Founders’ Best Days
For this week’s post, I decided to reach out to some founders to find out what their best day has been so far with their startup. It was a really fun exercise, and I got some great answers from 10 early-stage startup leaders. The results were a little surprising to me, until I took a few minutes to think about my own answer to this question from my experience as a founder. Initially, I expected people to talk about revenue milestones or capital raised, but cash itself was not the driving force behind these founders’ best days.
The most popular answers were related to success with customers. Carter Russ runs a fantasy sports startup called Champions Round. Carter talked about how his company had to adapt after the sports world shut down last spring due to COVID. They launched a fantasy contest for the NFL draft shortly after in April 2020, something his company had never tried before. It was a big hit. Carter says that “downloads for our app were POURING in. We hit #6 on the app store for free-to-play sports apps on this day, raised over $10K to charity, and got to hang out with some really cool athletes.” Another sports tech founder told me that his best day was September 1, 2020. This was the first day of the NFL season post-COVID. Their team wasn’t sure how users would respond to their most important sport starting back, and the user numbers turned out great.
I asked my co-founder Andre Fluellen the same question related to our group Beyond The Game Network. He came up with the same date I was thinking about — January 30, 2020. We were down in Miami for the Super Bowl, and our group hosted an event for athletes, startup founders, and VCs. The event went great, and we also got invited to a bunch of other gatherings that night. In my prior startups, my best days were also tied to customer successes. At Sportal, it was the day one of our highlight clips made ESPN’s SportsCenter Top 10. At Aquina Health, it was meeting with a healthcare provider customer in Maryland and seeing the impact they were having on the teenagers in their clinic.
The next most popular category of answers from founders related to hiring and team building. One founder told me it was the day she decided to bring in a co-founder. She described that day as knowing “that no matter what challenges we would go through, we would be doing it together.” Another founder talked about the first time he was able to bring his remote team together in-person. He said that “there was instant culture and bonding that seemed like everyone had known each other for years.” Two other founders talked about great days after hiring engineers to the team. One founder said that bringing in this person meant that “when I took a day — or really an hour — off, the business was still growing.” Another founder talked about his favorite day being one when a customer loved an update to their product that a recently hired engineer had spearheaded. That day convinced him to “realize that finding the right people to trust and help build a company was more important” than doing everything himself.
We also heard from one founder that won a prestigious pitch event as his favorite day. I’m guessing if I asked more founders, this answer would have come up more frequently than 1 in 10. Winning that event brought some good eyeballs to the business and came with a cash prize. He said the cash “allowed me to hire my first employee which freed up a lot of my time, allowing me to focus on other important tasks.”
Do these sound like awesome days to you? If so, then being a startup founder might be right for you. You can look forward to victories with customers, teams, and much more. Starting a business is tough and has lots of ups and downs, but it can be the most rewarding experience when things go well. Thanks for reading today’s post, I hope this reminds you to celebrate the great days that come with being a startup founder.
