My Kind of Startup
The startup mythology we celebrate is almost entirely fantasy. Billion-dollar exits, twenty-something founders, overnight success etc. These stories are so rare they're essentially fiction. This piece calls for something more honest and useful.
I want a story about a person that struggled for many years. That made lots of mistakes. That learned lessons the hard way. That eventually combined the right idea with the right execution in the right market to make a living. Not buy a boat you can land a helicopter on. Not conquer the world with iPads. Just make a living. The real startup story that most people live.
The stories we tell shape what we think is possible and what we think is worth pursuing. When we only celebrate the extreme outliers, we create a distorted view of what entrepreneurship actually looks like.
Most successful businesses aren't venture-funded unicorns. They're people who figured out how to solve a real problem for real customers and built something sustainable around it. They didn't "disrupt" entire industries, they found a niche and served it well.
In the startup community, we keep emphasizing the dramatic, the kids out of college cashing in on a billion-dollar IPO. But hell, that's not the story that any of us who are actually doing the work are actually living. We need more realistic success stories if we truly want to help each other out.
I think the emphasis on dramatic stories does real harm. It makes normal business building seem like failure. If you're not growing 10x year over year, if you're not raising millions in funding, if you're not featured in TechCrunch, then somehow you're not doing it right.
But the unsexy truth is that most valuable businesses grow slowly and steadily. They serve customers well, they improve incrementally, they build sustainable operations. The founder doesn't become famous, but they build something meaningful and profitable.
These stories matter because they're actionable. You can learn from someone who spent three years figuring out pricing, who struggled with hiring their first employee, who found creative ways to bootstrap growth. You can't learn much from someone who got lucky with timing and raised $50 million.
Tell me more of those stories. Please.
I want to hear about the consultancy that slowly built recurring revenue. The SaaS product that took two years to find product-market fit. The e-commerce business that grew through word-of-mouth and careful optimisation. The service business that learned to scale without sacrificing quality.
These are the stories that would actually help people building things. These are the models worth emulating.