Why I'm helping startup founders

July 28, 2012starting up

Last month I wrote about my discovery that helping others makes me happier than spending the time seeing a movie or doing some other “pleasure activity”. I briefly mentioned that I’ve been regularly helping startup founders, and since then I’ve had a few people get in touch to ask how I do it and, more importantly, why I started helping others in the first place.

It’s true that as a startup founder you have more than enough to do without helping others. However, helping others is something I’ve found to be very useful for many reasons, so I want to share some of my reasons for doing so and why I think you might want to start helping people too.

6 reasons I help startup founders

I enjoy helping people

One of the key reasons I help other startup founders is that I genuinely enjoy helping others. It gets me excited to hear about people’s challenges and about how to improve a situation. Whether they’re struggling to get traction, having difficulties with juggling a startup alongside work, or finding it hard to stay motivated, I get a thrill out of working with them to think of the best steps to take.

A duty to the amazing community

During University I got hooked on the idea of creating a startup. Since then I’ve made many mistakes and learned a lot of lessons. One of the things I’ve been blown away by is the “pay it forward” culture of startups all around the globe. The very least I can do is Help with your startup positively to this amazing community, wherever I happen to be.

Do you think I might be able to help you with your startup? Help with your startup

Learning about success and failure

We all know that success doesn’t come overnight, and often there are failures along the way. I love meeting people so I can pass on the lessons from some of my failures and at the same time start to spot what works and what doesn’t through other people’s experiences.

A way to experience more startup challenges

There’s simply no way I can experience first-hand what’s involved with all the different types of startups, marketing approaches or technical challenges, even if I build many different startups throughout my career. Whilst it’s never the same to hear about someone else’s learning than to go through it yourself, by meeting other founders you can be exposed to much more and multiply your experience and knowledge.

An outstanding support network

Meeting lots of founders also gives me a fantastic group of people to call on whenever I have a challenge. I might meet an awesome Android developer who needs to chat about struggles of creating a startup such as validating their idea or gaining traction. If I’m having challenges with Android development, I can easily hit them up for help.

Practicing being an amazing advisor

I’ve heard many times before that the investors who succeed are the ones who are very good at recognising patterns. Mark Suster describes this well in his article Invest in Lines, not Dots:

"If you’re an investor looking at dots somebody else may be looking at lines. Meet entrepreneurs early and watch how they perform maybe even at their previous startup. I always ask to meet people before they’re officially fund raising well before actually. It helps me spot patterns."

One of my aims is to be a fantastic advisor, and eventually do some angel investing too. I want to become someone people can call on who has lots of fantastic advice in many of the challenging areas of running a startup. I can only hope to achieve this by experiencing different aspects (bootstrapping, finding product/market fit, gaining traction, raising funding, hiring etc.) and through practicing being concise and useful in short advisory sessions.

Why you can start helping others now

When we were making just $20 per month with Buffer, I had the feeling that I couldn’t help people: I wasn’t successful yet! What I’ve found, however, is that I could help far more people when I was at that stage. I believe you can too, whatever stage you’re at.

Imagine you go to a conference and there’s a big guy on the stage who’s sold his 3rd company for a billion dollars. He’s so far away from the founder sat in the audience who’s just starting with their idea or maybe doesn’t even have an idea yet. The best you can hope to get is inspiration. The worst case is you actually feel stalled by how small the chance of this happening to you is.

With most people I meet, I find that I’m just a few steps ahead or behind. This means the learning is very fresh, the advice is actionable and the results feel achievable. I think this is much more powerful. Even if you’ve just had your idea and are starting to plan the steps ahead, how many people are there that haven’t even got to the idea stage yet?

Have you started helping others, or have you considered it?

Photo credit: Michael Scott