Author Archives: Shannon Dunn

1. How to use BAMFAM To Avoid the Sales Valley of Death

   23rd January 2025 7:00 am Comments Off on How to use BAMFAM To Avoid the Sales Valley of Death

   You know the story. You’ve had a meeting with a prospect, perhaps one that went really well. And at the end of the meeting your prospect says something like ‘This looks interesting, let me take it back to the team / think about it / could you send me a copy of the deck – and I’ll get back to you.’

   They may even promise to get back to you the same week.

   Which, of course, they don’t.

   So you wait a few days, and then you send a ‘Checking in’ email to see if they’ve had time to take it back to the team / think about it / review the deck you sent over.

   And, of course, you still hear nothing.

   And this dance goes on. You call, you email, you message them on LI. And several weeks, if not several months, pass without hearing from them again.

   Which means, I’m afraid, that you’ve found yourself in the Sales Valley of Death.

   Why Prospects Go Silent

   And it’s not at all uncommon. Prospects are really busy people. Prospects sound interested when they’re too polite to say they’re not, Prospects do market research that sounds like it’s buying interest when it’s not.

   And even for prospects who are interested, there’s a huge difference between being interested and actually having the time, resources and money needed to do something meaningful about it.

   But even though it’s not uncommon, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. A really big problem. Because these sorts of delays and lack of engagement with your prospects are killing your sales cycles, which in turn is killing your runway.

   Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem and it’s one of the simplest and highest-impact changes you can make to create momentum with a prospect and help prevent you from falling into the Sales Valley of Death.

   BAMFAM!

   BAMFAM stands for Book A Meeting From A Meeting and it’s my favourite, biggest bang-for-buck acronym of all time.

   The purpose of BAMFAM is at every stage of the sales cycle, with every single prospect, to always have the next touchpoint booked and confirmed in the calendar before you get off a call or meeting with them.

   So whenever you have a meeting or call with a prospect, you never leave that meeting or call without doing the following three things:

   1. Establish a clear next step – what is the next step you and your prospect are going to take after this call?
   2. Agree the day and time you’re going to speak next with your prospect.
   3. Send an invite right there and then to get it booked in the calendar, and ask your prospect to check they’ve received it.

   This can be a really simple change in your behaviour, but if applied to every prospect at every stage of the sales cycle it will have a big impact on the momentum of your deals.

   Your New Sales Mantra

   Give yourself this mantra:

   I will never leave a meeting with a prospect without getting the next meeting BAMFAMed in the calendar.

   Let’s look at a practical example – how to use BAMFAM in your first meeting with a prospect.

   When you have a first meeting, always save 5 minutes at the end of the meeting to say the following (and those 5 minutes are critical – if you run the clock down to the end of the meeting, your prospect will jump off before you get through this):

   ‘From what you’ve told me, it sounds like there’s a good fit between what you’re looking for and the solution we provide for our customers.’

   (Obviously if there’s no fit, this would be the point to qualify them out. There is no point putting prospects in your pipeline that are obviously not right for your business, no matter how thin your pipeline)

   ‘What we’d normally do at this stage is to book in another call so I can understand more about your ideal solution and show a deeper dive demo of our product.’

   (The ‘What we’d normally do..’ is very important – it implicitly tells your prospect that you’ve done this before and gives them the comfort that you know what you’re doing.)

   ‘I can also share some case studies of how we’ve solved similar problems for our customers if that would be of interest.’

   (Here you’re offering additional value. You don’t need actual written case studies if you don’t have them, you can also share anecdotes.)

   ‘Would XXXday or YYYday work for you?’ 

   For example, if today was Monday you could say ‘Would Wednesday or Thursday work for you?’

   If you get the day agreed, suggest morning or afternoon, then propose a specific time. If those don’t work suggest a couple of other days, and then if those don’t work, simply ask when they’re free. And when you suggest a date, don’t default to the following week – suggest a couple of days’ time and see if that works.

   Of course, your prospect may still say ‘No’ to getting the next call booked in. My personal preference is to address this directly:

   ‘I often find when people are reluctant to book in the next meeting, it means they’re not really interested in what I’ve shown them. Is that the case here?’

