F2F #60: Startup advice ages faster than milk

Being a founder and parenthood have got a lot in common, but one thing sticks out more than the rest: everyone has an opinion on how you should do things.

When we created the company in 2014, we received a lot of praise and compliments, but also a fair share of unsolicited opinions about what we were doing wrong even before we started.

• A company without an office? clients won't trust you.
• Ruby only? that's too niche, you should go for Java instead.
• You're too expensive. You won't be able to compete with offshoring to India.
• Etc.

Being a founder isn't about making the right calls only, it's also about enduring headwinds and unsolicited and highly uninformed opinions about your work.

Unfortunately, being a first-time founder means trusting people more than you should, mostly because you still don't know what you don't know and because you lack prior experience, so you tend to take these opinions more seriously than you'd do in a second company, or ten years down the line.

One thing I've gathered during the first 12 years of MarsBased is that startup advice ages faster (and worse) than milk.

Why?

• Early stage companies change all the time: mission, team, name, target market, B2B to B2C - or the other way around -, distribution channels, partners, ICP, and whatnot. The likelihood of an outsider to your company having the complete snapshot and making the right calls is zero.
• People tend to give advice they either heard somewhere (in a podcast, a panel, another conversation) or that it worked for them. Guess what: my company isn't Google, Spotify or the fucking NASA.
• The ecosystem changes too. While bigger companies are affected more by the macro, startups are affected by the macro AND the micro. While the big corporations are affected by interest rates & geopolitical relationships, startups have to worry about those AND changes in customer acquisition trends, Stripe/Shopify/Apple's fees, a new technology being hotter or a new player entering the market.
• Startups are more likely to be affected by reputational crisis. For instance, in 2014, the advice was "launch on Product Hunt and pray". What would've happened if Product Hunt got involved with any sort of PR crisis or scandal? Startups wouldn't know where to move to launch. HP & Cisco would've never noticed.
• Might be an ego thing or an attention span deficit, but most conversations around business happen in tight schedules, little oxygen between meetings, crammed agendas and unprepared meeting topics. When data isn't available, people reach (and settle) for vague opinions.
  • I can barely prepare my meetings because I am very busy, so how would someone with 10x more work than I have be able to prepare for my meeting?

Look, I have been re-reading stuff we were doing in 2014 and it feels like reading about another company. It's almost 12 years ago, but not that long ago we were doing entirely different things: COVID broke out 5 years ago and it reshaped everything, then the tech decline of mid-2022, then certain reputational issues with some scale-ups and passing fads. I'm sure that what we planned for 2024 wouldn't be a good strategy today.

2014 Era

Back in 2014, the startup world was enamoured with “growth hacking,” viral loops, and simple product-market fit stories. 

Back in 2014, we tried growth hacks left, right and centre, but none of them worked. Why? we were a services company and we were trying stuff that worked for Dropbox, Buffer or Pocket - and most likely didn't work for anyone else after that.

2019 Era

Fast-forward to 2019, the marketing world shifted: personalisation, voice search, digital experience were becoming front-of-mind. 

We realised that doing “what everyone else is doing” meant you were a follower, not a leader. We tried to follow advice of opening up our services offering just because everyone else was doing it, not because our company needed it. Most of our new initiatives from that year didn't work.

2020 Era

In 2020 the stakes changed again: digital became default, all companies went remote-only, business formations surged. 

At the beginning of the lockdown, I called a few industry leaders to ask for advice. Most of them told me to cut costs, lay off people, keep the lights on for as long as possible. Luckily, we didn't follow that advice: we onboarded new clients, we hired more people and we grew to make a record profit that year.

Final thoughts

The moment something becomes The Next Big Thing™, its edge diminishes. The only lasting advantage is learning how to challenge advice, test it fast, and trust your own judgment over the hype.

Founders love to quote other founders’ success formulas, but those formulas were custom-built for a different era, team, and market. The only universal truth: be right about things and fuck the rest.

Every "thought leader" is selling the past. Their advice worked once in their exact conditions. By the time it hits a keynote, it’s outdated. The real edge is learning to spot when advice expires with your own experience.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that MarsBased isn't a startup: we're a services company. But we have operated it as a startup for many, many years. Even if we have never fundraised, we might potentially run out of money if we lose our clients. External advice never takes your cash position into consideration (unless you have disclosed it beforehand, of course). If you give advice to a company that has 8 months or less of runway, chances are that they're already thinking and worrying about the next round, not about listening to your advice (and, much less implementing it).

Last, but not least, the moment a strategy becomes popular, it stops working. Remember the flashy Spotify swarms? Guess what, not even them really implemented them. It was a marketing fad that companies adopted blindly that distorted perceptions, expectations and relationships in the IT market. That's why it didn't work for most people: if everyone is doing it, where's your advantage?

My take has always been: if everyone else is doing it, why should I?

Following other people's steps can only lead you down already discovered paths. If you want to go somewhere new, become a trailblazer.

Startup advice doesn’t age; it expires. Don't drink expired milk.