I remember spending tons of time when I started my company trying to understand my company formation options and completing lots of paperwork. Should I be an LLC, S corp, or C corp? Funnily enough, I did a lot of it incorrectly and needed a startup lawyer to fix it years later. There was so much I didn’t know or understand. It was a real pain.

A founder recently shared his experience of forming his company. It was the polar opposite of mine. Using Stripe Atlas, he answered a few questions online and had his company formed in a few days. It was painless. The service even allowed him to establish a banking relationship in a few clicks. (I tip my hat to Stripe—this service is a great way for them to snag new customers for their other products.)

I love how friction is being removed for founders. It’s easier than ever to get the administrative tasks of starting a company done. Founders can now spend more of their time on what matters most instead of learning about things they’ll do only once in their life.

If you’re considering starting a company, focus on building a great solution for your customers, not admin stuff. There are apps for that!

I met with a founder with a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in engineering. He’s worked at a variety of prestigious organizations building amazing things. Speaking with him, it’s obvious he’s passionate about his work. He said that his life’s work is the result of a single robotics engineer visiting his school when he was ten years old. He had no idea that robotics existed before that day, but from that point on, that’s all he wanted to do.

Exposure is important and can be a game changer. This founder’s journey is a testament to that. Mine is too. Until you know a field of knowledge exists, it won’t affect your life—you won’t be fired up with the desire to do something wonderful because of it. This founder is now on a mission to help expose as many children as possible to STEM, and he has some great early traction.

I’m excited for this founder and look forward to watching his journey. I suspect he will have a positive impact on the lives of many children!

Meeting mainly over Zoom this last year has been a big adjustment for me. I used Zoom before the pandemic, but never daily. I’m feeling the effects of these video meetings on my eyes. After a full day of calls with minimal breaks, my eyes are tired. I’ve purchased blue-light glasses, which have helped, but I know this isn’t good for my eyes long-term.

Working from home will be a normal part of people’s life going forward. That means meeting over video will continue to be more common too. The eyestrain problem will likely only get worse. I think there’s a huge entrepreneurial opportunity to solve this problem for consumers.

I’m excited to see what types of solutions are created to solve this problem!

I was chatting with a founder friend about early-stage entrepreneurs. This person was a founder for over a decade and then sold his company. He’s lived it and achieved what many founders aspire to, a liquidity event. During our chat, he mentioned that early founders need to be committed to the problem they’re solving, not just fixated on being a founder or being part of a startup.

He’s right. He and I both spent over a decade building our respective companies. There were many tough periods and trying moments. Those are the times that test founders, and their commitment to the problem determines whether they pass the test. If a founder cares mostly about the title or the “glamour” of startup life, they probably won’t be motivated to stick it out during tough times.

Starting a company is hard, and building it is often a journey of a decade or more. If you’re considering being a founder, make sure that what you’re working on excites you enough to make you want to push through thick and thin.

I spoke with a sharp founder who has a problem I rarely hear about: he’s turning away customers because he can’t service any additional business. He wants capital to expand his team so he doesn’t have to do that anymore! Having been in his space for a decade, he understands his customers’ needs well.

His waiting list and revenue growth are indicators of a likely product–market fit. His platform is creating value for customers by solving a painful problem. And they’re readily paying for it. All great signs. This founder is entering a phase where scaling the company will be his next challenge.

It’s not often that founders find themselves in the position of having to tell customers no. Congrats to this founder! I’ll be interested to see how he handles the scaling phase of his entrepreneurial journey.

When founders think about capital, venture capital or angel investors often come to mind. I’ve always thought, though, that customers are the best and cheapest source of capital (that’s why I bootstrapped my company). Most people think of selling a product or service as the only way to obtain money from customers. It’s not. (It’s just the most common way.)

If a company’s solution solves an extremely painful problem, customers may be willing to provide capital in other ways. If the solution creates an enormous amount of value, customers will pay for it and may also be open to becoming investors. When you think about it, it makes a ton of sense. Who better to understand the potential upside of a company than someone using its solution? Obviously, this is less likely if your customers are small businesses, but you never know. A company I’m familiar with has an amazing solution that has the potential to eliminate tons of labor expenses. A large customer that spends a lot of money on labor invested and helped refine the solution. The investment was a win–win.

