Random Reflections on One Year of Farmers for Forests
By: Farmers For Forests
Tags: Sdgs, Climate Change, Conservation, India, Nature

I have to confess to having a deep curiosity about the daily lives of others. By “others” I mean writers and sometimes scientists, and now more recently, start-up founders. There’s something delightfully personal about getting the deets on when your favorite writer (or start-up founder) wakes up, when she goes for a walk or how she generally gets through her day. I mean has one really lived, if one hasn’t obsessed over how many cups of coffee Balzac drank in a day or what Murakami eats for lunch?

Unfortunately (or fortunately) there’s no similar litany of the daily routines of start-up founders. That’s a good thing though. Because a) who cares? b) there’s definitely too many of us c) we all have infinitely less interesting lives than the writers (and probably the scientists too) and d) all our daily routines would probably look like this:

7:00 — Wake up

7:01 — Panic about self and then the start-up

7:02 — Panic about finances and then paychecks

Rest of the day — some full and half hearted attempts at work

23:00 — ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

So when scavenging for the literature on the daily routines of start-up founders, I mostly came up zilch. Unless, ofcourse, you’re interested in the daily routine of Elon Musk (then there’s a ton). But for the mere mortals that sleep 8+ hours at night and don’t wake up at or stay up till 4 am, there’s really not that much “real stuff” out there (random cascade of generic productivity and motivational advice not counted).

What I did find, however, in my practically pointless search for the uber personal side of the start-up world were some great pieces on what some of these other start-ups had learned over the years. In a similar vein of transparency and (almost) full disclosure, here’s a list of all of the things we did well and all the mistakes we made in the first year of existence for anyone who wants to read them (so basically just our Moms *hug emoji*):

Mistakes

Not being careful enough in our dealings with vendors: As a small start-up hungry to prove itself, we often prioritized immediate action over calm consideration and ironclad contracts. As a result, we often found ourself in prickly situations — we had an irascible IT vendor hold our own website hostage while mocking our “foreign” education and lack of IT knowledge; we also had a barbed wire vendor threaten to throw out two of our co-founders if they ever showed up at his shop again (while refusing to deliver 300 kg of barbed wire that we had paid for). If we had paused a few minutes longer to just think through the long-term ramifications of getting into contracts and dealing with certain ‘type’ of vendors (hint: unethical, mixed with some misogyny), we would have saved ourselves a ton of headache.

MSRTC bus and tree saplings (Location: Dhavalgaon, Maharashtra)

2. Not loosening our purse strings enough: As a new not-for-profit with a small budget, we desperately looked for ways to cut corners — from hiring an inconvenient but majestic looking MSRTC bus for transporting our saplings to scaring our staff into spending less money on field expenses (so much so that one of them spent the night in his car instead of getting a hotel). The most frequent result of choosing the cheaper option over the sensibly priced practical one was that we often ended up spending more money to reverse the damage than if we had simply chosen the latter.

3. Not taking ourselves seriously enough: Honest confession- none of us are the swiss clocks of human beings we’d like to be. We procrastinate, obsess over somewhat irrelevant fonts and formatting details and often turn work conversations into long rambling rants on politics, pilates and police brutality. We’ve also not done a great job of holding each other accountable for missed deadlines and delays. But we’re learning and improving — holding team meetings in co-working conference rooms rather than co-founder homes has helped tremendously, as have weekly check-in calls and Trello task lists.

Afforestation on 3.5 acres of unused farmer land (Location: Dhavalgaon, Maharashtra)

4. Not thinking big enough: We surprised ourselves by not just meeting, but surpassing the Year 1 targets we had set. But when we shared the first draft of our five year scale-up plan and financial projections with friends and advisors, the recurrent piece of feedback we got from everyone was to THINK BIG! Set more ambitious targets! We initially dithered — the scale at which they were forcing us to think scared us a bit. But one thing we’ve solidly realized over the past year is that ‘being practical’ shouldn’t wade into the ‘undervaluing yourself’ territory.

What We’ve Done Well