Kickstart Your Success: The Tough Love Founders Need

Name: Kickstart Your Success: The Tough Love Founders Need
Uploaded: 2024-12-12T10:48:56+00:00
Duration: 1 min 59 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this motivational monologue, Jason M. Lemkin delivers blunt, "tough‑love" advice to startup founders. Drawing on his experience with 32 founders, he…

12 Dec 2024 · 2 min

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1:59

In this motivational monologue, Jason M. Lemkin delivers blunt, "tough‑love" advice to startup founders. Drawing on his experience with 32 founders, he argues that many entrepreneurs need a literal "kick in the ass" to stop feeling sorry for themselves, stop making excuses, and start building, selling, and iterating. Lemkin stresses that founders who have previously achieved product‑market fit and have a strong team can regain momentum, while mediocre teams may only enjoy fleeting, lightning‑in‑a‑bottle growth before failing. He underscores the importance of wanting growth badly enough, leveraging happy customers to acquire more, and hitting concrete revenue milestones (e.g., $6 million in revenue growing 70%). Throughout, he positions himself as the honest, often‑uncomfortable voice that investors typically don’t provide, urging founders to take ownership, stay relentless, and pursue aggressive growth.

Chapters

But maybe, maybe it's, what you need is a friggin' kick in the ass. I've needed a kick in the ass from time to time, and of those 32 founders, 30 have gone through a year of hell. And usually, I'm the one that has to give the kick in the ass. I'm the one that has to say, look, it's been a quarter, it's been two, time to, it's like, stop feeling sorry for yourself and go build some fucking software and go get on a plane and go sell something. And the best founders do it. The best founders listen. Sometimes they get mad at me because no one else is honest. Everyone else is sucking up to them. Everyone else is scared of them. A couple founders hate me for it. They wanted to hear it's okay to quit. They wanted to hear it's okay to settle for mediocre growth. They wanted to hear that it's someone else's fault. But the best founders go and fix it. They go and fix it. I'm not exactly sure how I got completely on this tangent at 6:05 PM. But in terms of should and would, if you ever had product market fit and you have a great team, you can get it again. If you ever had a time of good growth and you have a good team, you can get it again. If you ever, you can get it back. If you have a mediocre team, once in a while mediocre teams get lightning in a bottle and they grow really quickly and then they fail. It does happen. It's more common in B2C than B2B. But it does happen. But usually if you want it badly enough and you have 100 happy customers, you can find another 100. And if you have 500 happy customers, you can find 500 more. Do you want it? Do you? And in tougher times, do you want it badly enough? And once in a while, I'm the guy that has to kick them in the ass and tell them, you gotta want it. And what I usually tell them is what My investors didn't tell me. I tell them, hey, you're at $22 million in revenue, or $6 million, you're at $6 million in revenue growing 70%.