The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap Founder. Let's dive into one more piece of entrepreneurial advice that's really, really irritating and quite dangerous. Today I want to talk about the one that I get quite a lot: Don't give up. A bit dangerous. And before we get to the actual reasons why this is dangerous and how to make it less dangerous, a word from our sponsor, paddle.com.

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Don't ever give up. Force yourself. Grind it out. I mean, obviously that's dangerous advice because it builds on a founder's capacity to struggle through challenges, but it uses this for the wrong reasons. Right?

There's a good reason to struggle because if there is something you really want to accomplish and it's kind of within arm's reach, yeah, you toughen it out. But just to not give up at any point. Now here is what makes this particularly dangerous. It is really, really useful advice until a certain point. And after that, it becomes extremely dangerous with the problem being that as a founder, you never know exactly where that point is.

You only ever know where that point was in retrospect. And even then things are complex, They're highly interdependent, codependent. You don't even know what caused that point to appear in your journey, even if you really dig into it. There might be a lot of internal external factors. It's hard.

It takes a couple years usually after you stop a business, either you sell it or you grow it and become successful, whatever it is. It takes a long while for you to figure out why things happened the way they did because a lot of the reasons for success and failure are not even intrinsic to your project. They're part of the market or part of technological advancement or the actions of a competitor or the inaction of a competitor and there are so many reasons why things work or don't work or things shift and make things possible or impossible all of a sudden that you never really know in the moment so don't give up is a good motivational thing to use when you struggle with the initial pains of establishing this understanding of your market because I think that's one of the ways that I think it actually works you don't know much it takes a while for you to learn all the nuance of a complicated field so when you don't really see what you want to see for the first couple of weeks or months I think that's fine some things understanding things just takes a long time and particularly as you're building a software business with more enterprise or bigger clients things just take time with these kind of people I've had lots of clients and customers in the pipeline for Podscan that I reached out to and then they did a trial maybe that day or the week after or whenever they got to the email and nothing happened for a couple months.

All of a sudden they subscribe because they operate on their own timelines. Like I laid the seed and that whole germination thing was kind of on them. It went at their own pace. Right? The tel war, the climate that this was in, that's theirs to maintain, not mine.

And they operate on their own timelines and you do as well and you not giving up on a timeline that does not have millions of dollars of budget behind it to slow things down whereas your enterprise prospects may, well, that is quite dangerous for you. It becomes detrimental to your business, just to your whole personal finance situation, to be stubborn when it means that you're running out of money or that you're trying to force a particular approach into a market for too long when you just should be experimenting more. And I think that is the solution to this advice to make it actually usable. Don't give up, but do different things and maybe opposite things at the same time. If you're trying to make money in a particular market and you just struggle and there are not enough customers or retention is horrible and people quit, two things could happen here.

First, things could just change for your customers so that their retention all of a sudden increases and they stop churning and they find value in your product. Things could just change for the matter. That's kind of the hopeful, wishful thinking that don't give up, the diamonds are just ahead. You just have to kind of go through the mountain a little bit further. Or the other thing could happen and that's you making changes, You change your positioning, you change your features, your product or even your approach to educating, reaching your customers so that they can then develop this newfound appreciation of your business.

And honestly you will never know which one of these will be the successful one until you try both pretty much at the same time constant experimentation at the same time that's what I'm talking about while still only running a limited number of experiments is the antidote to these pointless don't give up kind of pieces of advice. If you see no changes in one of the approaches and some changes in the other, right, you don't do anything, you reach out to people the same way, nothing changes, and then you reach out to a couple more people a slightly different way and something happens, well then you know you're dealing with a particular problem and a particular solution. But if you see changes in both, right, you reach out the same way and all of a sudden there's an uptake or a downward trend, Well, if you reach to the other reach out to new people and you see the same trend, we run experiments with some customers, present a new interface, new approach to business to some and same old stuff to the others, and both of them increase retention or decrease churn or subscribe all of a sudden, then it had nothing to do with your product.

It had everything to do with the situation of your customers. Think about like changes in regulations in the market that were not to be anticipated, like a new thing just happened or a new competitor joined the market or some competitors dropped out of a market, moved upmarket, all of a sudden everybody who was a client of theirs is looking for a solution that they can still afford. And that looks a lot like the one that they had before and now you're able to provide it. But until that competitor moved upmarket or changed their pricing or something, there was no reason for anybody to move over to your product old or new way. Those are the things you need to constantly look at and for that it's helpful to have kind of parallel experimentation.

Giving up generally and I want to talk about like just the term here for a second does also not mean to give up the whole thing. You might just give up an assumption and maybe that's the idea. Maybe giving up is not about giving up doing the business, giving up entrepreneurship, but it's giving up your long held assumptions the thing that you thought was true because it's not necessarily true they're just true in your mind because of your own experience your insights your your way to get a guess at what the world is like but your experience is limited to your own life only you know about you only you think the way you think only you have ever had your own experiences and challenges other people have not and they might not see the world the same way you do. I remember a twitter conversation with somebody who was talking about Peter Levels and everybody in our community enjoys Peter Levels' wonderful tweets and is, well, let's call them not extremely modern landing pages for his products. Right?

It's pretty old school. And that person was saying I cannot believe that somebody with landing pages that look this old that are not modern at all is making this crazy amount of money a month and it's kind of true it is surprising that Peter has his own style and it doesn't look very flashy, but he still makes a lot of money with his businesses. And some of the replies to this tweet were like, yeah, you just don't understand landing pages or you don't understand this particular thing. But one of the replies that I really enjoyed and then kind of chimed in on was, yeah, and you already started wondering about why this is the case, right? Why Peter levels is making money even though his pages are not extremely modern?

Maybe now you should ask yourself why you think that a beautiful landing page actually makes more money because it doesn't apparently as proven by this example. So that's giving up the assumption giving up the assumption that because in our community some things are like common knowledge and it is said that things like this should have results like that, well maybe that's not true or not completely true or not always true or not true in this niche or not true for this kind of customer. So that's the assumption that you may have, might have had for a long time, and it just might be wrong. Give up the assumptions and try others. Try the opposite one.

A website that intentionally looks very simple and minimalistic works really, really well with a particular kind of customer. How about that one? And now you can look into what kind of customer? What does minimalistic mean? Like, why is that the case?

Super interesting. Run a control group, see if the assumption might have actually held true. Just run experiments around it. Don't give up the business. Give up the assumption.

And the real lesson is that persistence isn't about blindly pushing forward with the same approach. It's about persistently experimenting and persistently questioning your assumptions and then persistently adapting based on what you learn from this. Founders who succeed, they're not the ones who never give up, but they're the ones who know what to give up and when. The next time somebody tells you don't give up remember they're kind of right, half right. Don't give up on your business but absolutely give up on the assumptions that are holding you back from finding what actually works.

And that's it for today. Thanks so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter avidkahl, a r v I d k h l. If you want to know what everybody's saying about your brand, your product or your name on over 4,000,000 podcasts, well podscan.fm tracks mentions of anything in near real time with a powerful API that turns these podcast conversations into actionable business data. And if you're hunting for your next business idea, you can get them delivered fresh from the podcast world at ideas.podscanfm where we extract the best startup opportunities from hundreds of hours of expert conversations every day.

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