25 founder side quests to avoid
And 38 things that boost momentum
After mentoring hundreds of startups, I’ve seen founders distract themselves with founder side quests
Here’s a list of 25 common momentum killers
And 38 things that systematically help to increase momentum
Don’t do this
Joining startup/pitch competitions to pat your ego
Spending twenty hours on your landing page without having talked to a single potential customer, but now the shading of your font really is top notch
Trying PR campaigns to let the media write about you, which means spamming 100 journalists who don’t write about tech
Setting up a referral system for a startup with zero customers that in turn will—surprise—generate zero customers
Hosting a focus group with six friends instead of prospects: ‘It was really fun and insightful feedback’
Showing your website to your mom for feedback—shoutout to all moms though ❤️
Launching your ‘brand’ on social media, i.e. making profiles with your AI-generated logo and one long post talking about yourself and then getting mad there is no traction
Interviewing people for an hour who are the opposite of your ICP
Getting tons of free users for your product because you want to test it first before charging (just charge a little bit).
Having conversations with marketing agencies to consider a rebrand to improve the vision of the startup to get more traction
Having people sit on your waitlist for months because you are editing pilot plan version 38 in Google Docs
Convince people who say no to your pilot to join anyway, succeed, have unmotivated participants in your pilot and complain they don’t use it
Work on your pitch deck for a week, even though you are not fundraising, but outsource most of the strategic thinking to Claude
Doing market research using Claude, having a TL;DR of twenty competitors that sicophantically shows you are a winner
Having paid pilots running but not contacting your customers on how it’s going, but instead hiding behind your command line interface to optimise that one feature nobody is using
Having scattered unintentional team meetings throughout the week that kill your developers’ momentum
Making a moodboard of your brand identity even though aesthetics aren’t important in your industry
Setting up GTM automations in Zapier, Apollo, Clay, and HubSpot even though your CRM is completely empty
Asking Claude or OpenClaw to generate leads based on a poorly defined ICP, having 5000 leads is a needle-in-a-haystack situation.
Postponing sending that invoice for the services you provided because you don’t want to be rude
Reverting back to a strategic decision of last week because you are not ready to kill your darling, so you throw mud at a lake for three more weeks
Hiring a marketeer full time even though you could just spend 2k on a freelancer and have shit ready in a week or two.
Refining that one feature of your product that customers would hardly notice, which postpones shipping for another day
Going to trade fairs to scout competition for the fourth time this year
Hiring a salesperson to outsource a sales script that doesn’t work.
Still stuck? Then you might need a PMF & GTM check-up:
Free 30 minute call
You tell me your symptoms like a doctor’s visit
Diagnosis + light problem solving for longhanging fruit at no cost.
And I’ll explain what working together systematically looks like.
Do this instead:
Aim to have 3 sales calls per day, a minimum of 5 per week
Invite your developers to a sales call every now and then so they understand who they are developing for
Go niche. Reflect regularly on which segments you can easily convert (feel pull, see Rob Snyder’s work) and drop sluggish ones.
If you are pre-launch, start selling today. You don’t need a fancy demo for that first call. Make a sales deck, see who wants to see the demo.
For B2G, pray.
You don’t want feedback on your product. You want people to use it actively. Don’t ask: can you check this out? Monitor if they use it. If not, ask why.
If you have fewer than 1000 customers, don’t use questionnaires to get feedback. You have a phone. Use it. Speak to your customers. They like it if they are super fans. If not, your PMF is off.
If your startup allows, try to visit your customers to observe them for a day using your product. You will see things you will NEVER expect.
More features don’t always convert more customers. Be sure you truly understand the main JTBD and the blocking obstacle (see my Market Fit Canvas, link in comments).
Obsess over how you're positioning. What are you? Aim for clarity: which product category? How do customers see you?
Make sure you don’t only have problem-solution fit; you should also have a competitive advantage. Startups’ raison d’être is having a product advantage; literature on successful product launches confirms this.
If you are the CEO, at least 50% of your time should be on sales. Don’t do 90% development and 10% sales. Sales is a full-time job.
Don’t outsource sales when you haven’t mastered the process yet. You can’t hand over what you don’t understand. And don’t even think about getting a customer development intern to do this for you. At most, as lead gen, nothing more.
Develop a cadence with your team to check in on goals. As a CEO, make sure you plot your strategy visually somewhere in the office. The fact that’s in your head doesn’t mean everyone understands it. Often, you need to repeat it 3 times before it sticks.
