The founder’s syndrome is usually associated with corporate life where the founder cannot adapt his mindset to the growth or change in his own company. As a result of this, the company not only misses business opportunities but also can struggle with people management, motivation & general performance.
The same syndrome manifests clearly in startup founders, especially in startups on idea or pre-seed stage of development. Being at these phases, founders are still in so-called honeymoon, where they idealistically or sometimes even fanatically believe in the perfection of their ideas. Such mindset can be crucial for the startup survival on such early stage because founders can:
· not understand clearly the market feedback about their product/service;
· behave in an authoritarian manner with their teammates and their different points of view;
· underestimate some key factor and opportunities for development;
For the last 4 years Beyond pre-accelerator has met more than 500 startup founders and worked with 100 of them. Statistics showс that founder’s syndrome do exists in different scale in most of them. That’s why we have prepared several questions to help startuppers find out if they have the most common characteristic of founder’s syndrome:
· Do you think that your product/service is perfect?
· Do you usually disagree with your teammates?
· Do you think clients, investors, mentors, teammates don’t understand the potential of your startup?
· Do you think the local startup environment is too limited?
· Do you think your startup is developed enough to get big investment?
· Do you believe that the business plan is enough to get funded?
· Do you believe that your startup is not still successful just because of the limited resources - money, people and advertising?
· Do you want to change/modify your startup idea?
If the answer on the most questions is “Yes” and the answer to the next is “No”:
· Do you have prototype/MVP?
· Do you have users?
· Do you have sales?
Then you probably have the founder’s syndrome!!!
Don’t get upset! It is something most of the people have it. Here are several things that you can do to fix the situation:
· try to change your mindset
· try to educate yourself in the area of startup development/creation
· try to find good mentor – an entrepreneur with startup
· surround with more startup founders. Other blind spots are easy to be seen.
· talk more with people- customers, investors, teammates and try to understand their point of view
· try to adapt your startup to the market feedback
All of this but not only, you can get by joining a pre-acceleration or acceleration program. So just get deep dive into the startup ecosystem and swim.
