Printing Money and the Shiny New Toy

What drives the entrepreneur may be more complicated than what it seems…

For many entrepreneurs, getting to revenue is not “success”, it can be a let down.

I see this pattern over and over: an entrepreneur has a product that quickly makes some money, but they get distracted with a ‘new’ and ‘better’ idea. They drop the money maker to chase the shiny new toy.

Try as I might to convince them otherwise, they don’t want to focus on what is making money – and they want to start something brand new. I understand it. It is much more fun to create something new rather than endure the drudgery of building, debugging, selling, shipping, and supporting a product.

But there is something else. There are some underlying phenomena that create this behavior over and over.

You would think they don’t realize how good they have it.

The entire entrepreneur journey is like walking through a thick fog, randomly bumping into things and (hopefully) learning tiny lessons. You think you know where you are going, but it really doesn’t matter which direction you are pointed, as long as you are moving ‘forward’, you are hopefully learning something.

Most entrepreneurs start with some notion of a problem that needs to be solved and some version of how to solve that problem. However, it is never that simple.

Just figuring out the problem and potential solution is never enough, although it is brutally difficult. The problem/solution might work well for the entrepreneur’s immediate situation, where there may be 10’s or 100’s of customers. However, there may be another use case for the solution (or a closely related problem) that has millions of customers.

It takes a lot of time to bump into many different people, pitch an idea, get feedback, re-do the message, try a different tack, and constantly improve and hone the business idea. This is a terribly time-consuming process and it takes immeasurable amount of endurance and fortitude. Or so it would seem.

The grind of entrepreneurship and the hero’s journey.

Many entrepreneurs are on the hero’s journey. They have a deep-seeded need to set impossible goals and overcome enormous obstacles. They work tirelessly to achieve things that are impossible by mere mortals.

These entrepreneurs are driven by the impossible nature of their quest. They love the thrill of walking the knife’s edge of complete failure and the relentless dopamine hit of pulling out from a steep dive.

One of the things that turns people off of entrepreneurship is the potential for failure. Many entrepreneurs learn to embrace that potential. It is a motivator for them. It is pure thrill-seeking behavior. It is the race car driver running on the very edge of crashing all the time.

Until it isn’t.

The big let down: getting revenue.

Once a little bit of revenue kicks in, there is a kind of a let down.

The ever-present anxiety of imminent failure now gone. It is like you are heads down, working tirelessly day after day to reach a far-away goal, and finally, there you are. It is truly a weird feeling, which is both comforting and uncomfortable.

Entrepreneurship is addicting.

There is an insatiable thrill to being an entrepreneur. Overcoming great odds, the valiant entrepreneur toiled through thick and thin to singlehandedly bring a product to market.

Whether driven by the dream of riches, getting back at the seventh-grade science teacher who said you would not amount to anything, or whatever motivates you deep in your soul, the drive to that goal is an addictive compulsion.

The anxiety of imminent failure, while always frightening, weirdly becomes a friend on the journey. But when “you arrive”, that friend is gone.

This is one of the reasons why entrepreneurs often drop a “successful” product and want to try to climb an even higher mountain with a more difficult project: they need the dopamine and the challenge.

The let down is never this clear.

I would guess that few if any entrepreneurs fail to recognize this behavior in themselves. While they may feel like something has changed when the revenue appears and they have “success”, they know something has changed, but they cannot put their finger on it.

As the business changes from finding product-market fit to executing the business, the entrepreneur might feel like a fish out of water. It is understandable that their deep motivators – that ever-present fear of failure – are no longer there. They get antsy, and they loose interest in the thing that appears to be their goal.

However, their goal was never to generate revenue. Their goal was to live on the edge.