The Founder Trap

What happens when the wrong thing works?

Entrepreneurship starts with experimentation and failure. Learning how to create value for others takes practice, and during that practice, you're going to make things no one wants or cares about.

Thankfully there are ways to shrink the failures and tighten the feedback loops. The Lean Startup Method has saved millions of years of time, encouraging entrepreneurs to build the smallest viable version of their product first instead of wasting years and small fortunes on an unvalidated idea. 

The great thing about staying lean is it allows you to rapidly iterate on new ideas, quickly testing businesses to figure out which one will work. The bad part is that in all the excitement of starting and testing ideas, you might not consider what it means to succeed.

At some point, entrepreneurship goes from giving you maximum optionality to providing none at all.

It clicked for me when a bank called to verify an employee worked at Growth Machine. She was buying a house. I answered the banker’s questions, hung up, and a few hours later it hit me: I really shouldn’t screw this up. It wasn’t just my income and lifestyle riding on my work. Someone’s house was too.

That seriousness intensified with each new employee and each new employee’s life milestones. Someone finds out they really need good health insurance. Someone has a baby. More houses. 

That seriousness can be one of the greatest sources of meaning in your work as an entrepreneur. Supporting someone taking maternity leave during COVID was much more rewarding than hitting revenue milestones. But that seriousness can also trap you because you quickly hit the point where you can’t quit.