Dear founder,
Earlier this week, I came across a quote that resonated deeply with me: "I can accomplish anything, but I won't really be worthy until I accomplish the next big thing." This sentiment, shared in a Hacker News conversation about similarities between founders, got me thinking about the self-limiting beliefs we entrepreneurs often grapple with, especially when running solo businesses.
There’s always some kind of balance to strike. Never clear-cut. Always in between.
🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.
As a serial entrepreneur myself, I've experienced this strange cognitive dissonance firsthand. After selling Feedback Panda in 2019, I found myself in a void of purpose. Despite joining the small group of people who've successfully sold a business, I felt like a newbie who had to prove himself all over again – but better this time.
Interestingly, this feeling isn't unique to small-scale successes. I had a conversation with Patrick Campbell, who sold his business Profitwell to Paddle for $200 million – a record-breaking acquisition for a bootstrapped business. Even he felt it could have been a fluke, that he just got lucky. This sentiment of "luck" in entrepreneurship is pervasive, often used to diminish others' achievements or explain away success.
But here's the thing: entrepreneurship is incredibly complex, making it difficult to track cause and effect. Ideas come at random times, sometimes aligning perfectly with market conditions, sometimes not. The willingness to take risks and gamble with your own money requires a unique character – one that's simultaneously optimistic enough to start and realistic enough to keep going.
As founders, we're challenge-oriented people who love solving puzzles, but we're not just doing Sudoku professionally. We're building things, creating solutions that help others solve similar problems. This requires a delicate balance between being an excellent product person and being wildly interested in the underlying, almost theoretical nature of the challenge.
There's also the dissonance between acknowledging the role of luck (or as I prefer to call it, contingency) and recognizing that our choices and curiosity push us into the path of that luck. When someone dismisses success as "being in the right place at the right time," I can't help but think: yes, but they put themselves there. They followed trends, experimented with emerging technologies, and allowed themselves to fail while figuring things out.
This adaptability, this constant exploration and experimentation, is a crucial skill for founders. It's what allows us to navigate the ever-changing landscape of market demands and consumer expectations, especially in fields where the future is uncertain.
Most of entrepreneurship is about striking a balance between long-term decisions and short-term choices. I'm experiencing this firsthand with my current project, Podscan. At its core, Podscan is a podcast data platform, generating transcripts, extracting entities, and creating summaries for every podcast out there. But what I'm actually selling is a product built on top of this platform – an alerting and mention tracking tool.
I often find myself torn between working on the underlying platform and the customer-facing product. The platform is complex and promising but harder to sell, while the product is simpler but generates immediate revenue. Balancing the potential of short-term sales against the long-term promise of building an unparalleled podcast data platform is a constant struggle.
This balancing act extends beyond just product development. It's about prioritizing tasks, deciding between cold outreach and improving data quality, between spending time with family and creating the income that sustains them. Everything in entrepreneurship – and life – is about striking a balance.
What I've come to realize is that this constant need for balance is unique to entrepreneurship. When you're employed, choices are often more clear-cut, with well-defined scopes and outcomes. But as an entrepreneur, the choices you make today will affect your work tomorrow, next month, and even years down the line.
After discussing this with my founder peers, the consensus was clear: revenue is king, and the easiest way to generate revenue while staying aligned with the ultimate goal of the business should be the priority. For PodScan, this means focusing on the alerting platform for now, even though I know the underlying data platform has much more potential.
I have countless ideas for Podscan – trend forecasting, sentiment analysis across industries, and so much more. But for now, I'm striking a balance. I'm committed to building an amazing data platform that will eventually be mind-blowingly useful for hundreds of thousands of people. But to get there, Podscan will primarily be an alerting tool on the outside, while still offering API access for those who see the potential in the data.
This is the balance I'm choosing to strike – a pragmatic approach to turn Podscan into something profitable enough to eventually pivot into its full potential. It's not always easy, but it's the nature of entrepreneurship – a constant balancing act between present needs and future possibilities.
I'll share a few updates about my SaaS on the pod, and if you want to track your brand mentions on podcasts, please check out podscan.fm — and tell your friends!
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