Why “Going-ons” and “Scale-ups” Deserve Your Spotlight More than Facebook and Uber
Recently my two cofounders and I celebrated the second birthday of our startup. When reflecting upon the past two years, I’ve realized one thing – people rarely talk or read about startups in the process of their journey, instead, we get a lot of news about newly-launched projects or unicorns that recently received a big round of funding. We all love exciting success stories, as they show that everything is possible, and even you can become the next Facebook-kind of company. However, those are not Facebooks and Ubers that need the most support and attention, but those startups that are on their way to developing and establishing a steadily growing company. Those are “going-ons”, and “scale-ups” not the “startups” and “unicorns”, that need attention and support the most. And here is why.
The hype of the first days
Our first startup days were exciting – everything felt new, we made huge progress within the first few months, and we genuinely functioned on the adrenalin and hype.
Our friends and family were eager to support us, local magazines and blogs were reaching out to us to get their hands on the new and exciting concept, and the first posts we made on social media got a lot of comments and likes. People naturally gravitated towards us and offered to volunteer, help out with some projects and support us. When we tried to reach out to the same magazines after a year of functioning to ask to write about our scale-up, they all said “We’d love to. But we already posted about you before…so no.”
Waaait a second. You have to continue?
When we got over the stage of fundraising, the launch of the product and acquiring the first few customers, there came a point where it was just our team, an endless amount of work, and lots of sleepless nights filled with worries. All we could think before is launching the product, what came after seemed neither relevant nor real. But the real stuff began after that. We constantly had to deal with the mistakes associated with an MVP-state of the project and handle customers’ good and, most valuable, negative feedback. Our friends got a bit tired of the constant ranting about our startup affairs. And our friends and family losing a bit of attention was not the only thing that changed drastically when we went from pre-launch/launch stage to the continuation of the journey.
It feels lonely at times
Being in a startup meant that we were stuck within our environment working non-conventional hours, constantly thinking and talking about work at all the occasions. A line between personal and work lives got impolitely blurred. The first year was the time when we did not see our friends and family much, never went on vacation and spent all the time working or thinking about work. It’s great to have co-founders that are also your friends and are on the same page as you… but have you tried to hang out with your startup cofounders and spend at least two hours not talking about work? We didn’t manage yet 
