The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #70
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- The Entrepreneurial Struggle: What Founders Don’t Post Online
- How to Handle Bugs Effectively in a SaaS Product
- Forget the Quick-Wins. Good Solutions Take Time
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
The Entrepreneurial Struggle: What Founders Don’t Post Online
The entrepreneurial struggle is rarely shared. Discover the internal and external factors behind an entrepreneur’s constant uphill battle.
I’m an entrepreneur. I work hard, I play hard, and I post on social media about my successes and the attractive people I meet in entrepreneurial high society.
Wait, no.
I’m an entrepreneur, I work hard, I struggle over and over again, and you normally don’t hear anything about those struggles outside my founding team, my family, and my inner circle of friends.
I don’t think you can build a company without struggling. I know what I’m talking about, I have been the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, since 2015.
Internal Factors
Some of an entrepreneur’s struggles are due to internal factors that arise from doing business. Let’s look into some examples.
Suddenly, you receive a call from a dissatisfied customer. Ugly bug. Immediate fix required. However, no data is available to reproduce the bug. Your team doesn’t know exactly what to do due to missing log data. Your customer says you’re too slow fixing it.
Many times have I pushed my team to let go of everything else to fix an urgent bug. The larger your company becomes, the less a CEO should do that. Nevertheless, sometimes you have to. But is this bug the top priority? You don’t know, and you will never know. Will you post on social media once the bug is fixed? Hell, no.
Hiring people is arguably the most difficult task an entrepreneur is facing. Either you are hiring your friends, which can set loose all sorts of problems down the road. Or you are hiring people you don’t know, leaving you in the void whether they are up to the challenges of working in an early-stage startup.
Everyone’s job description will change multiple times along the dirt track from startup to established company.
I had to say goodbye to some colleagues who at some point weren’t the right fit anymore for the phase the company was in.
Not easy. “Good fit” doesn’t change into “poor fit” overnight. It’s a slow process, and during that process, you can never be sure if it’s you who is wrong, or your colleague. But at some point, you will have to face an unpleasant discussion with your colleague and bear the consequences of that discussion. Did I post about this on social media? Certainly not.
The laws of the World Trade Organization (WTO) allow RFP awards to be contested. In this case, the second-placed bidder contests the award, gets to see your full bid, engages a lawyer, and tries to find a formal error during the RFP process to win over the bid.
That’s what happened to us with the first RFP we won in a new industry. The contest was successful, and this will deny our access to this new industry for at least another 1–2 years. That is after a 5-year sales cycle. Did I post about this on social media? I’m not crazy.
External Factors
As if there wasn’t enough that can go wrong when doing business, there are things you cannot control as an entrepreneur. Yet they still happen and contribute to your daily struggle, often catching you in the worst possible moment.
Let’s start with a no-brainer: COVID-19. At the time, Yonder was a very young company, just gaining its initial traction in aviation. When COVID-19 broke out and countries closed their airspaces, our carefully built pipeline collapsed within days.
It took us a solid two years to get our pipeline back: Once the lockdowns were over, airlines were busy restarting their operations and had no time to evaluate software procurements. The tradeshows came back in 2022, yielding the first RFPs in 2023, and the first awards in 2024.
As soon as the lockdowns were over, Putin attacked Ukraine. No big deal if you don’t do business with Russia or Ukraine, you might say. Well, in our case, we do have a customer in Ukraine. After supporting the customer with a wartime 100% discount for the first year of the war, they reduced the number of licenses to the absolute minimum — not because they don’t like our product, but because they hibernated everything that is not directly linked to survival.
A couple of years later, Donald Trump was re-elected and started breaking all hell loose. I told my board that we see a risk of the U.S. dollar collapsing because we have significant revenues in that currency but no costs.
A few months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. dollar lost 20% against the Swiss Franc, wiping off a 6-digit amount of our P&L — not because we lost business, just due to an external factor.
Conclusion
There would be many more examples of entrepreneurial struggle, but that’s not the point of this story.
The point of the story is that both internal and external factors contribute to an entrepreneur’s struggle that will never end. If you’re not prepared for an endless struggle, don’t become an entrepreneur.
And just in case you think you’re unlucky with all those external factors: Always remember that the last 30 years were a huge, endless party — adverse external factors are the new normal.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
How to Handle Bugs Effectively in a SaaS Product
Learn how to triage customer issues, prioritize bug tickets, and handle bugs effectively with practical, real-world strategies.
All software has bugs, unfortunately. That’s because software is invisible, and you can ship a problem as big as shipping a car with three wheels. In contrast to the flawed car, you don’t see the flaw in the software.
Even if you take testing and quality assurance seriously.
Not all issues reported by customers as bugs are bugs. But all customer issues must be taken care of — ideally instantaneously, realistically within a reasonable time.
How can you deal with bugs that impair the quality of your software product?
At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we have come a long way in improving bug handling. Once upon a time, we used to have a CTO who bluntly said that bugs don’t matter, only features matter. As a consequence, I stepped in and declared myself the Chief Bug Officer of the company.
Things have evolved since. I am still involved in handling bug tickets, but I am no longer the Chief Bug Officer.
Here is what we did.
1. Not every help desk ticket is a bug ticket
We use a tool called Freshdesk as our customer help desk system. Not every issue reported by customers is a bug, even if the customer says it is a bug.
Before we scream “urgent bug!”, our customer team tries to solve the customer issue without creating a bug ticket. In many cases, this works well.
In some cases, the reported problem is indeed a bug or another issue the dev team needs to step in. That’s when the customer team creates a JIRA ticket for the dev team.
2. Talk about bug tickets, several times a day
Ticket systems are great, and they were designed to facilitate asynchronous working. Asynchronous working is often a synonym for working whenever, wherever, without talking to each other.
