Why Are We Surprised That Startups Are so Freaking Hard

Highlights

  • 'the only enduring moat is effort'
  • "...building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, than any of us expected it to be. And at that time, if we realized the pain and suffering, and just how vulnerable you're going to feel, and the challenges that you're going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong, I don't think anyone would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it."
  • "The clever plan doesn’t remove the need to compete; it just distracts us from it."

Business Aren't Build on Gimmicks

"People will be excited about your company because you have that missing piece. They won’t ask you about everything you have to copy to build a great email client, or a new CRM, or the next enduring social network—they’ll ask you about your clever wedge. Tell someone about your cloud-first Alteryx, or your warehouse-native HubSpot, or your dbt-backed Tableau, or your AI-enabled Zendesk, and they’ll want to talk about the cloud-first, warehouse-native, dbt-backed, and AI-enabled parts. And we’ll deceive ourselves into believing those are the important parts. But all the work is in building the unremarkable features and business processes that Alteryx, HubSpot, Tableau, and Zendesk already have.

Because big businesses aren’t built on gimmicks. You can blitz your way through Sand Hill Road and spike up the App Store charts on gimmicks, but you can’t actually use them to replace Gmail, or Salesforce, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram. Even seemingly instant successes can’t become lasting companies without putting in the work—developing checkbox features, building enterprise sales motions, creating support escalation policies, arguing about sales compensation strategies, defining career ladders, preparing for board meetings, negotiating office leases, hiring lawyers, changing lawyers, dealing with Trinet, helping employees deal with Trinet, responding to investor emails about trendy but useless features that nobody will ever want unless they only want to be a part of the latest fad, setting up the office Wi-Fi, fixing the office Wi-Fi, yelling at Comcast Business about the office Wi-Fi, emailing customers about your new pricing model, redoing your all-hands format, introducing and re-introducing OKRs, and a list of 100 other mundane things that every single one of us overlooks in pitch decks"

Conclusion

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the companies that have a reputation for building the best products of this generation—Slack, Figma, Superhuman, Notion, and Linear—are basically new versions of successful predecessors. These companies didn’t distract themselves with four-step strategic maneuvers or clever wedges into a new category that they claimed to be creating. They took on the challenge directly instead—built a better Hipchat, or Illustrator, or Gmail, or Google Docs, or Asana. They knew they’d have to do it eventually, and rather than pretend that they could avoid it, they started with that plan. The strategy was to do the work.

author: @benn_stancil
description: "You don't need a clever idea to build a great company."