432: Don't Give Up... Your Assumptions
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Why is the “don’t give up” mantra dangerous for founders?
Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap Founder. Let's dive into one more piece of entrepreneurial advice that's really, really irritating and quite dangerous. Today I want to talk about the one that I get quite a lot. Don't give up. Bit dangerous. Now, before we get to the actual reasons why this is dangerous and how to make it less dangerous, a word from a sponsor, paddle.com. I'm using them as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They do all the taxes. Currencies, they track decline transactions, they update credit cards in the background. It's really cool. So that I can focus on dealing with my own business instead of banks and financial regulators. So if you think you would rather just build your own product, focus on your stuff, toughen it out, well, check out paddle.com as your payment provider and merchant.
Record. Don't ever give up, force yourself, grind it out. I mean, obviously that's dangerous advice because it builds on a founder's capacity to struggle through challenges. But it uses this for the wrong reasons, right? There's a good reason to struggle because if there is something you really want to accomplish and it's kind of within arm's reach, yeah, you you toughen it out. But just to not give up at any point.
When does persistence turn into costly stubbornness?
Now here is what makes this particularly dangerous. It is really, really useful advice until a certain point. And after that, it becomes extremely dangerous. With the problem being that as a founder, you never know exactly where that point is. You only ever know where that point was in retrospect. And even then, things are complex, right? They're highly interdependent, codependent. You don't even know what caused that point to appear in your journey, even if you really dig into it. There might be a lot of internal, external factors. It's hard. It takes a couple years, usually, after you stop a business, either you sell it or you grow it and become successful, whatever it is. It takes a long while for you to figure out why things happened the way they did because a lot of the reasons for success and failure are not even intrinsic to your project.
They're part of the market or part of technological advancement or the actions of a competitor or the inaction of a competitor. And there are so many reasons why things work or don't work or things shift and make things possible or impossible all of a sudden that you never really know in the moment. So don't give up is a good motivational thing to use when you struggle with the initial pains of establishing this understanding of your market, because I think that's one of the ways that I think it actually works. You don't know much, it takes a while for you to learn all the nuance of a complicated field. So when you don't really see what you want to see for the first couple of weeks or months, I think that's fine.
How can founders tell if they’re stuck on the wrong assumption?
Some things understand. Things just take a long time. And particularly as you're building a software business with more enterprise or bigger clients, things just take time with these kind of people. I've had lots of clients and customers in the pipeline for Podscan that I reached out to, and then they did a trial maybe that day or the week after, or whenever they got to the email, and nothing happened for a couple months. All of a sudden, they subscribe. Because they operate on their own timelines. Like I laid the seed and that whole germination thing was kind of on them. It went at their own pace, right? The Taloir, the climate that that was in, that's theirs to maintain, not mine. And they operate on their own timelines and you do as well.
And you not giving up on a timeline that does not have millions of dollars of budget behind it to slow things down. Whereas your enterprise prospects may, well, that is quite dangerous for you. It becomes detrimental to your business, just to your whole personal finance situation, to be stubborn when it means that you're running out of money or that you're trying to force a particular approach into a market for too long when you just should be experimenting more.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is the “don’t give up” mantra dangerous for founders?
0:00–1:20
2
When does persistence turn into costly stubbornness?
1:20–2:49
3
How can founders tell if they’re stuck on the wrong assumption?
2:49–4:27
4
What’s the benefit of running parallel experiments instead of grinding on one idea?
4:27–5:31
5
How did Pieter Levels succeed with “ugly” landing pages?
5:31–6:59
6
What assumptions about design and conversions should founders question?
6:59–8:07
7
How do you systematically test and discard faulty assumptions?
8:07–9:07
8
What’s the final takeaway on persistence versus giving up assumptions?
9:07–10:24