Wrong.
The Chief Customer Officer and I talk several times a day about bugs. Whenever there is the slightest uncertainty about a bug ticket, we talk at the coffee maker or jump on a quick Teams call. It’s those discussions that make the JIRA tickets more accurate, which helps the dev team fix the underlying issue fast.
3. Prioritize bug tickets in the sprint
Some customers report every edge case as a bug; some other customers only report grave bugs. Therefore, we have to prioritize bug tickets. This is done in my weekly one-on-one meeting with the Chief Customer Officer — or if there is a high-priority issue, anywhen between those one-on-one meetings.
Last but not least, I resort to a very simple trick in JIRA. All bug tickets are assigned to the JIRA epic “customer bugs” if the customer reported it, and to the JIRA epic “bugs discovered by Yonder” if we discovered the bug. The labels for those epics are red, and I move the bug tickets to the top of the list of all tickets in the sprint. In this way, they appear first on the sprint board. As simple as that.
Conclusion
Some customers might still say that bug fixing takes too long. Before arguing with a customer, let’s put bug-fixing cycles into context.
I would totally agree that bug fixing takes too long in the case of edge case bugs. Those get lower priority than other bugs, or they might not even get fixed at all. On the other hand, I think our bug-fixing process for higher-priority bugs works quite well.
And here you have it: A bug isn’t a bug. Even if you measure resolution time in the customer portal the same way for all bugs.
INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Forget the Quick-Wins. Good Solutions Take Time
There is no overnight success. Growth and good solutions take time, effort, and setbacks. That’s true for startups, products, and people.
Overnight success.
Blitz-scaling.
Wunderkind.
The list could go on and on — the loud success gods constantly bombard us with their quick successes on social media. Or should I say, apparent quick successes?
In my humble view, there is no such thing as a quick win. Every success takes tenacity, setbacks, learning, improvement, and therefore time.
Let’s put this into perspective. I am basing myself on my experience as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.
Overnight Success
Ever heard of something called product-market fit? It’s the hardest thing a new company must do. It’s about getting from the first business idea to a product that generates revenue.
Easy, right? Just sit down, build a product that implements your business idea, and sell it to the first customer, everybody will follow. Overnight success.
No, no. Even creating an MVP is a wild journey. Putting an idea into a product requires a lot of back-and-forth discussions, both internally and with your first customers.
But then it gets easy, right? Go live with your MVP with your launch customer, announce it on LinkedIn, and everybody will follow. Overnight success.
No, no. Typically, money and time are constrained during the MVP, so you will cut many corners when building your MVP. You will pay a heavy price for cutting corners later in your journey — performance, stability, and scalability. With software products, refactoring and rewriting core components of your application will start sooner than you think.
But after the refactoring, it will finally be easy, right? I mean, the product is now performant, stable, and scalable.
It will get easier, but refactoring is never completed. It is a continuous task that sticks with a product that has been around for some time — because technologies evolve, you learn from your journey, and new cut corners always slip into your product.
Furthermore, when a product matures, there is a tendency for its feature set to expand, with new features starting at the MVP stage. Guess what, it won’t be easy to put those new features into your product…
Blitz-Scaling
Why do you think some B2C software products use invite-only beta programs when launching a new product? To manage growth during that early MVP and refactoring phase. In contrast to B2B products, churn is quick and easy for users of B2C products, so you want to make sure that nobody churns due to low product performance or stability.
Once your product finds MVP and it is stable enough, you can open the product to the general public. But contrary to your expectations, in nearly all cases, growth will be slower than expected. B2C products need large marketing efforts (and budgets) plus lots of word-of-mouth before strong growth kicks in. And let’s face it, both marketing and word-of-mouth take time to trickle down.
B2B software products usually try to land a few first customers, who help the product grow from MVP to stable product. During this time, growth is slow — because you’re busy making your product performant, stable, and scalable. Furthermore, sales cycles for B2B software products are typically much longer than for B2C software products.
At some point, when the product is performant and stable, marketing efforts and word-of-mouth kick in, which will help accelerate growth. But again, it takes time to trickle down.
Don’t get me wrong: it is every entrepreneur’s ambition to build a scalable product, with growth accelerating steeply at some point. But don’t get fooled by some crazy LinkedIn posts that talk about their blitz-scaling success. In 99.9% of cases, growth and scaling take more time than you might expect.
Be aware of this when you create your business model. I’m speaking from experience.
Wunderkind
Let’s leave the product realm and talk about people.
How often have you heard about that kid who learned to read in a day, about that software developer who is a refactoring god, and the guy who is a natural pitcher?
I have three reasonably intelligent kids, and none of them learned to read in a day. Instead, they practiced over and over again, often with the help of their teachers or parents. “Dad, what’s this letter called again?”
Refactoring gods are not born but made. Many refactoring decisions and techniques come from experience with previous refactoring projects. Gritting your teeth through multiple refactoring projects requires determination, tenacity, and endurance, with many setbacks on the way to success.
Finally, let me share a secret: every pitch presentation is choreographed, and hence practiced over and over again. Of course, some people have a natural gift to present, but even those people will have to practice their pitch many many times.
Conclusion
Don’t get fooled by all the apparent quick successes as seen on social media. In most cases, there is tons of effort behind every success, and success takes much longer to achieve than writing the social media post took.
You will be a lot happier in your journey towards success if you reduce your time on social media, and if you accept that every good solution takes time.
You’re not alone out there. Everybody who has created a product, built up a company, or raised a child will know what it takes. Spend your time speaking to those people instead of spending your time on social media.
About Me
Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about my experience in entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.
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