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.
