Two years of building a startup! What changed?
What changed in two years? My thoughts, perceptions, decision making skills? Let me walk you through
Hello there 👋
I have been thinking of starting my newsletter since Jan 2023, and cannot think of a better time to finally start this.
It’s the 24th of Oct, Dussehra in India. Exactly 2 years ago, on this day, I was feeling calm, nervous, and excited all at the same time.
Leaving a good salary, a comfortable job, and jumping straight into the chaos of building a startup is still one of the hardest decisions I have taken ever!! I always talk a lot about going through this transition so today I won’t bore you with the same. But in this one, I will be sharing about what changed with me as an Individual and as a Professional after this.
Time to look back and reflect!
Everyone says building a startup is a roller coaster ride. The experiences are different for different people, but one thing is constant, learning is exponential. It changes the way you think and the way you make decisions. For me, these 4 things will be the highlight of these 2 years -
Calmer in the Chaos!
Building a startup in its early phase means you will be in a time and resource crunch. There will be many things to take care of and because you are among those few people who have the whole context, you need to pay attention to everything. This leads to a lot of context-switching and you start getting overwhelmed.
Happened many times to me, and I won’t lie, it happens even now. But slowly I learned to be okay with this. You can plan things better, yet there will be 20% unknowns.
This makes you calmer and better at making decisions. Difficult to do than to say, I still need to practice this a lot 😁
Decisions are Binary. It’s Yes or No!
While building Peerlist I got a chance to talk and meet many leaders. One thing was common in almost all of them, clarity! We have to be super clear with our expectations and our goals. It basically comes as a chain reaction, high clarity gives you better priority and better priority helps you execute better.
But how to bring this clarity? It’s a matter of practice!
Not keeping your decision pending and making it in a yes/no way helps a lot in thinking clearly. Yes or No means there is no room for vagueness… you have to be thoughtful about the side effects and move forward. When you restrict yourself to this, you start getting clarity.
Your every binary decision won’t be right, but all the wrong ones will make things more clear for you!
Things will never be Perfect!
I remember the very early days of Peerlist with 100-200 users. Every error msg on our prod-monitoring slack channel used to make me feel bad!
“How did this error happen, why my product is not perfect, why this edge case was not handled 😂”
We used to do deployments and ship once a month because I wanted to make every feature, everything perfect! I used to feel every software in every company has perfectly working clean code written. Well yes, I was this naive!!!
No one can write 100% clean code.
Your product might not handle some edge cases.
Some users might not like some features you built.
There will be some errors on the server.
I had a hard time accepting all these. I am not saying that it’s okay to have unhandled scenarios or people not liking some features, but expecting things to be best in the first go is impossible! You have to improve with the feedback.
Software is built by shipping small things, improving what is not working, and iterating constantly. Enjoying that process is the only way to build a good close to perfect software.
I learned this the hard way after many panic attacks (not literally) but I am grateful I learned 😁
Comfort is not always comfortable!
Leaving a good salary throws you out of your comfort zone. You have to build, ship, and do things that you have never done, get exposed to a lot of unknowns, and all this makes you a little uncomfortable.
Things you do for the very first time are the ones that make you learn. This process ultimately becomes repetitive and feeling comfortable at times makes you uncomfortable!
For some, this might feel toxic but trust me this happens. It helps you improve. I remember talking to my cofounder Akash and discussing this many times in the past 2 years.
With the power of hindsight, I can say, I may have made things more complicated than they should have been. But I am grateful for all these learnings and the way my thought process has changed.
Today, while remembering this entire journey, I am glad that 2 years back I took this hard decision 💚
Until next time 🥂