   Why BAMFAM Is Worth the Effort

   If you feel awkward saying any of the above, just remember three things:

   • This is actually a very honest conversation. You’re simply clarifying if there’s real interest
   • Time is your enemy. Your runway is slowly running out every single day. You do not have time to waste.
   • This actually saves your prospect time. Booking the next meeting now is much quicker than back and forth over email.

   And remember, BAMFAM isn’t just for your first meeting. Whenever you have any meeting with a prospect, you should follow some version of the above to get the next step booked and confirmed in the calendar before you leave the meeting.

   Don’t forget your new mantra:

   I will never leave a meeting with a prospect without getting the next meeting BAMFAMed in the calendar.

   Does BAMFAM work every time? Of course not. There are no silver bullets in B2B sales.

   But if you use it consistently, with every prospect in every meeting at every stage of the sales cycle, you will significantly increase the momentum of your deals.

   Best of luck with BAMFAM!

   If you have any questions on how to use BAMFAM, just DM me on LinkedIn or drop me an email at ben@crane.vc.

   

2. Continuous Sales: Don’t Forget to “Mind The Gap”

   15th January 2025 8:00 am Comments Off on Continuous Sales: Don’t Forget to “Mind The Gap”

   Deal Fatigue

   As the founder of an early-stage company, you know just how much effort it takes to close deals, but what is easy to overlook is just how much effort the buying process can be for your prospects too.

   So much so that once contracts are signed, buyers often suffer from what I like to call “deal fatigue” – immediately disappearing back into their (already busy) day job and becoming unresponsive.

   You’re probably wondering why this would be a problem? Surely once the contract is signed, everyone’s job is completed and you’ve taken one more successful step in building your company?

   This is only partially true.

   Whilst closing deals definitely helps to build your company, it does not help you sustain it for the long term.  For that you need to ensure you can consistently –

   • Retain this hard won revenue
   • Expand it in the future

   And the only sure-fire way to achieve both is to deliver on the value you promised they would get in the sales cycle – as quickly as possible and preferably with a minimal amount of effort required by the customer.

   Speed is an important consideration here because the risk of not being able to retain your revenue increases the longer it takes for a customer to see the value of your solution.

   The amount of effort required by the customer is also another vitally important consideration because prospects and customers do not live and breathe your solution like you do.

   They are busy being a bank, insurance, tech or engineering company etc. and even though they may have paid you a substantial amount of money to address serious pains in their business, it does not automatically follow that they will put in the required time, effort and resources to get your solution deployed and adopted quickly.

   
   The Buyer – User Gap

   This is because there is always a gap between the buyer of your solution and all the other people at the customer that are required to deploy and adopt it, and without their active involvement and participation you will not be able to deliver the value you promised the buyer.

   As they were not involved in the deal, these other people will usually have different priorities and little knowledge about or interest in your solution and to make matters worse they are almost always –

   • Overworked
   • Time poor
   • Resource constrained
   • Lacking in authority to make necessary decisions
   • Resistant to any kind of change

   The bigger the customer, the more of these people there are likely to be, and some of them may even be motivated to completely block your ability to deliver value.

   It is important to remember that even though your solution should make their working lives better, these people are effectively being asked to take on the additional work of deploying your solution and changing the way they work by adopting it, so to have any hope of securing their active participation someone needs to answer the perfectly reasonable question they will have –  “what’s in it for me?”

   And this is where buyer “deal fatigue” becomes a real issue for you because your buyer is the one person with sufficient credibility and authority to successfully answer this question for them.

   Common mistakes founders make here is to think that they have the credibility to answer the question, that the question only needs to be answered after the deal has closed or that the value of their solution is so overwhelmingly self-evident that the question does not need to be addressed at all.

   None of these is true, and if you wait until after the deal has closed and your buyer is no longer actively involved with you, you will (at best) find yourself stuck at a much lower level in their organisation spending additional time and effort trying to ”re-sell” your solution to lots of busy uninterested people who will not move quickly (if at all).

