The Silent Killer of Startups (And How to Prevent It)

0:00Despite what you see all over Twitter, LinkedIn, and definitely here on YouTube, building a startup is not easy. In fact, it's hard. It's really hard. And you know what makes it exponentially harder? Trying to do it all by yourself. I've been in this game for more than 20 years. And I can tell you that the founders who burn out, who make expensive mistakes, who spend months building the wrong thing, they're almost

0:21always the ones building in isolation. They're sitting alone at their desk trying to solve problems that have already been solved, losing sleep over decisions that could take 10 minutes to gut check with another founder. Today, I'm going to show you why building alone is dangerous, what your real options are, and exactly how to surround yourself with other founders who can help you navigate this chaos without losing your mind. To get started, let's talk about why building alone is often so dangerous for founders. There are a lot of challenges to building a startup on your own without someone else to bounce ideas off of. I'm going to just

0:54cover three in this video for the sake of time. The first one is that you move slower oftent times because you're stuck in the echo chamber of your own head. You reinvent wheels that don't need reinventing. You solve problems from scratch that someone else has already cracked. And if you had a conversation with another founder, whether they're your co-founder or whether they're just someone who knows your business pretty well, you can often get unstuck in just a few minutes. Another issue that happens when you're building alone is you get stuck in analysis paralysis. You don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of and you can spend hours or days or weeks

1:28debating decisions that should take a few minutes. And lastly, when you're building a loan, the emotional toll is a big one. It can be brutal. Entrepreneurship has ups and downs. It's often described as a roller coaster, which has become kind of cliche now, but it's better with someone else in the car with you. When you're alone, your lows hit harder, your lows are lower, and your highs are lower as well. Your lows last longer. And when you are building with someone else who's celebrating with you, you have the support to keep you going when you hit the lows, and you have the support to celebrate the wins

2:01when they come. So, you might be wondering if I'm saying, "Well, everyone should have a co-founder." And that's that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying everyone should have a founder or group of founders to bounce ideas off of. There's a reason that when my co-founder and I started our B2B SAS accelerator just 7 years ago, we focused on a community. We focused on running batches

2:20of founders through a one-year program. We could have just funded willy-nilly. It would actually be so much easier for us logistically if we just wrote checks here and there and put people in a Slack group. But no, instead one week every 6 months, we get a cajillion applications and we sift through all of them at once and then we let everyone into the program on the same day and they go through it as a batch or a cohort and that model allows them to support each other. It's like being in the same grad school class or being in the same graduating high school class. This camaraderie forms between them and we

2:54have masterminds and we have our online community which is in Slack. We have in-person meetups and events and then there's the broader alumni community as well. So even if a tiny seed founder doesn't have a co-founder, they have a lot of knowledgeable founders that they're able to bounce ideas off of. So no, I'm not saying that you need a co-founder. In fact, within Tiny Seed, the majority of founders we have backed are solo founders. There are still some investors out there that almost require you to have a co-founder. And all things being equal, I think having a co-founder

3:24is probably better than building solo. But honestly, co-founder relationships can implode. You never give anyone more equity than you do if you split 50/50 with your co-founder. So, it's not a one-sizefits-all prescription. I do not believe that everyone needs or should have a co-founder, but I do advise that every founder, whether you have a co-founder or not, build some sort of personal board of advisors or a mastermind. And a mastermind can actually be viewed as a personal or a professional board of adviserss. So you

3:54might be thinking, what is a mastermind? It's a small group of founders that meet on a regular basis. It's often every other week or once a month. The ideal group size in my mind is between four and six founders. Any smaller than that and you don't have a good enough mix of ideas, I think. And as you get larger than that, you're just kind of in a meeting full of a bunch of people and it's easy to check out. And so the idea behind a mastermind is that two or three or four minds are better than one. And these aren't just random founders that you meet at a conference where you have

4:22to explain all the context in your whole business. These are people who understand what's going on because they're going through it, too. And they are kind of going through it with you. They've followed your story over weeks, months, and in some cases years. I've been in three different mastermind groups in my professional career, and one of them has lasted 15 years, and we still talk once a month. and it has been invaluable for my sanity and for my progress as a founder. You might be wondering, what do I get from a mastermind? Four things. Number one, accountability. You want to ship when you say you'll ship and people can keep

