The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #81
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- The Anchor I Return to When Entrepreneurship Gets Messy
- Features That Save Users from Themselves: The Unsung Heroes of Software
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
The Anchor I Return to When Entrepreneurship Gets Messy
You need a fallback when entrepreneurship gets messy. Mine rests on four pillars: Fearlessness, commitment, decision-making, and simplicity.
“Our mission.”
“Our values.”
“Our purpose.”
Large corporations plaster these words everywhere. Posters in hallways. Slide decks in meetings. Corporate wallpaper.
We don’t do that at Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded. Instead, I created a personal mission statement. Not for PR. Not for recruitment. Not for my co-founders. But for myself.
It’s my anchor document. I revisit it monthly, especially when things get rough. It keeps me grounded when doubt creeps in, and it expands as I grow.
No, I won’t share the whole thing (sorry voyeurs). But here are the four pillars I rely on most as an entrepreneur.
Pillar 1: Fearlessness
Not the heroic kind. Not skydiving without a parachute.
Entrepreneurial fearlessness means one thing: Keep moving, no matter what hits you:
- Bureaucracy will block you.
- Competitors will outspend you.
- Systems will crash.
- Murphy will strike (probably on a Friday night).
If everything feels “under control,” you’re simply not moving fast enough.
Fear also comes from comparison. Scroll through LinkedIn, and it looks like everyone else is winning while you’re drowning. My experience? Swimming against the current is often the only way forward. Boring, unsexy preparation — scenario planning, resilience building — looks pointless for years. Until the world flips upside down and suddenly you’re the one still standing.
Always remember: Success and failure are neighbors. One wrong step, and you’re on the other side of the fence. You have to learn to live with that shadow without panicking.
Pillar 2: Commitment
Here’s the bad news: you can’t build anything great by working a neat 40 hours a week.
Entrepreneurship is years of perseverance through storms. Every founder eventually faces:
The trick? Don’t waste energy on battles you can’t win. Your time and energy are the only real currencies you control. Spend them wisely.
Commitment doesn’t mean burning yourself out. My recharge doesn’t just come from sleep or retreating to the mountains — it comes from time to think and read. Space to step back, ask better questions, and spark ideas I’d never find in the noise of daily firefighting.
Pillar 3: Decision-Making
The perfect decision doesn’t exist. You’ll never have all the data. Wait too long, and you’re paralyzed.
Entrepreneurs need to make good-enough decisions fast and then adapt. In software, we call this refactoring. In business, it’s just survival.
Here is my method that has worked well for me for over 20 years:
- Planning phase: Dream big, design bold options.
- Execution phase: Mix those bold ideas with the gritty realities on the ground.
Think of it as blueprint vs. battlefield. You can’t thrive by focusing on either-or only.
Pillar 4: Simplicity
Complexity kills. Simplicity wins. Always.
I’m proud to be “a simple mind.” Simple solutions work in the real world. Complex ones fall apart.
The same applies to life. More stuff doesn’t mean more happiness — it means less time, less energy, and fewer ideas. Every extra thing you own comes with maintenance costs that steal attention from what matters.
The world doesn’t need more gadgets. It requires more great ideas. And those only come when your head is clear.
Conclusion
My personal mission statement isn’t a wall poster. It’s not marketing fluff. It’s a compass I keep checking when things get chaotic. And more often than not, entrepreneurship is messy and chaotic.
Why don’t you sit down and start drafting your own personal mission statement?
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Features That Save Users from Themselves: The Unsung Heroes of Software
Here are some real-life examples of features that save users from themselves. They prevent chaos and keep your product frustration-free.
Software is a funny industry. You can start your business from your couch, with a laptop, an internet connection, and your coding skills only.
The motto of any startup is “build fast and break things”, which enshrines the picture of the indie developer on the couch. Ship feature after feature, with each feature opening the door to yet more customers.
It’s not that simple. I’m the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company. Yes, we also started out of nothing. Yes, we also shipped feature after feature in the early days. But after a while, a strange old friend visited us: Reality.
Besides evergreen improvements such as performance, usability, and bugfixing, we had to build functionality to guardrail our users. No offence to our users, but they do all sorts of things with your software product that you would never have imagined when you first sat down on your couch and started coding.
What Does Our Product Do?
To understand the guardrail examples I will explain in this article, you need to know what our product does.
Yonder is a fully integrated document management solution for XML-based documents in highly regulated industries. Think aircraft manuals for airlines, operating procedures for air navigation service providers, or aerodrome manuals that are linked to a set of underlying regulations.
Our solution consists of an authoring solution in a web client and a viewer solution for the iPad. In this way, technical authors can edit and customize their documents before they are distributed to the end users, who are typically pilots, flight attendants, or control center operators.
Now let’s dive into some examples from our experience.
Guardrail 1: Connectivity in the Tunnel
There is a good reason our authoring solution is available only in the web client. Authoring complex technical documents is not something you should do on the go. Additionally, the authoring framework offers numerous options for typical Airbus or Boeing manuals, requiring a large screen to work efficiently.
Nevertheless, a few years ago, an author user was on a long-haul bus in Southeast Europe and decided he wanted to edit that Airbus manual while on the go. He opened the browser on his iPad and logged into the authoring web client. Remember, that’s the component that’s built for large screens in an office.
Don’t ask me about the details of what exactly he did on that bus, but we know for sure that at some point, he decided he’d finished all the modifications to his Airbus manual, and he’d pressed the “publish” button.
Whilst on a bus, with a hotspot internet connection.
And just at that moment, the bus drove into a tunnel.
Connectivity dropped.
The publication job was lost somewhere in space. Getting it back was difficult, laborious, and didn’t exactly benefit customer satisfaction.
In the aftermath of this episode, we built a feature to check connectivity before saving the edits you made to your documents. This feature would have saved our poor author on that bus in the tunnel.
Guardrail 2: The iPad with Limited Storage
Change of scene. We’re in the headquarters of one of the largest airlines on the planet. The authors have been busy creating and customizing hundreds of documents, and now they are ready for users to view on their iPads.
But on some iPads, the synchronization didn’t complete.
No, it wasn’t a bug. It was much simpler. The airline I am talking about doesn’t manage their iPads, meaning that users work with their company iPads like they do with their private iPads: Downloading apps and games, storing photos and videos, etc.
And for some users, their iPads were so full of private stuff that there wasn’t any space left for (safety-critical) data such as Airbus manuals.
What did we do? We implemented a feature that checks for available storage before synchronization is started. If there is not enough storage available, a big fat red banner saying “storage almost full” appears. And you can’t click away. You can only make it disappear by freeing up storage in other applications on your device.
Patronizing? Maybe. But this guardrail feature saves us from mandating Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions with our enterprise customers. Because we know that some of them don’t manage their iPads.
Conclusion
Guardrail features are not flashy. But they are needed for a stable product. As a product owner, you have to give guardrail features the priority they deserve, even if your developers would prefer to work on a flashy new feature.
The secret to developing guardrail features? You can’t plan them in advance. Because what your users will do with your product was beyond your imagination when you sat on that couch and started to hack away at the first features.
But when there is a case like the ones described above, it’s in your best interest to change the priorities and get the guardrails implemented to avoid repeated cases of user frustration.
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 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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