   The answer to closing this “buyer – user gap” is not to wait until after the deal has closed to figure out who these people are and then try to convince them to take on the extra work your solution represents, but rather to do the necessary discovery and engagement with your buyer during the sales cycle so your buyer is the one closing the gap with them.

   Thankfully there exists another “gap” you can exploit to your own advantage here – the gap between finalising the contract and marking the deal as closed-won.

   
   Closing the Gap

   This gap is the perfect window of time to do the necessary discovery with your buyer, as during the bureaucratic step of finalising contract terms nothing else is required to get the deal done and so there is no risk of slowing the deal down or introducing any new deal blockers.

   In fact, if done right, this discovery can help drive more urgency with your buyer to speed up getting contract terms finalised as they increasingly shift their thinking from closing the deal to getting their high priority pains solved with your solution.

   The specific discovery you will need to do with the buyer during this gap in the sales cycle will depend on the nature of your solution, however these are the kinds of things you are looking to understand from them –

   • How are new software solutions typically deployed at your company?
   • When does the solution need to be live and fully adopted?
   • Who needs to be involved for the deployment project?
   • Who do they report to?
   • Who will need to adopt the solution once it is deployed?
   • How many of them are there and what departments / teams are they in?
   • Who are their managers?
   • How much of a change in the way they work does the solution represent?
   • What communications channels work best when you roll out new software?
   • How do you normally train people on new software at your company?

   The goal of these discovery questions is to understand how they run software projects (and what their track record of success is), who needs to be involved for the deployment and what their priorities are, what the size and scope of the change impact will be for different people and groups, who has credibility with each of these groups to get them to adopt your solution (usually their direct manager), the company’s familiarity and experience with change management processes and tools, and where there is likely to be resistance or outright blockers.

   It is unlikely that your buyer will know the answer to all of these questions, but what they will be able to do is to navigate the organisation and connect you to the right people so you can dig deeper and start building a positive working relationship with them.

   By making these introductions for you, the buyer is effectively conferring their credibility on to you and your solution and acting as your executive sponsor. Should you encounter any blockers or resistance when engaging with these people, you can then go back to your buyer and explain the impact this will have on realising the value they want your solution to deliver. The buyer is then best placed to use their authority to engage directly with any resistors or blockers and get the deployment and adoption work required for your solution prioritised.

   It’s a good idea to provide your buyer with some messaging that they can use when making these introductions. The messaging should include why the solution is being purchased, what value it will deliver to the individual they are introducing you to, the high priority and importance the buyer is placing on the solution and the risks for the company and this particular individual in not embracing it.

   
   Minimising Your Revenue Risks

   As a founder it is vitally important you understand the risks “deal fatigue” can have on your ability to retain and grow your revenue so make sure you continue working with your buyer during the natural gap in the sales cycle when contracts are being finalised so they can introduce you to anyone else that needs to be involved to realise the value of your solution.

   Using this natural gap in the sales cycle, rather than the traditional approach of waiting “post sales” should minimise the time and effort it takes for your solution to deliver value which in turn will maximise your chances of retaining and expanding your revenue.

   The key thing to remember is that it is your buyer, not you, who has the necessary credibility and authority to close the “buyer-user gap” and get your solution prioritised but if they have disappeared on to the next thing, exhausted and unresponsive from closing the deal, this gap will stand in the way of delivering the value you promised them and jeopardise your ability to sustain your company for the long term.

3. The Future of Data Infrastructure and Our Investment in Kurrent

   18th December 2024 3:30 pm Comments Off on The Future of Data Infrastructure and Our Investment in Kurrent

   It’s January 25, 2022. We get a cold email from Dave Remy from Event Store, the company behind EventStoreDB, telling us about…

   “…an operational database that keeps all the changes in the form of events in contrast to traditional databases that keep only the current state (tongue in cheek, “intentional data loss architecture”). You can think of ESDB as being a log or ledger of the data, the enterprise’s source of truth, which then feeds the rest of the enterprise in real time.”

   Having invested in our fair share of data infrastructure companies, we already knew about event sourcing and event driven architectures. But there weren’t really any products that had made implementing these approaches easy for non-academic, non-steeped-in-database-lore engineering teams.