Customers can be a great source of capital. This is just one example. Early founders, don’t forget about them when you’re thinking about raising capital.

A group of founders reached out to catch up recently. I’ve known one of the founders for some time now; he contacted me after I did a presentation and we’ve stayed in touch since, syncing every three or four months.

Our last chat was a bit different. He and his founders have been working on a product as a hobby. They built a solution to a problem they saw and have been slowly getting new customers as their time permitted. Recently, potential partners have asked them for help solving a particularly painful problem. Luckily, their product already relieves this pain. They’re realizing this could be huge and an opportunity to build a big business. They just aren’t sure how they should be thinking about funding to capitalize on the opportunity.

We scheduled a quick chat in which they asked pointed questions and I gave candid answers. Because of the preexisting relationship, the conversation was productive and straightforward. I already knew what problem they were trying to solve and how their solution worked. They brought me up to date on the larger opportunity they’ve uncovered.

Preexisting relationships with early-stage investors can be valuable for founders. These founders initially reached out cold, and we built a relationship over time. I was receptive to them because they were self-starting and demonstrated execution (they’d built a product and had a handful of users). When they had questions about a new opportunity, they had a friendly to turn to for help.

If you’re an early founder, consider building relationships with investors before you need them. All investors might not be receptive or responsive, but someone will probably get back to you. An investor friendly can be helpful when you need advice or honest feedback in the clutch.

Over the past few months, I’ve been hearing more early-stage founders say they have coaches. Some sought coaching on their own. Others did so because it was suggested.

I’m a fan of coaching and have experience with it myself. Quite a few of my founder friends have also been coached. It’s a great way to foster self-awareness and work toward becoming the kind of founder you aspire to be. It’s not always fun or easy. A good coach will tell you things you don’t want to hear and have you do exercises you’d rather not do. But the effort is usually worth it in the end.

It’s great to hear more early founders openly discussing coaching. I think this a big plus for them, and I hope the trend continues!

Working long hours is part of the job description for founders. The to-do list is constantly growing but the end of the runway gets closer every day. Founders often work long hours because they want to—they’re passionate about what they’re doing—and because they must—it’s what’s required to turn their vision into reality. Most founders understand this going in, but they don’t always understand the corollary: when you’re working that hard, you need an outlet.

When I was a founder, I looked forward to exercising. I started because I wanted to stay active, but I got so much more out of it. The workouts gave me a great mental reset and a way to relieve the stress of the day. I never thought about anything related to work, which helped my mindset. I worked out with a close-knit  group of people who had no idea what I did for a living. We just saw each other for the people we were. Looking back, exercising with that group of people gave me the outlet I needed to survive the long work hours.

Exercising was my thing, but it won’t work for every founder. If you’re a founder or want to be one, figure out what your outlet will be and make it a priority from day one.

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I connected with a buddy who built an analytics platform for enterprise clients. (Think billions of dollars in annual revenue.) He mentioned that he’s about to roll out an update to the platform that has nothing to do with analytics. It’s to provide an administrative capability his enterprise clients are accustomed to seeing in other platforms they use. He wasn’t thrilled about using engineering resources for this versus enhancing analytics capabilities, but his enterprise clients have high standards.

When I was running my company, we were always on the lookout for tools that allowed us to do our jobs better. They weren’t always perfect and didn’t have all the bells and whistles, but they saved us time and helped us execute better. We focused on what the tools added to our productivity, not what they were missing. This approach meant that we became early customers of innovative companies building great tools. Over time, we saw some of them evolve into huge successes. As they grew, some of them went upmarket to enterprise customers. We benefited from being along for the ride. Our company was on the cutting edge of some things simply because we were loyal, patient early customers.

Founders who want to target enterprise customers straight out of the gate should be mindful that their product may have to be fully baked for these organizations to even consider trying it. They can be risk averse and less forgiving if the product still needs tweaking or has issues. Companies that plan to go after these large customers often need to spend more time developing the product before they begin selling it, which means they usually need more capital to survive longer without customer revenue. Enterprise customers can be great when you land them, but landing them can require a lot of upfront product development and capital.