Fame and Former Successes May Be the Biggest Hindrance to Entrepreneurial Progress
By: Rachel Greenberg
Tags: Business, Success, Social Media, Entrepreneurship, Startup

The explosion that broke the camel’s back

The best thing about flying across the country, leaving my old corporate life and colleagues behind, and embarking on my flight of (initially failed) startups from the solitude of my Marina del Rey studio apartment was the isolation. Pursuing entrepreneurship in a vacuum might sound like a horrible idea, but some people — I’d venture to guess many — work best on their own, without the scrutiny of a watchful boss, judgmental colleagues, or a pressure-enhancing audience.

Unfortunately, some startups don’t allow that secrecy, isolation, and anonymity — and for one of my clients, the transition to a public launch became her downfall.

This client wasn’t your average product-hawking entrepreneur; she did have a plan for a line of future products, but initially, she was selling services in the entertainment space. We identified what we thought was her ideal customer audience, strategized a launch plan, and she began building out the service side of her business online. For the first few weeks, her business was doing well, but it was far from exploding. Then, something unexplainable happened, and seemingly overnight her business blew up.

Well, it wasn’t just her business that blew up — it was the services she’d provided, the audience of invested fans, followers, and customers, and her very own name. This person definitely didn’t pursue business for the attention; she merely came up with a unique service to tap into an underserved market that she had unusually direct access to, so she decided to give it a try. If anything, she was building it in spite of the potential attention.

When I say her audience blew up, I’m talking she went from tens to hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of people patronizing her services in a matter of months — with zero advertising and barely any marketing at all. In fact, the services largely sold themselves, spreading through word of mouth or SEO algorithms perhaps, plus a few unsolicited features in relevant publications. Financially speaking, things were going very well for her — and given her lack of marketing expenses, her profit margin was through the roof.

That’s when she experienced something new and equally unexpected: a negative review. Statistically speaking, it would have been nearly impossible for her to grow this fast without accumulating a few less-than-stellar reviews. However, the handful of negative reviews sprinkled among the hundreds of positive ones weren’t the biggest problem. The much graver problem at hand was the size of the audience itself — and the heightened stakes and elevated expectations to which my client felt she had to live up.

She contemplated shutting the entire business down — saying she was “closed for orders” until the frenzy went away. Just a tip — from entrepreneur to entrepreneur — shutting down your entire business in the heat of its explosive growth is typically not a winning move. Especially if you may have been algorithmically blessed and awarded free, zero-cost customers flocking to your offerings. As far as I could see, this was her time to ride this wave all the way to the top.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t proven her concept; she had — many times over. That said, service businesses may suffer from a component that few entrepreneurs talk about: performance anxiety. With the increased pressure of a large audience potentially watching her company’s every move — in terms of services added, customer testimonials, and new product launches — she felt paralyzed in her very own business.

She doubted that she could ever again provide the same high-quality services she’d successfully provided to tens of thousands of people over the past few months. She’d expanded her team a bit — to keep up with the accelerated demand — and the added pressure of supporting her new employees weighed on her further. This client is a perfect example of an entrepreneur traumatized by her very own public success — or “fame” on a small scale.

Thinking back to my earlier failed ventures, it probably isn't a shocker that I’d rather have failed quietly in isolation than on a public stage with an audience to watch, jeer, and “boo” with my every misstep. It wasn’t until years later that I felt confident enough to come clean about my startup failures — which ironically enough, became one of my biggest claims to fame.

Even Harry Potter acknowledges the curse of fame

My two guilty content consumption pleasures range from firsthand prison exposés to interviews with former child stars. Last night, it was child stars with none other than Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe. I watched the interview at double speed (the same way I watch everything to maximize the bang for my limited time’s buck), but I paused and rewatched his answer to one question.

Does Daniel Radcliffe like being famous?

When Daniel Radcliffe was everyone’s favorite little wizard boy, the stakes were fairly low. JK Rowling had already proven the concept, and the success of the movies likely came down to the post-production editing and the marketing circuit. Post-Potter, Daniel started branching out into more mature and artistically complex content. That new, unfamiliar content didn’t sit too well with his former teenage bookworm audience. They captured Daniel in their minds as Harry, and any deviation from that felt like a betrayal, a failure, and a mistake on Dan’s part.

That’s why it’s no surprise Daniel answered “Anonymity is a really cool thing. It allows you to do a lot and make mistakes…and not feel like [they’re] all very, very high stakes all the time.”