   We called all the database experts we knew. We dove deep into operational vs analytical vs streaming data. We messaged users of open source EventStoreDB, and we looked under the hood with paying customers.

   Here’s what we found: real enterprises running very real revenue-generating applications, not to mention entire infrastructures, on EventStoreDB.

   Many of them had stripped out Rube Goldberg machines made of message queues, ETL/ELT pipelines, multiple databases, and mountains of custom code to make sure that events weren’t lost, that they arrived in the right order, that history could be recreated, that end user facing analytical and BI tools didn’t fall over, etc etc. Where before they had multiple teams operating an unmaintainable mess, now they had one team running one database that was the source of truth for everything else.

   We leaned in to lead Event Store’s first institutional round and invited our friends at Creandum, Cocoa, Data Tech Fund, Irregular Expressions, and Common Magic to join us. It’s also the first time we’ve invested based on a cold inbound email—in truth, a rare occurrence in VC investing, but we are always thrilled to embrace outliers.

   Fast forward to today.

   • Kirk Dunn, of Cloudera fame, whom we had worked with for 5 years previously and had introduced to the company as an angel, came out of retirement to become CEO of the new Event Store, now known as Kurrent.
   • Nearly 150 enterprises rely on Kurrent and Kurrent Cloud to be the central source of truth for the events that are their business, such as streams for a particular artist’s song or retail transactions at global scale.
   • We led both parts of this funding: today’s $12 million funding announcement completes the total $22 million round. We’re doubling down on our commitment to the Kurrent team.

   We have been investing in data infrastructure for nearly a decade. We’ve watched the “modern data stack” grow old in the tooth. Enterprises are spending millions to make uncountable copies of the same piece of information, manipulating and modifying it, moving it back and forth from one system to another, paying a tax to every vendor that touches it.

   Kurrent represents a rethinking of the data stack—starting with bringing together the capabilities of a world-class operational database with streaming data services into an event-native data platform. Head over to kurrent.io to read about where they’re headed next.

   The future of data infrastructure is going to be simpler and faster and truer. Kurrent, Axiom, Gable, Tinybird, along with some yet-to-be-announced investments, represent us here at Crane hitting the accelerator. Let’s gooooooooooo!

   

4. To OSKR or Not to OSKR?

   17th December 2024 7:26 pm Comments Off on To OSKR or Not to OSKR?

   Alas, poor strategic planning! I knew it well, dear reader – a process of infinite complexity, of most excellent frameworks. Business leaders find themselves at a crossroads: to OSKR or not to OSKR? That is the question that haunts many a sleepless CEO, wrestling with the ghost of traditional strategic planning past while gazing into the promise of a more agile future. (Note: I used to avoid Shakespeare and Strategic Planning like the plague. And now, I somehow learned to love ’em.)

   Shakespeare? Strategic planning? Both often get a bad rap. Some founders need to avoid it altogether, convinced it’s a corporate relic too cumbersome for their fast-moving startup. Others overcomplicate it, turning what should be a guiding framework into an unwieldy binder of PowerPoint slides and vague aspirations. Somewhere between avoidance and paralysis lies the genius of a simple, practical framework: OSKR.

   Yes, OSKR—Objectives, Strategies, and Key Results—”To OSKR or not to OSKR, that is the question” may not have graced the stage at the Globe –or any stage for that matter, but the timeless genius of this method proves its worth in the modern-day stage of startups.

   Let’s break it down.

   The Anatomy of OSKR

   
   Objectives: What Matters Most

   At its core, an objective is a north star—an ambitious yet achievable statement of what you aim to accomplish.

   Good objectives are:

   • Inspiring: They should make your team’s hearts beat a little faster.
   • Concrete: Not “be the best” but “double our active user base in six months.”
   • Aligned: Objectives connect directly to your startup’s mission and the outcomes you’re building toward.

   For example: “Establish product-market fit in the enterprise market.”

   
   Strategies: How You’ll Get There

   Strategies answer the “how” behind your objectives. They’re the actions, approaches, or initiatives you’ll undertake to achieve your goals. Think of strategies as the main plot points of your story—the deliberate choices that propel you forward.

