Ask Your Investors

You should ask your investors for feedback.

As a first time startup founder- I find that I’m in a bit of a bubble. Naturally I talk with my co-founders, team members, and with friends in startups. I read a lot of books about startups and follow the news. I write a monthly update to our seed and venture investors and we have an investor on our board of directors.

So another key is that you can’t get really good advice unless you are communicating thoroughly and often.

You should ask for feedback from people with relevant industry experience and broad business experience because you want to get better at what you are doing specifically and you want to benefit from a large sample size of observation. Conversely it may not help you as much if you are getting advice from non-related industries, situations, or small sample size.

So, the people you are asking for feedback should have a good sense of how you are doing and how others are doing.

Whether you are better motivated and focused by thinking inwardly or outwardly, this is a good practice. It’s a competition against you yesterday, or against time, or against others. The success of your team depends on getting better.

Most of your time in an early startup- you will be muddling along. You won’t know if you are doing well or not.
Failure- those who fail cannot hide it, but nor will they often own up to it. Not in real time at least, when it matters most to you.
Success- those who succeed greatly will tell you loudly- but they will often not tell you the mistakes they overcame. Or they will ascribe to skill what could have been luck.

Sure, it can be scary to ask but you really should. If you don’t have people you can trust to ask this about, you should address that too.

Otherwise you can’t really figure out things like “how am I doing now”, “how well could I be doing”, “what could I be doing better”, “what do I do better than others”.