Harnessing the power of liminal spaces as a founder

Just look at the headlines: “Why the world feels so unstable right now” (BBC), “Global economic uncertainty remains elevated” (IMF), “Learning to do business in an uncertain world” (FT)... Things feel pretty turbulent right now.

We’re in a phase of rapid transition where our understanding of life and work are challenged, and where we need to constantly reinvent ourselves — what anthropologists call a liminal space.

Those can be uncomfortable times of doubt and anxiety, especially so for indie founders. It’s hard enough to build a business as it is! So here are some practical tips to find creative ideas and build a resilient business in times of change and uncertainty.

These tips are based both on my experience as a founder and on what I learned about the brain as a researcher. They have been immensely useful as I’ve built Ness Labs, where many of our projects were born out of times of chaos.

I think it’s super important right now, but really, the advice below always applies: After all, life is a giant liminal space :)

#1: Increase your resilience to uncertainty

Uncertainty is a source of stress both for the founder and for the business, so there are two aspects to this: psychological and practical. You need to consider both in order to better manage that stress, and even turn it into “eustress” — the good kind of stress that makes challenges motivating.

Psychological resilience

Regarding the first aspect, psychologists study something called “tolerance to uncertainty”, which is our ability to cope with the unknown. This is incredibly important in general, but particularly so in liminal spaces where information is limited and the environment keeps on changing.

The best thing you can do to increase your psychological resilience to uncertainty is to build your mental gym.

It will be a bumpy ride, and it can be hard to “switch off” when you’re a solo founder. So lots of founders turn to mind-numbing TV or alcohol to disconnect from work. But your mind is your most precious asset as a founder, so you need to protect your mental health.

So do this instead: choose a couple of healthy coping activities for when you feel stressed. For me, it’s journaling and dancing. For other people it’s exercising, meditating, painting, playing an instrument. Experiment with a few coping activities until you find the ones that work for you.

Practical resilience

When it comes to the resilience of your business itself, there are several things you to make sure that you keep on thriving in chaos:

• Become an all-rounder. If you’re a solo founder, that means becoming good at most essential functions. For instance, a technical founder should learn enough marketing to keep the business afloat. And if you have a team, that means over-indexing on flexible generalists who can wear both a technical and a business hat depending on the needs of the business, and who’d be happy to pick up new skills if needed.
• Stay on top of big technological shifts. Imagine being the founder who ignored the explosion in mobile apps or that refused to switch to cloud-based solutions. Today, imagine being the founder ignoring AI as if it would have zero impact on their business. Don’t be that founder! You don’t have to jump on every trend, but be aware of how the world is changing so you’re not unknowingly putting your business at risk.
• Ship often. Liminal spaces are times of rapid change. Make sure to test your ideas by shipping them and collecting feedback. This could apply to features for an existing product, or new products entirely.

A big benefit of doing these three things is that even if your business fails, you’ll be in a much better position to limit the downside for yourself. With those skills + your knowledge about the market + a portfolio approach, you’ll be able to either freelance while you figure things out, or start anew with a more resilient business.

#2: Leverage times of change to generate creative ideas

It can be scary when you’ve built your business based on specific assumptions and these suddenly don’t hold true anymore. But such times of change are also great arenas for founders to come up with new ideas.

Building an indie startup is about finding a problem that enough people experience strongly enough that they would pay for a solution. Turns out, liminal spaces are teeming with both new problems and new ways to solve them.

Here are some examples of how you can practice liminal creativity:

• Explore new problems. Are there any old problems in your space that can finally be solved thanks to new technology? Or are there new problems created by some recent changes in the way we work? For example, @asilzada11 noticed the annoying context switching when working with ChatGPT and quickly built a MacOS app that adds ChatGPT to any text field, generating $13k in two weeks.
• Develop new skills. You’ve been building a product based on your existing skillset. What if you tried improving aspects that would require you to upskill yourself? @dinkydani and @jivings are amazing examples of this principle: While their comfort zone is coding, they learned everything they could about branding and marketing while building Leave Me Alone.
• Build for new niches. When the lines are getting blurrier, is there a way to position yourself to help a very specific kind of customer solve their unique problems? For example, @jrfarr noticed that there were no good products for people who were both coders and creators, so he imagined Lemon Squeezy, built by developers for developers.

Uncertainty can be structural (a fast-changing environment) or personal (your skills and ability to navigate a new space). As you can see, success is all about turning that uncertainty into creative opportunity. Yes, you’re not quite sure how things will go, but by asking questions and experimenting, you can ride the wave of change instead of resisting it.

#3: Think like a scientist to learn from success and failure

Finally, it’s incredibly important to not only accept that things can go wrong (because things will go wrong sometimes), but to learn from those moments of failure. Just like a scientist who observes unexpected results when performing an experiment, treat any outcome as a useful source of data.

One of my favorite tools to make this a habit is Plus Minus Next. It’s super simple. In the first column, write everything that went well. In the second column, write everything that didn’t go as planned. And in the last column, write everything you want to focus on next.

Ideally, you want to block 15 minutes every week to go through it. I personally do this on Sunday evenings. It’s a great way to learn both from success and failure, and to define your weekly priorities. I also use it with my team: each team member fills their Plus Minus Next each week and we review it during our 1:1 to make sure we keep on learning from the good and the bad.

Summing up

• Increase your resilience to uncertainty by taking care of your mental health and building an antifragile business.
• Leverage times of change to generate creative ideas by exploring new problems, developing new skills, and building for new niches.
• Learn from success and failure by implementing metacognitive strategies like a weekly review.

Bonus: Find your fellow liminalists

Liminal spaces are much easier to navigate when you don’t go it alone. Find other founders who are on a similar journey — people who have a high tolerance to uncertainty, who are looking for creative ideas to leverage times of change, and who are willing to learn from both success and failure.

Indie Hackers is actually a great place for this! When I made my first dollar online four years ago, I announced it on Indie Hackers. I’ve connected with so many amazing founders by hanging out here. So I hope this post was helpful in some way and provided some food for thought!