How do you stay motivated as a founder?
It’s hard to stay motivated as a founder. Sometimes it’s a big part of your job to believe when no one else does. And sometimes… well. It’s hard for even you to believe.
I was recently reminded of the difficulty of staying motivated when we launched Trivial. We’d been building for months, and I hit a wall where I was so discouraged, I couldn’t bring myself to type another keystroke.
At that moment, the project seemed doomed. It felt like anything I could do would be a waste of time. Self-loathing kicked into high gear, and my thoughts got… dark.
In the back of my mind was the ubiquitous advice to launch early, but I was struggling with that for two reasons:
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Dreams die at launch. Before launch, you can tell yourself a fantasy that users will love it, and your product will go viral just because you opened the doors.
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It’s not done! Of course people won’t love it — it’s barely a sliver of the vision and riddled with obvious flaws.
The thing I didn’t understand was that by indulging in that delay, I was also preventing myself from the very thing that motivates me– interacting with an audience. I build products because I love to see people use them. It’s as simple as that.
We’re launching into a crowded space, so we’re doing a promo — if people try Trivial, we’ll send them a t-shirt. I put a trickle of ad spend against it, and suddenly, I’m interacting with my users. I’m doing support. I’m watching the exact way the product fails them — and it definitely fails them — and it’s exhilarating.
Are users in love with the product? Far from it. But do I watch their interactions and get inspired about what we should do next? You bet.
I firmly believe that our startups should serve us, and not vice-versa.
So when things are going well, and the money is flowing in freely, I find that my motivation dips quite a bit.
When things look grim, or they look to be in decline, I go into highly-motivated overdrive mode and hunker down to reverse the bad trend.
I know I can't be the only one.
For me it's actually reversed. I'm the most motivated when things go well.
But the difference might be that I'm not yet living off my product. When your income depends on it, maybe it reverses indeed. I wish I had days when the money is flowing in freely 😃
You aren't, but that kind of stress isn't healthy. We all get motivated by deadlines, commitments, and unfortunately, lack.
Maybe one strategy to break the feast or famine phenomenon might be to immediately set higher goals. In other words, if you achieve your goals, immediately have an even further goal, so that the achievement of the first goal is point zero.
A very well working "hack" for me is working on something that you use yourself, that provides value for you (even if you are the only user).
I've been a way easier time working on https://kaado.io then anything else I tried - by far - because it's scratching my own itch first and foremost.
This might mostly apply to B2C but I think can work for B2B too - see dogfooding.
What really helped me was selling/donating most of my possessions and starting to do the digital nomad thing. I was based in LA at the time, facing massive burnout and not getting anything done(large backstory here I won't bore you with the details).
After I started traveling, my motivation came back almost instantly. I started connecting with other digital nomads by staying in co-living spaces and I started having this feeling that I can work hard and then play hard, and the two fed off of each other.
Example:
In Hawaii, I'd wake up at 5am, work until 5pm, and then surf until the sunset. I would be in bed by 9-10, insanely excited to do it again.
If you want to chat more about it happy to dive into the details.
Hang in there !
That's the dream, right there!
Wildly off-topic, but why surf in the evening instead of sunrise? Is that just personal preference, trade winds, the dawn patrol crowd or something else?
I'm outside SF and tend towards dawn when the winds, traffic, and crowds are manageable.
It was more about prioritization on my side. I do my best work in the morning, so I tried to work around that. The surf was solid all day so you really couldn't go wrong out there haha.
Plus if I wasn't getting my best work done, I wouldn't feel great while out in the water, I'd just be stressing about all the stuff I had to do.
That makes a ton of sense. I need to get this product on its feet and get to a place where the surf is solid all day!
This definitely resonates! I went through that numerous times when building my previous product. Which ultimately failed because I burned myself out building the product for so long that when it was time to launch, I had no energy or motivation left. I literally just left it to die.
Lots of valuable lessons were learned tho, and most importantly – test early and often. The sooner you put your idea (doesn't even have to be something that is built yet) in front of people, the sooner you can start learning. It's simple in hindsight, but super easy to forget when you start building.
Designing for "Test early" is a skill in itself. How do you make high quality tests that people don't ignore because they look early/low effort/spam?
An excellent way to validate early ideas through concept testing is to recruit people even earlier in the process — when doing your generative research. This way, you know the people are close to the problem and might possibly have a personal interest in seeing it solved, so they’re pretty excited to see the ideas form from an early stage.
