2 Important Startup Mindsets I have learnt after three years of being a co-founder
By: Jerome Tse
Tags: Product, Growth, Productivity, Founders, Startup

Looking back on my 3-years experience cofounding Freehunter, it is a fruitful journey in which we learnt a lot from our mistakes. A startup is a business hypothesis that aims to solve a problem with a disrupting solution, which I have come to realize that a founder’s mindset has a huge impact on both the direction and the approach/system that the company uses, which eventually affects the company’s progress.

As Freehunter is becoming one of the largest freelancing platforms in HK and growing quite well in Taiwan and Singapore, my team and I am now starting another venture, Jupitrr — a smart business networking app that works like a dating app. This is a great opportunity to do a huge review on our startup journey so that both you and we can avoid our previous mistakes. This is the first blog of a series of blogs on the essentials, the growing, hr, product, tech stuff on what we experienced or observed from other startups.

And today, I want to start with 2 undermined mindsets that I have learnt from Freehunter:

Don’t assume, look for feedbacks continuously Connecting the dots

I won’t say the mindsets below are the best as different founders have different positions in a different company with a different culture, but these are the ones that I think are currently important as a founder.

The Freehunter Team

1. Don’t assume, look for feedbacks continuously

It’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. — Elon Musk

As suggested by Elon Musk, a feedback loop means you’re constantly thinking about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself. A really typical example for Continuous Feedback Loop is that famous founders always suggest us to talk to users to find a product-market fit. The word “continuous” here is really important. Many first-time founders, including us, seldom talk enough to users, which end up creating a product that not enough users like. They had feedback loops, but simply not enough. With continuous feedback loops, you can understand users’ problems better and whether your product is the best solution to solve their problem. It is one of the best ways to find a product-market fit. As long as you keep getting feedback from users and iterate, you will find 100 users who extremely love your product, you may then find a million users who love your product.

Once you understand how to apply continuous feedback loops in doing user research, you will realize that the same mentality can also be applied to the other aspects of your company or even your life, some good examples are self-improvements, team communication methods, marketing strategy, or product development cycle.

The goal of the feedback loop is to understand more about the situation and keep pivoting before you give up. Let’s say you wanted to have a healthy body and decided to hit the gym in the evening. After a few days, you stopped because you thought that you were always tired after work. Many people procrastinated and stopped here. Having a feedback loop on yourself will help you to be more self-conscious and review yourself. For example, is it possible to work out in the morning? Still so exhausted? How about doing it three times per week instead of every day, etc… It is always easy to say than to do it but the only thing limiting yourself to change is mostly your mentality.

To practice this mindset, an approach is to do simple journaling every day before or after you sleep, it will raise your self-consciousness. Andrew Kirby had a nice and simple video on this, you can also take a look at the journal format that I use weekly here.

2. Connecting the dots

… ability to sort of zoom out like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from about the 80th floor down at the city while other people are to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps — Steve Jobs (1982)

As young Steve Jobs suggested, being smart is the ability to zoom out. When you look down from 80/f, you could be able to find the starting, destination point, the cheapest/fastest/cost-effective way between two points. Put it in the founders — you need to know the current situation, your goal, and link them up with the most suitable approach. If you start practicing this mindset, you will make better decisions as you view things from the macro perspective. You will become more goal-based, logical, and data-driven, hence you would clear the micro pathway before really going through it.

One example in Freehunter is how we did goal settings for feature development. There was once in 2018 that we spent two months building a social networking feature where the freelancers could share their knowledge and work. Half of the reason for this is that we thought it would be an engine for our user retention. We didn’t really consider the dots in between, we knew that it requires a reason for users to use the feature but instead we just think that it will “boom” and have lots of freelancers sharing their insights frequently as users like to use FB/IG.

After the launch, we realize the dots in between — most of our users prefer to have more short-term jobs than knowledge exchange. To them, the social networking feature is more like a place to do direct personal branding than really doing knowledge exchange. The feature became a yellow page that was not value-added to their personal branding, their target audience (the clients) are not even here! After knowing about these dots, we decided that this is not the most effective way to either do freelancer knowledge exchange or personal branding, the users don’t like it and they don’t use it the way we expected. We shut down the feature, and used other methods to increase retention, decided to focus on being a really good freelancing job platform.

This highly uncertain dot played a huge role which made us spent extra time and money that we could have better spent. My experience tells that whenever you have this huge uncertain dot, most likely there are lots of small uncertain dots inside it. If you don’t think detailedly about these missing dots, it is highly possible that this dot is going to make you fail. You need to break them down into pieces such that you could either pivot to another route or at least better estimate the upcoming result.