Startup Founders: Give no room for confusion

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As part of my job I meet a lot of startup founders. These Founders, despite numerous job options, have chosen entrepreneurship as the way forward. They are dead serious about their startups; highly passionate; and very hardworking.

What bothers me the most is that many of the Founders don’t critically think through what makes teams and companies fundable.

All founders must critically assess their team, as well as their idea, and bucket their startup into one of these two categories:

  • a) our startup is fundable or
  • b) our startup is not fundable today. Therefore, I need to get to profitability with minimal angel money.

A majority of startups that I meet, unfortunately haven’t done their homework to understand what type of companies get funded and whether their startup belongs to the category of fundable companies. Most of the Founders, for some reason, postpone understanding the rules of the funding world and spend way too much time trying to raise money, when the idea or team itself is not fundable.

Please note – not all teams and their ideas are fundable.

It doesn’t mean these startups have no future. A significant number of high-quality profitable companies are built with no money from VCs. These companies focus on revenues from day one and continuously iterate in making their products for revenue generation. By generating revenues and getting to profitability, these companies become self sufficient and they are not at the mercy of anyone. Many times, these companies raise growth capital when they want to scale as well, or for liquidity.

The worst thing for Founders is getting stuck in between the two options: they can’t raise money and they don’t have enough runway to get to profitability. Once they are stuck, it is not an easy escape, and this impact  can be detrimental to the startup ecosystem.

Founders, before time runs out, critically assess your team, idea, strategy and pick your path accordingly.

The purpose of this article is to get all entrepreneurs to take action of discovering their path. There is enough content on the web on what makes companies fundable or how one can build bootstrapped companies. The other way is to talk to those who have done it, but, get on this work sooner than later

Roles and Responsibilities of Startup Founders.

Roles and Responsibilities of StartupThis is the 2nd in the 5 part series on ‘How to Sell in the US Market from India’. I had attended the Round Table organized by iSPIRT and here I attempt to capture the important points from the discussion. (You can read the first part here)

One of the topics of deep interest for the participant was on clearly understanding the role of the Startup Founders and where should their time and focus be optimally spent in order to achieve higher success.

As with the format of the Round Table, 15 startup founders shared their ideas which were wonderfully facilitated by Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape. The founders spoke from their own experience as well as tapped into the practice of other successful founders. Here are the key learning from the discussion.

Be Prepared to Spend 16 Hour Workdays.

The Startup Founders are the ones who are the most passionate about their firm and they have everything riding on the success of the firm. It is they who believed in the fundamental business idea. One of the fundamental requirements is for the founders to set the right precedent by investing the bulk of their time on the business. This adds confidence and motivates the rest of the team members to work hard as well.

In the early days, it requires someone who knows the vision, the product as it stands today, the message that need to be communicated to the market, listen to customers to understand the buying process and also get the feedback from usage from existing customers via support. This means spending time with engineering/product, marketing, sales and support. This is where having more than one co-founders help a lot. But if you weren’t the blessed one then you have to pull it all yourself. Be prepared to spend 16 hour workdays across all these 4 functions.

Change your Work Timing

Remember that you are selling to the US Market and hence you need to adjust your working hours to match theirs. Your sales sales days typially starts like 6pm or 7pm India time and go on till 2am or 3am. This is a very crucial time that you need to spend. As a founder/co-founder you are essentially figuring out sales process. This is of paramount importance.

All Startup Founders Should be ‘Chief Sales Officers’

Sales is quite obvious. A business idea might be great but it amounts to nothing if the revenues don’t flow in. It’s very important for the founders to lead sales operations and spend a lot of time prospecting, pitching and listening to what customers are saying during the sales process. Having someone hired for this job during very early days doesn’t help at all, as it requires more connecting the dots w.r.t. to vision and product. Iteratively, the founders have to figure out the companies and the decision-makers profiles within the company. The more you are able to pin-point the decision-makers, the better are the chances of sales closures. This is called as ‘Ideal Customer Profile’.

Founders should do support a lot during early days!

While its a general trend for most startup founders to wear the Sales Head hat, most founders don’t pay enough importance to support. That’s usually relegated to a team member. Suresh Sambandam strongly reiterated that the founders do hands on support job just like a regular support person. This needs to be done with the attitude of NOT as a CEO, not as a founder, but just like a regular support person. This is important early on, to receive first hand feedback that is vital for the improvement of the product. Other startup founders who attended the session also felt that there is a strong correlation between support and sales. Better support results in happy customers which results in better up-sell and better reference leads. In fact, some of the founders felt that the support personnel must be paid on par with the sales staff in order to send a strong message that the company takes its support seriously. After the early days, while support team will grow on its own path, it is important for one of the co-founders to have direct ears to what is going on in support.

There is an excellent blogpost on Freshdesk that is worth reading.

Hire People Smarter than you

The first set of people can make a big difference to the success of a startup. The founder should directly be involved in identifying and interviewing the candidates. It’s critical for them not to let the ego get in the way. The best founders identify people who are way smarter than them. It’s also important for the founders to elucidate the vision of the company and narrate the company’s growth plans. By being highly involved in handpicking each and every employee, the founders can build a solid team with complementary skills needed for the success of the startup.