4:53you accountable to being committed to the things that you've said you want to accomplish. Number two is advice. It's from people who faced or are facing similar challenges. And you can use their networks, right? It's your network of all your friends put together that can level you up. and they might know someone who's done the thing you're trying to do or they might have done it themsel. Number three is gut checks. Gut checks on big decisions that you're going to make before you make expensive mistakes, sanity checks, sounding boards, and it's not just in the mastermind meeting itself. You reach out to them in Slack or you text them. I

5:27still have ongoing lines of communication with founders who I have been in masterminds with or who have known through tiny seed or as I was coming up. And I will I will think to myself, I need to make this big decision. Who would be able to be a quick sounding board for me? Whether I text them to get their idea, whether I send them a a voice message in WhatsApp or Slack or whether we jump on a call, it is so good knowing that there are

5:51people out there who are rooting for me. And the number four thing you can get from a mastermind is encouragement and celebration. So when things get hard, and they will, the people in your mastermind can be huge supporters and they can encourage you to keep going. They can encourage you when you are, you know, maybe need to shut down. They can celebrate the wins with you as you have them. And this is something you don't get from a significant other and you

6:13don't get from nonfounder friends. There's a tremendous amount of value to the accountability, the advice, the gut checks, and the encouragement you'll get from a mastermind. There are different ways to structure a mastermind. You can do a hot seat format, which is where each meeting someone takes the majority of the time. So, if you have a 60-minute meeting and there's four people in it, maybe three of them give 5 minute updates on what they're up to and then the the fourth participant gets a full 45 minutes to just deep dive into a problem. If you're going to do a hot seat, this is where you focus on your

6:45biggest current challenge. And as I said, it's great for deep diving. Option number two is to have a round table where everyone gets the same amount of time. This is great for accountability. If you're struggling to make progress, this is where you set goals. You hold each other's feet to the fire if they aren't doing the work. You often talk about what did you accomplish? What didn't you accomplish? What do you want to accomplish before the next time we meet? Maybe talk about biggest struggles or biggest wins. I've traditionally been in roundt masterminds, but that doesn't mean they're the right way to do it. But the key is no matter the structure, it's

7:16consistency. It's commitment and consistency to meeting up and building your relationships over time. And now you might be wondering, great, I want to be in a mastermind. Where do I find people? There's a couple options. The first is by going local. This is going to entrepreneurship meetup groups and seeing if there are other folks out

7:33there kind of doing what you're doing. Then the second option is online. And realistically, this tends to be uh unless you're really in a startup hub, tends to be an easier way to do it, right? So maybe you put a message out on whatever platform you currently use to communicate with entrepreneurs. Whether you're on Reddit, whether you're on Twitter, LinkedIn, if you're a part of my paid membership community called Microcom Connect, the big thing to keep in mind is that you want to find folks who are at similar stages working on the same type of problems. Maybe they're a little bit ahead of you, but the idea

8:04that a founder doing $2 million of ARR is going to help you validate your idea, that's that's mentorship. That's not a mastermind. And so, you have to be realistic about who you're going to be able to pull into your mastermind. In addition, you want to have calendar overlap. So, I I've often found folks that are not in my local area. In fact, I've only been in one local mastermind where we met in person. It was a lot of fun, but I was limited in who I could choose to be in that group. All my other ones have been remote and therefore we use Zoom and we just have to have enough

8:36calendar overlap that we can make it work. In a minute, I'm going to share a resource that dives even deeper into masterminds and the tactics for running a successful one. But here's the thing. Hardest part of building a great mastermind group is actually finding the right people. And I've been asked so many times about this that we started a mastermind matching program through Microsoft. To date, my team has handmatched more than a thousand founders based on MR, stage, location, hours of availability, and more. A real human does the matching. It's not AI or an algorithm. So, the groups actually work. And we provide an 8week curriculum

9:09to help you get started because those first few meetings can be awkward. Applications are open now at microcom.com/masterminds. Make sure you get your application in before September 24th to get matched in this batch. And if you don't want to go through a service like Micromp, it's totally fine. I still want you to be successful. So, I'm giving away our full

9:26guide book for doing masterminds. Right? You're more than welcome to steal the entire playbook over at micromp.com/guide. Masterminds have been absolutely critical in my entrepreneurial journey and I hope that this video has encouraged you to start your own or join one that's already in progress. Earlier I talked about finding a co-founder and I get plenty of questions about how to split equity once you do find a co-founder. There are a couple of mistakes that I've seen blow up more than a handful of startups. I dig into that in this next video. Check it out and make sure you're subscribed. Thanks

9:56for watching.