   Great strategies are:

   • Actionable: Clear steps your team can execute.
   • Focused: Prioritized efforts, not a laundry list.
   • Creative: Bold moves, not status quo.

   For example: “Train the salesforce on ‘social selling’ to the enterprise market,” or “Hold a thought leadership roundtable event for prospects.”

   
   Key Results: Measuring the Impact

   Key results are the punctuation marks on your progress—the measurable outcomes that indicate whether your strategies are working. They provide clarity and accountability, answering the question: “How will we know we’re succeeding?”

   The best key results are:

   • Quantifiable: “Increase leads by X%” rather than “Do better marketing.”
   • Time-Bound: Deadlines matter.
   • Challenging but Realistic: A stretch goal with a foot in reality.

   For example: “Secure 3 pilot customers from Fortune 1000 companies.” or “Reduce time-to-value (TTV) for enterprise customers by 20%.”

   Why OSKR Works

   OSKR works because it combines focus, clarity, and accountability. It forces founders and teams to ask the hard questions:

   • What truly matters right now?
   • What’s the best way to get there?
   • How will we know we’re succeeding?

   By boiling down strategy into its essential components, OSKR eliminates the noise and creates a shared understanding of what’s important. Done well, it’s a playbook for execution and a rallying cry for your team.

   Avoiding OSKR Pitfalls

   Even a simple framework like OSKR isn’t foolproof. Here’s what to watch out for:

   1. Confusing Strategies with Objectives: Objectives are “what,” and strategies are “how.” If they’re interchangeable, they’re not clear enough.
   2. Vague Key Results: Avoid metrics like “improve engagement.” Be specific—define what improvement looks like and how you’ll measure it.
   3. Too Many Priorities: The beauty of OSKR is its focus. Don’t dilute it with a dozen objectives. Choose the few that matter most.

   Putting OSKR to Work

   If you’ve been avoiding strategic planning or overcomplicating it, start small. Pick one objective for the next quarter. Define the strategies that will move you toward it and the key results that will tell you if you’re on track. Test it, tweak it, and build from there.

   Your strategic plan doesn’t need to be perfect; it needs to be actionable. The brilliance of OSKR lies in its simplicity—a framework that’s easy to adopt, adapt, and amplify as your company grows.

   Final Thoughts

   To OSKR or not to OSKR? Much like Shakespeare’s works have been needlessly buried in a world of intimidation, we’ve managed to wrap strategic planning in layers of unnecessary complexity. Strip away the fancy consultancy speak in business and the academic jargon surrounding “the classics,” and you’ll find that both Shakespeare and strategic planning share a simplicity at their core: they’re both about human nature, clear choices, and decisive action. 

   If you’ve read this far and have participated in planning exercises prior, you may be asking –”isn’t it OKR? And why is there an “S” in there?!” The OKR framework is popular, but OSKR takes it further by adding the ‘how’—Strategies—to ensure your big objectives translate into actionable outcomes. If you’ve ever found yourself stuck between vision and execution, it’s time to try OSKR! Embrace the simplicity. Lean into the structure. And write your own great story. After all, as Shakespeare himself might say, “The readiness is all.”

5. GET ON A PLANE (or bus, or car or train)!

   9th December 2024 11:06 am Comments Off on GET ON A PLANE (or bus, or car or train)!

   Basically, GO MEET YOUR PROSPECTS IN PERSON.

   I am, frankly, astonished by how many times I see early-stage founders and salespeople trying to win meaningful deals without meeting their prospects in person.

   Pre-Covid, it wasn’t even an option to not meet your prospects in person. If you wanted to sell a deal over 10k, your prospects expected you to come to their office. And why wouldn’t they? If they were putting their name to a five or six figure deal, their reputation would be on the line, perhaps even their job, so of course they wanted to meet you in person.

   But Covid changed all that because, for a while, meeting in person wasn’t possible, so people were forced to get used to buying software without meeting the people who were selling it.

   The problem is a lot of founders and sellers are still doing that today.

