Next

There is one word I seem to use more than just about any other since becoming a founder: next. Solve one problem, and there is another one waiting. Get through one hurdle, and another one appears. Finish the website. Next. Get the product working. Next. Figure out how to market it. Next. Find customers. Next. Find money. Next. Fix what broke yesterday. Next. There is always something else, and when you are bootstrapping, most of the time that something belongs to you.

In some ways, that is what keeps you going. You cannot afford to sit around feeling sorry for yourself every time something does not work. An email goes unanswered, you send another one. Someone tells you no, you look for another door. An idea falls flat, you come up with another idea. Something breaks, you figure out how to fix it. You develop this habit of looking at whatever is standing in front of you and asking one simple question: What do I do next?

That mentality can keep a founder alive. It can also wear the hell out of you. That is the strange part about it. The same drive that gets you through rejection can become the thing that never lets you rest. You finally accomplish something that six months ago seemed almost impossible, and instead of enjoying it, you are already looking at the next problem. Yesterday’s mountain becomes today’s foothill because there is another mountain standing right behind it.

I think that is especially true when you are bootstrapping. There is not much insulation between you and the problems. If money is tight, you feel it. If you need something done and cannot afford to hire somebody, you figure out how to do it yourself. You learn things you never expected to learn because you have no choice. There are days when you are the founder, developer, salesman, marketer, customer service department and janitor all rolled into one. You roll up your sleeves because there is nobody standing behind you waiting to take over.

The hardest part, though, might not be the workload. It might be the silence. You can spend days or weeks working on an idea that looks good on paper. You think it through, refine it, put it into practice and convince yourself that this could finally be the thing that makes a difference. Then you put it out into the world and wait. Sometimes the answer is not yes. Sometimes it is not even no. Sometimes the answer is nothing.

That can be more deflating than rejection because rejection at least tells you something. If someone says the price is too high, the product is confusing or they simply do not want it, you have information. You can work with that. Silence leaves you guessing. Is the product wrong? Is the message wrong? Are you talking to the wrong people? Is the timing wrong? Or is what you built actually good and nobody has noticed it yet?

So you go back to the drawing board. You change the message. You try another approach. You contact different people. You make another video, write another post, send another email or rethink part of the product. Every new attempt comes with that little spark of hope that maybe this is the one. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets somebody’s attention. When it does not, you have to reach back into the tank and come up with something else.

Eventually you start wondering how many of those you have left. How many times can you genuinely convince yourself that the next idea might be the one that catches? There is plenty of advice telling founders to keep going, stay hungry and never quit, but there is not nearly as much discussion about what constantly keeping going actually costs. Persistence sounds wonderful when somebody is telling the story after they succeeded. It feels very different when you are still somewhere in the middle and have no idea how the story ends.

You can watch every YouTube video you can find. You can attend seminars, listen to podcasts and read all the books successful entrepreneurs recommend. You can study marketing, sales, product development, fundraising and every other part of building a company. You can follow the advice almost perfectly and still discover something nobody can teach you how to control. Life has intangibles.

Timing matters. Luck matters. Circumstances matter. Who happens to see your idea matters. An email reaching somebody on the right morning instead of the wrong afternoon can matter. A market can suddenly become ready for something it ignored a year earlier. You can meet one person who opens a door you did not even know existed. There are simply too many variables in life to pretend success is a formula where the right ingredients always produce the same result.

That raises a question I think about often. What really separates the successful founder from the unsuccessful one? There is a graveyard full of entrepreneurs who had great ideas, worked hard, believed in what they were doing and never made it. On the other side are businesses that began with ideas that probably did not look revolutionary at all, yet somehow they caught on. Once someone becomes successful, everybody can look backward and explain why it happened. The explanation is much harder when you are standing at the beginning.

Maybe there is no magical trick. Maybe success is some combination of a good idea, hard work, persistence, timing, relationships, adaptability and plain old luck. You control the parts you can control and try to put yourself in enough positions for the parts you cannot control to eventually fall your way. You keep learning, keep adjusting and hopefully stay alive long enough to recognize an opportunity when it finally appears. But there is never a guarantee that it will.

That does not mean we get to blame everything on bad luck either. The intangible cannot become an excuse for bad decisions. A founder still has to be willing to look at the evidence and admit when something is not working. Sometimes persistence means trying again. Sometimes it means changing direction. Sometimes the hardest decision is recognizing that the thing you have been fighting so hard to save is the very thing holding you back. There is no seminar that can make those decisions for you.

Maybe that is the strange bargain you make when you decide to build something. You have to behave as though your decisions matter enormously while knowing they do not control everything. You have to believe enough to keep going without becoming so blinded by belief that you refuse to change. You have to celebrate progress while knowing there is another problem coming. You have to keep something in the tank even when you have no idea how far the road goes.

And maybe that is why I keep coming back to that one little word. Next can be ambition. Next can be hope. Next can be stubbornness. Next can be exhausting. Sometimes next might even be irrational. It is the word that keeps a founder moving, and if you are not careful, it can also be the word that wears you down.

There may never be a secret. There may never be a moment when somebody hands you the answer and tells you exactly what to do. You do the best you can with what you have, control what you can control and accept that some things will always be outside your hands. Then you look at whatever is standing in front of you and make another decision.

What’s next?