined it would when you started going down it. I went from part-time founder to full-time founder and now Iโ€™m going back to being a part-time founder. Thatโ€™s not how I thought this would all go down.

Straight lines exist for lawyers and bankers and TechCrunch journalists, not entrepreneurs. Do what it takes to make the next dot appear, and the dots will eventually connect themselves.

7. Donโ€™t take blind risks.

Want to know a big Champio secret? You deserve to know since youโ€™ve spent the last 15 minutes reading this.

I didnโ€™t have to decide to get a full time job just yet. I know how to make our line look a little straighter for a little longer.

Our friends and family believe in us. With a few weeks of work and some papers, we could have the cash we need for 8 to 10 months of runway.

So why donโ€™t I go ahead and buy us more time to find product-market fit? Sure, itโ€™s a risk. 10 months isnโ€™t a lot of months. But founders take risks. Thereโ€™s nothing riskier than starting a startup. Thatโ€™s a part of the game I signed up for, right? No itโ€™s not.

I wonโ€™t because great entrepreneurs donโ€™t take blind risks.

Many brilliant founders do things that seem crazy. We use their stories to justify shoving whatever cash we can find into our companies, like a tipsy retiree playing the slot machines in Vegas.

But those brilliant founders arenโ€™t crazy, they just see things that we donโ€™t. Thatโ€™s what makes them innovators. Theyโ€™ve calculated the risk, and theyโ€™ve validated the risk.

I didnโ€™t understand that myself until a smart man told me his great story (letโ€™s call him Eric because Eric is on vacation and hasnโ€™t answered my email asking him for permission to include this).

Eric founded a startup in the late ’90s and raised millions of dollars weeks before 9/11. When the market collapsed, Eric realized that his company wasnโ€™t going to be able to raise the next round of cash that it would need to survive.

Rather than trudge ahead stubbornly, insisting that heโ€™d figure something out (which is tempting if you have millions in the bank), Eric returned the cash heโ€™d raised and closed shop. Years later, when the market had recovered, those same investors approached Eric and asked him to run a new startup. They knew that Eric was a great entrepreneur who understood the difference between a blind risk and an informed risk.

I canโ€™t take an informed risk right now. I donโ€™t need to see a straight line but I need to see the next step, the next dot. The money from family and friends will get us 10 months of runway if Iโ€™m the only one working on Champio. And if Iโ€™m the only one working on Champio, I donโ€™t see a next dot.

Taking that blind risk wouldnโ€™t make me a founder. Instead, Iโ€™d be (1) a crappy entrepreneur, (2) an even crappier family member and friend, and (3) a mental wreck.

So thatโ€™s that. Seven lessons learned from my first founder flop.

To be clear, this isnโ€™t a concession speech. Weโ€™re keeping our enterprise software up and launching a free version of the platform for consumers. Itโ€™ll be โ€œa FitBit for your career,โ€ and Iโ€™ll spend my weekends building a community there.

At the same time, Iโ€™m going to go find a full time position. Iโ€™m excited to do so. Iโ€™ve learned a lot starting companies. But thereโ€™s a limit to the types of things you can teach yourself and a ton of value in learning under someone else.

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