It would definitely be trickier to do lo-fi concept testing with complete strangers. It’s doable but just makes it more challenging.
Wow!! I’ll do anything for a free tshirt haha
Technical feedback:
Address 2blank. Rather than an empty string, it actually sends undefined. This passes the api validation too.Design feedback:
Other feedback:
Glad you persevered and launched! Keep it up. Thanks for the tshirt. Got me to sign up and I felt like I should give you added feedback too.
This is great feedback, thank you! Shirts are at the print shop now.
"While I was able to complete the free tshirt tutorial since I do a lot of design / development work, I think you should continue to ensure less technical users are comfortable, like my mom who struggled"
We've had an identity crisis around this question– "how technical should the product/our user be?" After interacting with different code-comfort levels, we've resolved around "can code or wants to learn".
Woohoo!
Yea, that’s a really big question mark for me: why would developers use your project? Especially when they could just code it. I don’t think it would be used at mid to large sized companies either.
You may be targeting this gap of low-code tools. I’ve not really taken the time to understand that market though.
As to "why would developers use this?" Here's a blurb I wrote for the Reddit post that's still better than any of the "marketing materials" we've done, here goes:
Maybe you took a learn-to-code course or a 101 class in college. Chapter 1 goes fine, and then you hit a brick wall of dependency management, class inheritance, and security issues. Way more than you wanted to deal with.
Or maybe you're a developer, and because you've mastered all of that, you know first-hand what a pain it is. You just want a place to quickly write the script that's in your head.
Trivial gives you:
Low/No-code tools give you some of that, but then you don't own your source, have version control, etc. That's the sweet spot we want to hit.
Motivation has nothing to do with it. You show up when you don't feel like it and do the work.
That mentality gets you through the bad days, I agree. But the less often you have to drag yourself in the better.
Oh for sure. It's like going to the gym, it's those days you don't feel like it that are the most important, but you need to get some satisfaction out of it
I used to have a colleague who was into cycling. He said that the days where it just doesn't go well, are the days where you can make the most gains if you push through. I don't know if it's physically correct or not. But I do think that having this mentality is better than quitting. It gives you extra motivation on the off days.
Although I'm not sure if you can translate this easily into knowledge work.
I love what I do. I'm dedicated to my idea I'm building on. My Idea is solving problems of me and my friends.
But nevertheless considering always the worst case scenario...
...just letting me go further.
As a founder of Student Life Saviour ( https://studentlifesaviour.com/ie ), I try to remain motivated by interacting positively with all my staffs and clients, and positively encouraging them even though the output is not what is expected. This way of positive approach help me to remain motivated and encourage me further to put in more efforts.
Personally, I stay motivated through exercise. This allows me to relieve stress and clear my head. This way, I'm able to fill the thoughts with new ideas.
It's a great morning ritual, that is quite easy to get used to :)
Totally agree @kiosan. For me, taking a walk outside really clears my brain and works out all the latent stress energy that builds up during the day. I carry a small notebook in case I come up with a good idea.
Also, I have a coach/therapist I see every once in a while to help me unlock blockers like perfectionism.
Startup life is a marathon and it helps to stay physically and mentally healthy to sustain yourself on the journey! :)
My main motivation is the involvement of people working with me
Great tips! I'd also like to add is that part of what can keep you motivated is remembering exactly how you arrived at the moment of building your startup.
It's a magical moment where things suddenly all came together!
Try to relive that magic anytime you're feeling frustrated.
Hope this helps!
The biggest motivator for us when building ServerAuth was taking on customers without charging them. It might sound silly but it worked very well for us.
We started off with an entirely free product, with no fixed timeframe on when we'd start charging. This worked really well to validate the idea, to get feedback and to figure out how people used our product.
We're in the extreme niche area so are immediately putting ourselves at a disadvantage. But having ~20 people using and relying on our product for their business was the biggest motivator.
We used that to figure out where we wanted to take things, and only when we were at a point where we had a solid offering did we introduce a paid plan.
Within a few days of that we had a handful of customers convert to paid - that right there, getting your first paying customer is a HUGE motivator.
Since then we've grown a fair bit, and every time we get a new customer it just drives motivation higher and higher.
