There’s a great phrase that a friend of mine from Boulder uses often.
She calls it “doing the work.”
It’s one of those things that seems obvious, but isn’t well understood by startups or founders.
Sometimes that’s because of ego and/or too high a degree of self-awareness, and sometimes it’s simply because “doing the work” can be a slow, painful process without much worth celebrating.
Doing the work isn’t about appearances, it’s about the value actually delivered or created.
Read MoreBuilding a company from scratch is exhausting.
Entrepreneurs need various kinds of support to stay afloat —understanding friends and family, tough advisers / mentors, a good reading list to encourage contemplation, these are all important.
But the best source of support is the people actually using what you build. Their stories are the ones that open up your world when you’re thinking too narrowly, and provide inspiration to keep going. While solving a problem for one person typically doesn’t justify a stable small business or a rapidly growing startup, it’s the starting point for everything else.
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