I recently wrote an article about how entrepreneurs and startup founders have the grand total of zero time for their peer’s startups. I wasn’t expecting much heat from the article, because, you’ve guessed it: entrepreneurs and start-up founders have the grand total of zero time for their peer’s startups. And to be fair, why would they?!
Assuming you’re an early-stager (most of you probably are), you likely have an infant business that may as well be your own child you have so much love for it.
Let’s go with this analogy a little longer. You’re in the middle of another 16-hour day looking after your little one (days off are but a distant dream to you now), whilst you multi-task a million things as you ‘just can’t get the help these days.’ You’re going through your daily routine, teaching it, feeding it, trying to work out what on earth it needs.
You receive a cold email from You think you may have met him once before. Could it have been that Bitcoin seminar 2 years back? Turns out, Dave’s got an infant company just like you!
At first, he offers some idle patter about how cute he thinks your baby is but really, deep down, he doesn’t think so. Hell, he doesn’t even care. All Dave wants to do is show you his kid. Dave thinks his little business is the best thing since sliced bread.
You scoff to yourself and you hit the spam bar and add Dave to your own mailing list, ‘Enough about your kid Dave, you need to meet mine.’
Analogy over.
But herein lies the problem in the early-stage entrepreneurial industry. Helping the start-up ecosystem, being entrepreneurially altruistic, goes against every fiber of your being. You’ll give back to the industry when you’re successful, right?
I’ve been in this world for 8 years now and what I can tell you without uncertainty that is this WRONG. I can also tell you with the same amount of certainty that every time I embark on a new venture I am as guilty as the next at doing exactly what I am preaching against.
If I were to pick a culprit of this ideology it’s that the majority of us millennials starting up a business are just about old enough to have that residual, 90s enterprise -autocratic voice in our heads
“Everyone in your space is competition”.
But the new manta creeping in (I hope) and the mind-set that we all need to have is:
“Everyone in your space is a potential collaboration”.
News flash, unless your big idea is a new search engine, which has an ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, you are probably not entering a market which has a monopoly on it. Therefore, if you are operationally sound, have good personnel around you, enough money, and a realistic and tested vision, then you have a big chance. People in your space are unlikely to take that opportunity away from you. And if they do, it will be 100% your fault.
Now to harp back to the analogy, we’ve discounted Dave and his kid as a threat, even an annoyance. So you shoot an email to Dave. Maybe your ‘kids’ get together for a play-date.
Turns out that Dave has a huge mailing list of people who exactly match your demographic. It turns out that the CRM you bootstrap is exactly what Dave is looking for. Turns out that two are better than one.
It’s all well and good feigning interest in other people’s business. But actually, caring enough to submerse yourself in them is a different thing. Lengthen your attention span to what your peers are doing. You might just learn something: find a new program that will save you hours, unearth a ton of new customers ripe for cross promotion, or at worst have someone to moan with about the lonely rigors of raising an ungrateful child.
Your startup has an infinitely larger chance of survival if you open your arms.
Guest post by : Freddie Cull, Director at Teamtalk. Freddie is based in New York and runs two investment-led startups started in London. He has also planned and executed successful business development strategies for two companies in the China, working with a versatile group of products.
You may also be interested in other guest_posts from entrepreneurs and founders