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Founder success is almost never what we picture it to be.

When we think of wildly successful Founders our minds easily jump to billionaires like Branson, Blakely, and Musk, balancing a life of magazine cover story photoshoots with keynote presentations and TV interviews. Our most "successful" Founders often have this air of glamour around their success.

But as it happens, Founder "success" feels way less glamorous. In fact, the most exciting success milestones are often so mundane when they occur that we don't even realize they happened. But this success is a culmination not of a single event, but a series of tiny events that we later look back and realize was when our success was truly defined.

We Always Make Payroll

For most of our journ...

The most expensive time to raise capital is when we're most vulnerable.

This paradox is the heart and soul of where we get leveraged as Founders, particularly when we're giving up valuable equity. What we need to do in those vulnerable moments is step back and ask ourselves "Is this the best possible time to take on dilution or can we find a way forward that costs us less later?"

If we've never built a startup before, we may not even realize how important this question is. For those of us that have, we're hyper-aware of how badly we get beat up in our previous startup by not being more mindful of protecting ourselves when we were most vulnerable.

Our goal then should be identifying our moments of vulnerability and crafting a more viable pat...

Startup culture has gone from glorifying victory to glorifying effort.

"Hustle Porn" has become more and more popular, particularly on social media, where would-be champions of entrepreneurship proclaim their insane personal sacrifices to the Gods of Startups. We're constantly wooed with tales of Founders putting in insane hours, risking it all, and coming away with the spoils of success to show for it.

How much of this is really a celebration of hard work and is how much is just the equivalent of giving ourselves a Participation Award for effort?

"I just put in 100 hours this week!"

Let's start by debunking the myth that working 100 hours in a week is somehow a victory to be lauded — it's not. The intention is that we're SO dedicated to ou...

Startups can only be great at one thing — if we're even that lucky.

One of the greatest challenges in our early days is that our ideas for new features and strategies far outweighs not only our resources but the amount of progress we've made on our core product itself. We'll sit in strategy sessions saying, "Oh boy! What if we added this feature, or went down this path! Now that would be incredible!" without realizing our big ideas are actually going to be the death of us.

What we fail to understand is that great companies are built by maintaining a razor-sharp focus on their core product with an unrelenting drive to be the absolute best at that one thing, at the expense of all other distractions. Great Founders have the ability to never lo...

Living in an overpriced is now a choice, not a requirement.

That wasn't always the case, as startup Founders like us would flock to cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York to find the capital and people we needed to build something incredible (I lived in all of them). We'd convince ourselves that our 800 square foot apartment (with roommates!) made sense because if we weren't here, we would never have a shot a startup glory!

And we were mostly right — for a time.

But the requirements of being in a big, overpriced city have changed dramatically. For the first time in startup history, we can do nearly all of the things we once did in a big city from the comfort of our own (much cheaper) home. In a new era of Slack, Social, and Z...

A customer journey map can be an incredibly helpful tool for your business. These maps outline every step that your customer goes through while engaging with your company, from learning about you for the first time to making repeat purchases. A customer journey map helps ensure that your customers are the center of your marketing — it should include touchpoints, frustrations, purchasing motivations, and the like. Creating one can help you identify pain points and keep your customers engaged throughout their buying process.

In this article, we’re going to outline how you can create a customer journey map for your inbound sales funnel.

Start by defining your buyer personas

Before creating your customer journey map, you need to build and defi...

Startups run on money but survive by optimism.

The greatest currency in our startup is our wildly insane, totally manufactured optimism that things might actually work out, even in the face of everything taking a giant crap on us. That of course sounds inspiring, but when we're actually living in that position when everywhere we turn things are falling apart, it's hard to pretend we can just put on a happy face and make everything a resounding positive.

This isn't a pep talk though — it's a game plan. The difference between letting our startups implode and bringing them from the brink of destruction is how we plan through this mess. As a 9-time startup Founder myself, I can tell you it sucks every. single. time. There's nothing cool about ...

No one cares what we have — they care that they don't have it.

That's a huge problem for Founders because we often have very asymmetrical compensation compared to the rest of our staff. We have more equity, we have a higher salary. We're on an investor retreat to some insanely cool resort while they are freezing their asses off in our cramped office. We're driving the new Benz while they're sharing a Kia with their roommate.

No matter what the delta is, what we have and what everyone else does not will always be a problem. As the organization grows, and the delta between our lifestyle and that of our staff increases, this situation only gets exponentially worse.

What we need to do is first understand why it's happening and then be mindful ...

Growing slowly is the fastest way to build a sustainable startup.

From the outset that sounds like a contradiction, right? How could "growing slowly" and scaling possibly be congruent? They are if we take the time to understand that scaling is only possible once we've identified the assumptions in our business that are actually true.

As it happens, most Founders don't realize that "growing slowly" isn't about the long-term growth curve of a startup, it's about the near-term growth curve, the part where we are still trying to figure out exactly how this thing works.

Amplifying Mistakes With Acceleration

The case for acceleration is that we'll get to where we need to be faster. But that rests on one (often) broken assumption — that we're acc...

The most impossible task for a Startup Founder is to "invent a big idea."

It's not because we lack creativity, it's because we wind up focusing our energy on the wrong thing. Big ideas, by themselves, are nearly impossible to corral in our minds because they are inherently either "not big enough" or "too big to tackle."

We tend to go about this all backward. We assume that once an idea is incredible enough, it will guide all of our actions thereafter. But that is like putting a map down on a table and saying "We want to go west!" without making this is the most reasonable path.

"What Do I Want This Idea To Achieve?"

Any idea can become a "big idea" if you work at it hard enough. What we should be more focused on is a step beyond that — wha...