What’s the key to driving a tech startup to success? Long hours and little sleep?
According to Ross Sabourin, CEO at VidDay and previous Director of Operations at Skip The Dishes, it’s the opposite. Taking things slow, accepting mistakes, and recognizing burnout.
Ross spoke on the Building The Future podcast, giving fellow tech entrepreneurs his thoughts building a business:
Understand that there's gonna be a lot of mistakes along the way. I think sometimes people look at companies and see success, and think how did they do it? It seems like every time I try and build something, something's going wrong, or I get some sort of hurdle, or it just seems so hard.
But that's the reality with startups -- is that you've got a really small team, you don't really know what you're doing, you're often in a new space. And there's going to be all sorts of things that are going to come that seem insurmountable at the time. And I think it's just taking little bite sized chunks. Okay, how can I solve this issue? Okay, how can I get past this?
And a lot of the things you'll do, right, a lot of the things you'll do wrong, but you just keep trying to fix the things that are in front of you, and you'll start to get some of them right. You’ll start to build some of that momentum.
And just that perseverance, I think is what kind of gets you through. But then on the flip side of that, going back to kind of my earlier years in the kind of tech scaling startup, I always felt like it was a sprint, where we would solve some issue, and then there was a big task, we had to get it done, there was no time to do it, we had to drop everything else and kind of focus on that and get through it.
And though that can be very successful, you have to understand that building a business is a marathon and it's going to take a really long time. If you're exerting yourself at a pace that's faster than what you can keep up with mentally and physically, you can push through it for small periods of time. And then over the course of weeks and months, you'll start to get diminishing returns on kind of pushing past that 100%.
I think just recognise the signs of burnout, both for yourself personally, and for your teammates, your co-workers, just identifying when you see people start to kind of slide down that path. Just make sure that you're honest with yourself and honest with other people that everyone, everyone's got a point, where it’s too much.
The early stages of building a business can be the most stressful -- but also the most exciting. You’ve got funding, growth, a budding team. Basically, plenty of news to share.
And we can help share it. Contact our Vancouver PR agency to see what we can do for your tech startup.