Make sure standups don’t become diary therapy sessions. Only discuss dependencies.
Marketing channels are like product features: you should iterate on them. Starting out, you may do spaghetti style; things that don’t work usually stand out as complete failures. Optimise what kinda works. Don’t expect home runs.
SEO & content marketing are often long-term strategies. If you are looking for sales now, it is a risky strategy
Referral strategies hardly work if your volume of customers is <1k. For b2b, a 100 bonus doesn’t mean much for a manager who makes €120k a year.
Always make sure you know your next steps in a sales call. Never let it rest at that: let me know when you are ready. Be in control: I will call you again in a week. If they push back, the lead is not hot.
Don’t build elaborate onboarding flows before onboarding customers yourself. Unscalable onboarding teaches you what is important and what you can scale, not the other way around. Sometimes, there’s a manual component that boosts retention by 50%. Keep it.
You don’t need to convince people to use your product. Your ad/landing page/DM/sales call/sales deck should act as a filter. It should be crystal clear what you do, so prospects can say: this is for me, this is not for me.
Start selling after 5 discovery calls. If you don’t know what you should sell after five calls, I’m not sure what you are doing. You had an idea, right? Just pitch it.
Revenue growth will initially always be slower than you think it will be. Any founder I meet feels that they should go faster. Onboarding clients takes longer than expected. That’s before systems are in place. Push through for a little bit, because the key processes will emerge as winners.
In some industries, partnerships with distributors or sales are key. Check out what channels other startups are using; if everyone is moving to D2C, perhaps you should do it too (if you don’t have a good reason for otherwise).
Finding your north star metric is important, but it’s not revenue. It’s about finding what type of behaviour predicts a 10/10 five-star customer. For online supermarkets, it has 5-8 orders completed to become loyal. On an online platform, it can take 3 responses to your inquiry. Figure out what is yours.
Always circle back to your core thesis. Why are you building the thing you are building? Does this new direction contribute to this, or distract from it? Identify things that are core, core adjacent, or new, and scrap the new for now to increase focus.
Celebrate achievements with your team. First client onboarding? Go out for dinner. It is something to celebrate. Funnel now converts at 20%? Celebrate. Often, startups move so fast that founders forget to celebrate.
Drop dead weight. If you have a co-founder or early employee who is not contributing to the mission and, after many conversations, doesn’t alter behaviour, this often doesn’t change. The fact that they were there before doesn’t mean they have a right to sit out the ride if they don’t add value.
If your new hires decrease your headspace, and this doesn’t evaporate after being onboarded, the new hire doesn’t fit the bill. You hire to outsource, not to babysit.
Fund-raising is a full-time job. Be careful what you wish for. When not raising, coffee connecting with VCs/Angels can help to be known about your progress: share goals and simple updates so they know you can deliver.
You gotta spend money to make money. Sometimes, founders are frugal. But if testing €500-5000 on a new channel is too much for you, you might be too risk-averse for entrepreneurship.
Advice is free; everyone gives it to you. Don’t outsource your decision-making. Don’t do something because somebody said so. Do something because you agree with the internal logic. This improves your gut feel as a founder.
Not everything needs to be supported with significant data or A/B tests. Sometimes a sample of 10 customers is enough, or even going with your gut. Postponing a decision is often more expensive than making the wrong decision for two weeks.
Most early-stage startup decisions are two-way doors: easy to reverse. Don’t sweat them too much. You can swap a failed segment out pretty easily.
Embrace uncertainty. The fact that you don’t know what will work proves that you are in a startup. If you have a recipe that will work, you are making a pie. If you can’t deal with the uncertainty, then this is not your journey. However, over time, it will get easier, as more things crystallise. The first phase is the hardest part.
Read books, podcasts and blog posts, but nobody has the secret recipe. Always include the context. Somebody launching B2C products, raving about SEO, doesn’t apply to selling navigational systems to one of the five global monster ship makers.
Respect the grind. Dumb stuff works. There are no clever workarounds to build a startup. Sometimes, you need to make 100 phone calls in two weeks. Sometimes, you need to hand out flyers at a conference, feeling like a bitch. That’s just part of the grind.
Have some fun along the way. Take the outcome seriously, but playfulness makes roller coasters way more fun!
🔥 Why I didn’t include pricing, PLG, unit economics, legal/IP, and founder mental health
Some extra spicy takes for the subscribers.
