“Don’t Take Advice” & Other Startup Advice: 7 Lessons Learned From Champio & Farmplicity Founder Jolijt Tamanaha
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This articleย was originally published on Medium Byย Jolijt Tamanaha.
My name is Jolijt Tamanaha, and Iโm a recovering entrepreneur. Iโm 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.
Weโve been cramming out iterations of Champio for over a year and still donโt 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, itโs time for us to go find jobs thatโll pay us real money.
Iโve spent the last 6 weeks or so at Champioโs bedside, thinking about all that I couldโve done or shouldโve done, and Iโve 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 startupโan online local food market for restaurantsโI wasnโt 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: โthis 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 โthe right wayโ to launch a company. And โthe right wayโ slowed us down dramatically.
I no longer had the audacity to charge from Day 1 because โthe right wayโ meant launching in beta and iterating. I put together decks โthe right wayโ so they had all of the standard information but lacked a heart and soul. I tried to fund the company โthe right way,โ which meant searching for investors instead of bootstrapping (and look where we are todayโฆ weโve done neither successfully).
Now, let me be careful. Iโm 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.
Iโm saying: adviceโby natureโis simple and straightforward while starting a companyโby natureโis not.
Iโm 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 youโre trying to do.
2. Time is King.
Time is King. Time is King. Time is King. Investors love saying โcash 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.
Before you start MVPโing and iterating, come up with a way to get yourself plenty of time.
Notice that Iโm avoiding the word โbuyโ in that sentence. Unless youโre 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 stuffโฆ look up โprofiting from a niche siteโ to get started). Charge customers from Day 1. If thatโs 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 youโve had. I know youโre trying to innovate and disrupt, not add yet another niche site or consulting firm to the mix.
But time is King and without timeโฆ lots and lots of timeโฆ your idea is a peasant that canโt grow corn. Once you have time, hold onto it.
To hold onto time, avoid momentum. Thatโll be hard. Entrepreneurs crave momentum. But when youโre still looking for product-market fit, momentum is dangerous because itโs distracting and addicting.
The ball will get rolling. Youโll get impatient. Youโll hire a team because that makes you feel like the ball is moving faster. Youโll pour money into marketing because it makes the ball look shinier. Youโll dedicate your soul to finding more investors so that you can spend more money on more things to improve that ball.
And when you canโt find those investors, the ball will come to an abrupt stop and youโll realize that itโs hit the bottom of the mountain. Youโve 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 youโre holding onto it. Now how do you find product-market fit so that the ball does end up where youโd like it to be? Focus on the numbers. Obsess over the numbers. Put the time (see, youโre going to need a lot of it) into tracking and analyzing every quantitative measure of demand that you can think of.
If youโre 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 donโt like numbers.
Numbers feel disconnected and useless (are you surprised I didnโt 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 donโt 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. Thatโs not news to you. You know that your mom will always think youโre 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 youโre so damn charming. No really. Most entrepreneursโespecially the ones who end up actually doing the user interviewsโintuitively sell the hell out of what theyโre building.
I can list at least 200 people who told me that they have the problem weโre working on solving, that itโs a priority, andโlater in the conversationโthat the product weโre 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.
Thatโs not their fault. Itโs mine. I tried to get to the heart of their issues, listen between the lines, and avoid leading questions. But Iโm 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 thatโs what feels good), itโs easy to figure out what Iโm hoping to hear.The minute Champio started systematically recording and analyzing our numbers, we realized: โholy crap, weโre 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.
Yes, it helps tremendously if your people are passionate about the problem youโre solving, and of course, itโs nice when theyโre also pleasant to be around. But when youโre building out an early, early, EARLY stage team, build it by looking for people who want to do something incredibly difficult.
If theyโre in it for โthe startup life,โ theyโll bail. Lobster rolls and nap pods are the Google life, not the startup life. If theyโre in it for the money, theyโll 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: โletโs figure out how to solve this.โ
Build a team energized by difficulties and youโve won half the battle.
5. Celebrate small successes with Champagne*
*Or Prosecco since itโs, you know,โฆ cheaper.
Once youโve built that team, cultivate them by celebrating them. Whenever I look at somethingโwhether itโs a website or an email or a sandwichโI 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. Thatโs why Iโm an entrepreneur.
But I often forget to pull myself out of that approach to recognize todayโs 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 doesnโt 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. Weโve 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: โWait, put down the work for a second and look at what weโve pulled off. Itโs amazing.โ
6. Stop trying to draw a straight line.
Iโm going to go work a full time job. Is that going to kill Champio? Maybe. But I hope not.
โWait,โ you cry out: โthis is an article about your founder flop. What the hell are you talking about โmaybe?โ Itโs over.โ
Itโs not over until the fat lady sings, and I ainโt a singer (or a fat lady, really).
Until recently, Iโd been looking for a straight line thatโd connect all of the dots and take Champio through what popular culture tells us is the startup life cycle. Talk to peopleโฆ build an MVPโฆ iterateโฆ build an MVPโฆ iterateโฆ raise a seed roundโฆ launchโฆ sellโฆ raise a Series Aโฆ sell a whole lot moreโฆ raise a Series Bโฆ. sell A LOT moreโฆ and boom you got it!
But then I started paying closer attention and realized that thereโs 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 gameโGlitchโand 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 didnโt 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 wouldโve either started building another game or quit. But Butterfield didnโt 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. Iโd 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 โsure enough, we have 20 pounds of tomatoes.โ I was a glorified vegetable broker for most of Farmplicityโs 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.
Now, to be clear, Iโm not telling you to never give up on your startup.ย Some startups suck. Sometimes youโve a bad team and crappy investors and a lame product. And sometimes youโre just too damn tired to figure all of that out. If youโre unhappy, give up (itโs 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 doesnโt 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 Iโm going back to being a part-time founder. Thatโs 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. Donโt take blind risks.
Want to know a big Champio secret? You deserve to know since youโve spent the last 15 minutes reading this.
I didnโt 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 donโt I go ahead and buy us more time to find product-market fit? Sure, itโs a risk. 10 months isnโt a lot of months. But founders take risks. Thereโs nothing riskier than starting a startup. Thatโs a part of the game I signed up for, right? No itโs not.
I wonโt because great entrepreneurs donโt 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 arenโt crazy, they just see things that we donโt. Thatโs what makes them innovators. Theyโve calculated the risk, and theyโve validated the risk.
I didnโt understand that myself until a smart man told me his great story (letโs call him Eric because Eric is on vacation and hasnโt 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 wasnโt going to be able to raise the next round of cash that it would need to survive.
Rather than trudge ahead stubbornly, insisting that heโd figure something out (which is tempting if you have millions in the bank), Eric returned the cash heโd 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 canโt take an informed risk right now. I donโt 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 Iโm the only one working on Champio. And if Iโm the only one working on Champio, I donโt see a next dot.
Taking that blind risk wouldnโt make me a founder. Instead, Iโd be (1) a crappy entrepreneur, (2) an even crappier family member and friend, and (3) a mental wreck.
So thatโs that. Seven lessons learned from my first founder flop.
To be clear, this isnโt a concession speech. Weโre keeping our enterprise software up and launching a free version of the platform for consumers. Itโll be โa FitBit for your career,โ and Iโll spend my weekends building a community there.
At the same time, Iโm going to go find a full time position. Iโm excited to do so. Iโve learned a lot starting companies. But thereโs a limit to the types of things you can teach yourself and a ton of value in learning under someone else.