We follow a slightly different mentality than most bootstrapped startups. We've kept our operations lean so we're not reliant on getting more and more paying customers in to survive. This makes it all that better every time you get that new customer and can see that you've got more cash coming in each month to drive back into even more improvements.
You're essentially creating your own gamification system. More customers = more money = more space to expand your feature set.
You need to love what you're doing. If building your product is a slog and you're not enjoying it then that wont change, your motivation won't improve without a serious change in perspective. It cannot all be about money, and if you're not in it to solve a problem then I think you'll always struggle to get anywhere these days.
We discovered this the hard way. We're two founderd who have worked together for close to two decades, and we spent a big chunk of that building what we thought people wanted, and didn't enjoy the process at all. We were missing the key element of it needing to be something you're passionate about.
Thanks for mentioning the early release idea. I am very new to creating and launching my own thing, been providing client services all my life until now. I did do a soft launch 2 days ago and agonised and hyperfocused without any breaks ever since trying to patch up all the holes. But finding this community and reading through your post and the comments are giving me much-needed peace. Now I know it is the right thing to do to launch early and listen to feedback instead. And that the psychological rollercoaster is the real and ongoing thing. It does feel like a relief of sorts now that I don't have to beat myself up over the never-ending launch delays. I am glad to hear you found your mojo and are riding the next wave. Upwards and onwards!
Lack of motivation can definitely be a blocker, that's why I only work on projects that I am genuinely passionate about. I always ask myself: "Would I see myself working on this for the next 5 years?"
Another way that helps me to stay motivated is to set daily goals in the WBE Space. The members there keep me accountable :D
Yep! That’s a great litmus test. My personal moment of darkness was 1 year into an idea that passed my “10 years” test. An idea I was less passionate about may way have died that day.
My motivation can be boosted by analytical tools such as GA, Google Search Console, and LinkedIn analytics. These tools can provide me with valuable feedback regarding my efforts and can also increase my motivation to follow through on everything I have planned.
💯
Ultimately, it comes down to love what you do or do what you love.
If you don't have passion for it, you're most likely going to stop doing it.
Of course, even if you love what you do there are going to be crappy times as you may not get any traction/sales or a major catastrophic event happened to your business and you lost client/revenue.
I believe it's very important to have a support system in place so when things go bad you can go and talk to them and they will lift you up or guide you on how to resolve the issues.
If you don't have a local support group I think the next best thing is joining startup communities like indiehacker, hackernews and saas facebook groups because we're going to go through very similar things.
I'm also available if anyone wants to have a quick chat about their product or mines.
Launch is only the beginning. Wait till you get to year 5 my friend.
In the current phase of working on BotMeNot I'm mostly getting motivated by receiving detailed feedback. It shows me that users are interesting in it, but that there are things that should be worked on.
Yes, exactly!
Thanks so cool, I can really empathize with your experience. In the end we are social beings, and at some point the tremendous effort required in creating a high quality digital product needs some sort of 'validation'.
While working on https://www.digstack.com, an online whiteboard with native timer and voting on a free plan, I keep motivated by keeping conversations going. I think that's all you have in the beginning, and these conversations really drive everything.
Best of luck with Trivial, we'll give it a shot - cool project!
Yes! Those conversations are the lifeblood of nascent products.
I'm disappointed 🙁
I'll tell you what– a few international shipments won't break our budget.
If you want to run through the claim form, I'll look for your response and green light it. If I'm lucky, you'll give me some detailed feedback on your experience in exchange ;)
Actually, a next t-shirt is not something I desperately need. Let's save the world some CO2 😉
I'm happy to share some feedback though. The promise to own the source code is quite compelling. However, after setting up a simple app, my first question was: where is the code? How can I export the source code?
@LukaszWiktor Sounds good, let me know if you change your mind!
I've been waiting for someone to notice you can't export the source in the current version ;)
The export tool hasn't been ported to the v2 build that's live now, but you can access it here with a URL pattern like this: https://www.trivialapps.io/apps/:id/export
That page lets you generate a .zip with a NodeJS app.
One thing that works for me is that my services are part of my everyday activities. Makes everything easier and motivating.
I stay motivated a few ways:
I have a recurring event on my calendar called "Your Why" and in the description of that event is the reason I do what I do. I read it when I feel down or hopeless.