   I get it because it’s very time-effective. Why spend half a day or even a whole day travelling and meeting a prospect when you could do that in an hour and get on with the hundred other things you need to do that day?

   Well, here’s why.

   Meeting in person builds trust.

   You get to know people, more quickly, more deeply.

   • Meeting in person allows you to dig more deeply into discovering the problem your prospect wants to solve, how important that problem is to them, what their ideal solution would look and feel like, how quickly they need it in place, and whether it is, in fact, a need, a must-have, or just a nice-to-have.
   • Meeting in person helps you ask these questions with much more nuance.
   • Meeting in person forces everyone to pay attention, or at least allows you to see more clearly who’s engaged, who’s interested, who is actually looking for a solution to a problem they have right now and who isn’t.
   • Meeting in person allows you to read body language, see nonverbal cues, and understand if there’s subtext beyond what people are actually saying.
   • Meeting in person helps you build more excitement about solving your prospect’s problem.
   • Meeting in person makes it easier for you to book in the next meeting.
   • Meeting in person allows you to ask more questions about the decision-making process, who the real stakeholders are, and what they care about.
   • Meeting in person allows you to better understand the business and its environment, as well as to get a sense of its culture and the type of people who work there.

   Even the walk from reception to the office where you’re meeting or the walk back at the end of the meeting will allow you to ask questions and learn things that you can never learn when you meet online. Even as the coffees are being handed out, you are learning about the person and about the company.

   You will never learn more about a prospect than when you meet them in person.

   There’s a saying that people buy from people they like. Which is partly true; it would be difficult to buy something important from someone you dislike. But what’s really true is that people buy from people they trust.

   Meeting in person allows you to build more trust with your prospects.

   Should you have every first meeting in person? Probably not, if you have any sort of decent pipeline of prospects, that would be impractical. But if you don’t have much pipeline and the prospect seems reasonably well qualified, you should consider it, particularly if the prospect is within a couple of hours travelling time. If nothing else, you’ll learn a lot more about their initial reaction to the way you run your meetings, your pitch, your solution.

   Or if the first meeting is with one of your ‘dream’ prospects – totally ICP, could be one of your cornerstone accounts if you win them, exactly the right persona you should be engaging with – then you absolutely should consider it.

   And as you progress through your sales cycles, think about what other meetings could be pivotal to your deal.

   Your prospect wants to bring another stakeholder to a meeting, possibly another key or senior stakeholder. Does that sound like a good opportunity to meet them in person?

   Your prospect wants to do a technical session with some of their key technical folks, does that sound like a meeting you should have in person, possibly bringing your Sales Engineer with you?

   You feel you’re losing momentum with a prospect and want to understand if your Champion really is championing you and your solution in their business, does that sound like an opportunity to take them to lunch and find out?

   Your prospect has suggested you meet with their boss, or their boss’s boss – does that shout ‘Meeting In Person’ to you?

   For the avoidance of doubt, the answer to all of those questions is ‘Yes!’

   And for the further avoidance of doubt, these are all situations I’ve come across recently when I’ve had to ask the founder, or salesperson, ‘Why aren’t you having that meeting in person?’

   For prospects who themselves seem less keen to meet in person, I’m a big fan of the ‘actually I’ll be in your area/town that day/week’ to take the pressure off them about the meeting, so they’re more likely to agree to put a face-to-face in their calendar.

   So when you’ve finished reading this, go back to your CRM, or however you’re managing your pipeline today, look at the prospects and deals you have in play today, look at every upcoming meeting you have, and then every meeting you want to arrange as the next step in the process and ask yourself ‘Would this be a good meeting to have in person?’

   To help you answer that question, imagine if I were selling a competitive solution to yours to the exact same prospects. I’d be looking through my pipeline every day for every opportunity to meet those prospects in person, build trust, ask deeper questions, build excitement about my solution, and create more compelling value propositions.

   Get on a plane! (Or bus or car or train)!

