Make It Happen

There’s a common failure mode where founders wait for the company to take off, as if it will happen without them. Paul Graham puts it plainly in Do Things That Don’t Scale: “startups take off because the founders make them take off.”

Early on, that means doing manual, un-scalable work on purpose. For us it’s sitting with a customer’s real tender documents, building around how their team already works, and shipping fixes in days. It doesn’t feel like leverage, but you only earn the right to automate a workflow after you’ve done it by hand enough times to understand it.

Go narrow first

The related mistake is going wide too early. It’s tempting to chase the whole market at once, but it’s better to go deep on one narrow slice (one region, one painful workflow), done better than anyone, and expand from there.

Build what you’d want to exist

The most durable ideas tend to be something the founders themselves want, can build, and few others think is worth doing. Arctis started there: a problem I could see clearly and was equipped to solve.

Underneath all of it is a habit I try to keep: work slightly outside your depth. Leaving a stable job at SAP to start a company was my clearest example of that. Dare to act, dare to take on the challenge, dare to own the outcome.

Referenced: Paul Graham, Do Things That Don’t Scale and How to Get Startup Ideas.