After being in the game for several years, I've realized that something always works out the end to pull me out of a tough situation, so I started to believe that I'll genuinely be okay no matter what happens.
I believe in my ability to figure things out. If one thing doesn't work, I know I can make a quick pivot into something else that'll bring in income (freelancing, etc.) while I focus on improving the main business/project.
I love the game of building a business. It's so interesting and fulfilling. There is no quitting. There are only breaks before I start the next thing or picking up where I left off.
Speaking of breaks, that helps with finding motivation again too. Sometimes it's okay to take a week or two off to come back with a clear mind.
I find paid communities where people a few levels higher than me hang out so I can ask them for guidance. It can help shortcut a few months or years of trying to figure it out on your own, and it's motivating to see others succeed in the same space as you.
Hope that helps!
I have a variation on the "my why" - it is a recurring task that I need to add a new comment to every day. So when I do feel down I can just read through all the comments I accumulated over the previous weeks. But I only really needed that for an app Idea I shelfed for now. My true passion project https://www.adhdgenius.club/ doesn't seem to need any Whys as it solves my own problems like nothing else does.
Can I ask for your recommendation on the best value for money paid support community you are part of? I have just did a soft launch 2 days ago - my first ever after providing only client services for the past 20 years. So I feel I need more support in the proper launching and marketing department. Thanks in advance!
I like this! You can even make it into an affirmation! LOL
Good tips– Breaks are important and difficult to master, at least for me.
When I hit that "couldn't type another keystroke" moment, I worked on a dormant project for about 5 days. Eventually the cloud lifted and I could see a path for Trivial again.
THis ia a great take on how to stay motivated. I have been struggling to "finish" my app Eurotripr and have been forcing myself to "show up" every day to code a little for a few hours because I , like you, coded too long in the void and lost motivation and had "dark thoughts" for several months before I jumped back on the wagon to try to "finish". Needless to say I need to focus on getting the app into the hands of users, "done" or not, so I can interact with them and feel the excitement of interacting with users. Even if they hate it and slam it for being unfinished or buggy. Thanks for this. Needed something like this today.
Awesome, good luck with the release!
I’ve learn motivation is not the thing cause you need motivation when you’re not sure on what to do.
When you have a clear plan and roadmap and be confident to stick it. Motivation is not needed, just follow the schedule.
And need it > want it
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The forces or drive within an entrepreneur that affect the direction, intensity, and persistence of his or her voluntary behaviour as an entrepreneur is the entrepreneurial motivation.
When I have bad days, I try to imagine the future. So, the one bad day will not destroy what I have built so far and where I'm going.
Probably a helpful exercise in visioning / setting the bigger agenda, too!
For me, I am trying daily affirmations that help me to remind me on my core values, the mission and also the struggles, to make it universal and non exclusive …
Sometimes we make problems seem special to us, but actually it’s happening to many people, just to remind myself that I’m not alone in this ..
Then focus on what I can do to change the situation and make things better.
I made a daily affirmation specific for founders/entrepreneurs, and shared it on Gumroad and it’s free. Let me know what you think and hope this helps.
https://darrentravel.gumroad.com/l/founderbooster
"Dreams die at launch. Before launch, you can tell yourself a fantasy that users will love it, and your product will go viral just because you opened the doors."
Yes. Totally can relate to this! It's like we're so attached to theoretical success that we can't allow our baby to face the real world. This is tough, but it's like ripping a band-aid off.
How are you doing with motivation these days? How do you handle it when customer interactions slow down?
We're only 2 weeks post-launch, so I've stayed busy fixing UX gaps and feeling like I have a reason to build. I know we're paying ~$23 for each demo, so I'm motivated to make big leaps forward every few days. And I know what I'm working on right now will see light in a few days, which is really the cadence I love.
At my last co it got to a place where it would take months to release non-critical code, and it just got so painfully boring as we got hemmed in by our medium-ish success & expectations for stability.
I've been tempted to turn the Trivial ad off when I feel like we've learned what we can without a bigger release ("big" meaning a week of work, ha!), but I've left it running to keep the pressure on and stay in the flow.
When dreams are dying at launch, you lacked test your idea just before.
For me the most disappointing situation is having a new great idea and then look on google search results
That google bar is another dream killer, for sure.
The dream that dies at launch is a fantasy of going viral / an easy win.
Been there. Can help you find options when shit hits the fan. DM me on Twitter.