How to keep the start-up mindset?

“Who has money is king, the ones who don’t make great partnerships. “

There are several ways to grow a company. You can either raise capital with investors, that will made you share your shares while growing with the capital of others. Or you can grow it with your own means. This is the same way: can be much slower.

Our focus will be on the second model.

Having been working in a startup in their first years, it was easy to see the biggest differences between how it was it back then and how is it today. And I am not talking about the amount of money the company has. I am talking about the mindset.

It is clear that when you have little money in your bank account you start to think in more creative ways in ways on how to spend it. Every investment has to be thought about carefully. Everyone within the team is aware that every decision has a cost and they feel the weight of their decisions.

On the other hand, when your company is having more financial freedom, in some cases, “money makes us stupid”. The decisions stop being so critical for the survival of the company hence we start to be careless about how we invest the money. When a problem arises, if the mantra before pushed us to make wiser decisions, at this point we start to solve it with more money on top of it.

That is clear when you have several companies making huge rounds of capital and year after year are simply burning cash.

Do not get me wrong. It is great to have great capital and a lot of money to invest. It is way better than no capital and having the weight on your shoulder of every decision. That definitely allows us to grow quicker. I am critical is the fact that the mindset that so many companies are having in their early days as a company is easily forgotten or put behind once you have more capital.

In our early days as a start-up, we diversify the channels we were using in order to have more students. Visit schools, events, tours, and road shows. Every platform that would put us closer to our potential market was a go for us.

With the days gone, as we started to have more money, we started to become more “lazy” and I consequent in our go-to-market strategy. Having money moment do online campaigns as the master solution, but no longer with the critical thing that got us there.

So, I am sharing with you 3 tips to assure you keep on the right track and the same mindset no matter what money you have to invest.

1. Always use everyone’s feedback to have better ideas. If the more senior people in the company can be biased in adopting the methodologies we are trying to avoid, usually, the more junior people arrive with fresh and creative ideas to solve problems. They are also much more nervous about suggesting spending others’ money, so creativity is usually expected from them.
2. Think like a start-up. Despite being easier to say than doing it, the focus here is to obsess with ideas as if you had no money. I get quite the feedback that having money is a great thing, but if you start to think like a start-up, these great ideas will emerge and money will be the fuel that will make them even greater, not the other way around.
3. Fail fast and fail cheaply. When you are in your early days as a company, you want to try something new but with minimal cost just to validate. This mindset should always be there in every action you take. Always look out for the things with minimum cost and maximum impact. And when you find them, double down on them.

It is quite easy to forget where we came from and what got us here.

By Vasco de Matos Ramos