{"id":44941,"date":"2023-10-20T15:39:54","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/four-aussie-startups-tell-how-they-beat-the-trough-of-sorrow-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:39:54","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:39:54","slug":"four-aussie-startups-tell-how-they-beat-the-trough-of-sorrow-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/four-aussie-startups-tell-how-they-beat-the-trough-of-sorrow-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Aussie startups tell how they beat the \u2018trough of sorrow\u2019 – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sometimes when you\u2019re launching and running a startup it feels like nothing goes right, Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins says.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a position echoed by a number of Australian startup founders. Founding a startup is hard. StartupSmart<\/i> contacted a number of startups to ask them about their \u2018trough of sorrow\u2019 moment (Yes, we\u2019ve been listening to the StartUp Podcast and you should too). That hour, day, week, or in some cases longer, where they felt like they couldn\u2019t go on, or as Perkins points out, nothing was going right.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve got to be persistent: Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins<\/h3>\n

\u201cTo run a startup, you have to be incredibly persistent. When someone doesn\u2019t want to join your team or invest in you, you have two choices: either give up, or try a different technique or tactic. After spending months building the basic building blocks of Canva, we thought it was ready to launch and did some user testing to see how people would actually use it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was extremely insightful. Users were scared to click much and when they did they wandered around aimlessly, struggled with a few things, created something that looked pretty average and then left feeling dejected. Not quite the fun journey we were hoping for users to experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became quickly apparent that it was not just the tools themselves that were preventing people from creating designs, but also people\u2019s own belief that they can\u2019t design. So we went back to the drawing board and looked at the way we were on-boarding users. We didn\u2019t just need to create an easy-to-use graphic design program; we needed to empower people who weren\u2019t graphic designers to believe they could design.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter persisting we finally got it right. People who signed up loved the platform, and were likely to share it with their friends and co-workers. That\u2019s when we knew it was ready to launch.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems like everyone else is winning, and you\u2019re not: YourGrocer co-founder Morgan Ranieri<\/h3>\n

\u201cTo be honest, my \u2018trough of sorrow\u2019 is actually more of a reoccurring thing than a once-off. Until recently I\u2019ve never really taken the concept of mental health seriously, but I\u2019m slowly learning that anxiety and mild depression are, at least for me, always around the corner.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the startup journey is rightly called a roller coaster in that there are big highs and big lows. You never go from win to win although it seems like everyone else is always winning. When you\u2019re doing harder than usual stuff like fundraising and hiring, the roller coaster just goes faster and can literally make you feel like throwing up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find if I\u2019m level-headed in celebrating our successes I can teach my emotions to be more stable and therefore less intense when things inevitably hit the fan. I\u2019m sometimes teased for being the least excited person on our team when things go well, but I find it\u2019s a real key for me.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other main strategy that helps me is having support from others. My partner, my co-founders and other founders in the community are all pretty close to the action and generally are always going through similar issues. Sometimes it just helps to hear that other people are struggling with the same things that are keeping me up at night. Knowing that you\u2019re not alone is pretty important. The worst thing you can do is try to plough through, work harder and longer hours thinking that it\u2019ll all be OK as soon as you reach X milestone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Help! We lost our lead developer: Airtasker co-founder Jonathan Lui<\/h3>\n

\u201cQuite early on in our journey we lost our lead developer, one half of our development team at the time, which was a big setback as we had a few critical projects that needed to be delivered within the following few months. While it was a really tough spot to be put into, it was also a great opportunity to sit back, discuss and really understand what our goals were and how we were going to get there together.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result we focused much more on building a great workplace with a culture that would be easily adopted, as well as contributed to by every new person who joined the team. This then enabled us to bring new skills into the team, re-architect our entire technology stack, revitalise the platform and our branding, which resulted in us growing the business by more than 7x within the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be ashamed to pivot; StorReduce co-founder Vanessa Wilson<\/h3>\n

\u201cWe hit our trough of sorrow a year into releasing TripleBackup. It had a lot of positives. It had clients, resellers and revenue. We had organic growth and did not seek financing. The mistake we made was that two thirds of these (clients) globally bought their disaster recovery solutions from IT resellers who wanted to sell businesses a box for their on-premise DR because they made much more money selling a box than software. When we tried to sell to the SME segment with our affordably priced solution, the cost to acquire became an issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we set out to get white-labelled into the solutions of two large global storage companies where we had a fit. One was very excited about what we had and started discussing an OEM deal with us. Their development team had spent the past 18 months trying to create exactly what we had and had failed. A month later they released a press release stating they were pulling out of the SME backup market globally. Double the despair!<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pivoted, scaled it for enterprise and released our new offering StorReduce, which is in OEM trials with a global company and is doing really well. We found when we talked about our failure and pivot a number of successful founders told us they \u201cloved our pivot\u201d, surprisingly it wasn\u2019t something to be ashamed of.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re having a difficult time, call<\/i> Lifeline<\/i> on 13 11 14 or<\/i> beyondblue<\/i> on 1300 22 4636.<\/i><\/p>\n

Follow<\/i> StartupSmart<\/em> on<\/i> Facebook<\/i>,<\/i> Twitter<\/i>,<\/i> LinkedIn and SoundCloud.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes when you\u2019re launching and running a startup it feels like nothing goes right, Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins says. It\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}