6. Startup Success for Founders: 5 Non-Negotiables and 5 “Extra Credit” Considerations

   4th December 2024 8:31 pm Comments Off on Startup Success for Founders: 5 Non-Negotiables and 5 “Extra Credit” Considerations

   The tech founder journey is filled with challenges and opportunities at any given moment, sometimes when least expected: lots of twists, turns, and triumphs to navigate and learn from. As founders begin this adventure, some fundamental principles and insights can guide the path to success. Here’s one perspective (mine) that may be worthy of consideration at this moment in time — in this somewhat crazy, exciting, and yet-to-be-defined new era of AI:

   5 Non-Negotiables

   Tell Your Story:

   Tell your story before someone else tells it for you. (They will inadvertently or inevitably get it wrong). Your ability to share your simple and powerful story authentically and with inspiration is crucial. A great articulation of your story attracts employees, customers, partners, and investors to your cause. It’s about leading an ever-growing parade of stakeholders towards a shared future, opportunity, and satisfaction.

   Creativity Over Conformity:

   Building a company is more art than science. It requires creativity at every stage in problem-solving, decision-making, and navigating the market’s and world’s uncertainties. Encourage a culture where innovative ideas and unconventional approaches, in context, are welcomed, valued, and celebrated. Marvel at the “Wow, I never thought of that” moments.

   Every Interaction Counts:

   Especially for founders who are naturally introverted, it’s essential to make every single interaction deliberate and impactful. Make it a masterpiece. Whether it’s networking, pitching, selling, or leading your team, approach each engagement as an opportunity to leave a lasting impression. Think of it as a “once-in-a-lifetime-of-my-company” opportunity.

   Grit:

   There is beauty in hard work. The path to success is paved with setbacks and failures. The resilience to keep going, learn from mistakes, and never lose sight of what’s possible –this is what differentiates successful founders from the rest. Do the work and never give up. Embrace the grind and enjoy the miracle of solving the unsolvable.

   Momentum Is Key:

   Whether you’re riding a wave of success or struggling to find your footing, remember that momentum is crucial. Momentum is “a thing.” If you have it, do everything to keep it. If you don’t, focus your efforts on activities that can kickstart and build, or build back, your momentum. Even small wins can create a snowball effect, uniting your team and sparking a cycle of positivity and progress.

   5 Extra Credit Considerations

   Commerce Over Code:

   While innovative technology is the foundation of opportunity in your pursuits, the ability to close deals, understand customer needs, and solve real problems is paramount. Find out fast what customers are willing to pay for and what “value” means to them. Reaching the “next stage of growth” often requires prioritizing sales, market fit, and easing adoption over technological greatness.

   People Matter Most:

   The foundation of any successful startup, or anything really, is people. Work with people who move you, challenge you, and bring light to darkness and simplicity to complexity. A healthy dose of “passion from the people” and unhinged positivity can overcome almost any challenge. Invest excessive time in hiring, caring for, and keeping the right people.

   Prepare for Organizational Fragility:

   As your company grows, so will the complexity of managing your team and employee community. Recognize that organizations are inherently fragile due to human dynamics –people just being people with varying degrees of ego and insecurity. Building a culture of transparency, support, and continuous learning can mitigate these challenges. So, be transparent. Be supportive. And model, from the top down, what can result from a mindset of continuous learning.

   Fearlessness and Generosity of Spirit:

   Fear no one and extend grace to everyone. Approach your work with confidence and courage, but also extend generosity and empathy to everyone you encounter. This balance will help you navigate competitive and other pressures while building meaningful relationships with your stakeholders.

   Creativity, Courage, and Kindness:

   Creativity, courage, and kindness are unstoppable. Creativity in solving complex challenges, courage in the face of adversity and the unknown and unexpected, and kindness towards yourself and others are formulas for business success, personal fulfillment, and joy.

   As a founder, your journey will be unique and filled with trials and triumphs. Keeping these ten considerations in mind can help you navigate the complexities of building a startup, ensuring you survive and thrive in the “Era of AI” world we all live and work in.

   If you’re a founder or simply passionate about navigating the exciting challenges of building something extraordinary, we’d love to hear from you. Have questions, ideas, or want to share your story? Visit our Contact Us page and become part of the Crane community today!