WHY YOU SHOULDN’T QUIT YOUR STARTUP

What To Do If You’re Failing

Startup founders tend to say everything’s great, all the time. What to do when that’s not true. Not even close.

There is only one real difference between a startup that exits and a startup that fails: who quits. If the entrepreneur keeps going then the startup isn’t a failure. It’s just in a rough spot.

Here are four ways to get through a rough patch:

1. Tell people.

There’s this terrible code of silence in the startup world. You never tell people when you are having trouble. Your products are great, your customers are great, your cash flow is great. You have to say all this in order to get funding. At least this is the common wisdom.

In fact, though, I have found that the more honest I have been about my funding troubles, the more help I’ve received. At one point, I wrote about how my company was at the edge of financial ruin and I was an emotional wreck. The post did not attract any funding, but it did attract an incredible number of emails from A-list entrepreneurs who offered moral support and encouragement. And that is what got me though the rough spot, mentally, so that I could get myself to the funding sources I needed.

2. Play mental games.

So much of a startup is having a crazy, irrational faith that you are going to be the one in ten that actually makes it.

But no one is perfect. You can’t be perfectly crazy every moment. Which means that either you go completely nuts (not healthy) or you have bouts of rational self-doubt (healthy). During this time of self-doubt, you should find some mental tricks for forcing your brain to remember what it feels like to have faith in yourself. Each person finds their own ways of reaffirming their faith in themselves. Here are five things that help me regain faith in myself.

3. Pivot. Big.

I know that the idea of the pivot is very hip right now. That is, if things are not working with your current model, just change it. You can do this pretty easily if you ride another trend as well: lean startup.  If you pivot with a lean startup you get lots of chances to mess up with a very low cost (Bonus: When you talk about what you’re doing, you’ll sound like the king of jargon).

Continue reading this article at INC.com after the break!