A founder client of mine* once said that she deals with “startup altitude sickness.” I’d bet you’re right there with her.
Multiple times a day, a founder goes from down in the weeds to 10,000 feet.
One moment, you’re fixing product bugs, analyzing open rates, or checking for spelling errors in a new sales sequence.
And then, you elevate.
Often, it's not even a conscious choice. You’re writing an email, and all of a sudden you’re looking down at your startup, asking existential questions like…
- “Are we even selling to the right buyers?”
- “Is building this new feature actually a good idea?”
- “Wait, why am I working on this right now?”
- “Well, how did I get here?” (Okay, now you’re just singing Talking Heads.)
Anywho, these questions often march right into your brain with zero notice. You’re pulled up to a bird’s eye view, only to force yourself back to sea level to finish whatever task you’re doing. But your worries about strategy stay unresolved until this pattern repeats all over again.
Just like the real illness, startup altitude sickness will leave you disoriented and fatigued. But you need all the clarity and energy you can muster for your startup to succeed.
If you find yourself dealing with altitude sickness, here are four steps on how to manage it.
Step 1: Commit.
Similar to when you’re actually going up to elevation, intention is key. It’s not effective to leave things to chance or assume it’ll all work out. That's how you end up fainting at a wedding on a mountaintop in Utah... hypothetically speaking, of course...
Instead, you need to commit proactively to spending intentional time at 10,000 feet so that you can be sure you’re headed in the right direction.
Step 2. Assess how you think you'll win.
When we talk about "strategy" and "vision" for an early-stage startup, it all comes down to repeatable sales. It's straightforward, but often made overly complicated: we need to figure out how to build a sustainable business, and a sustainable business won't exist without recurring, reliable revenue.
Get yourself and your team clear on how you believe you're going to succeed in the market. You'll do this by answering questions like:
- Which of our customers are using us to accomplish something absolutely critical?
- What is it that they’re trying to accomplish?
- Why do they need to get it done so badly?**
If you have a team, you need to align and commit to one hypothesis. If your team isn’t aligned on who is buying and why, you’ll end up selling similar-but-different stories, and that isn’t an effective way to build a repeatable sales motion as a team. Which leads me to…
Step 3. Track your learnings and iterate.
Once you and your team are aligned on a hypothesis of how you’ll win, you should start tracking what you’re learning about that hypothesis from your prospects and customers.
I recommend a weekly 45-minute meeting (with all founders and any customer-facing teammates), where you cross-reference your hypothesis against two questions:
- What did we learn from the market this week?
- Based on what we learned, where might our hypothesis be off or require iteration?
Make changes to your hypothesis based on what’s been uncovered. I cannot express how impactful it is to have a weekly ritual where each customer-facing team member shares what they’ve learned with the rest of the team. It’s this structured, week-over-week attention that will refine your hypothesis into a sales story that drives deals consistently with the same buyer type.
Step 4. Shift priorities, large and small, accordingly.
Startup altitude sickness happens because you haven’t spent enough time tying your high-level strategy to your daily responsibilities.
As you hold yourself accountable to iterate on your hypothesis of why you’ll win, your priorities will become clearer.
For example, during your weekly meetings, maybe you’ll uncover that none of your customers are using a certain feature. A natural decision will be to stop working on it and prioritize something else. If you notice that prospects are always saying the same phrase to express why they need from a product like yours, a natural result would be auditing all your sales messaging to ensure you’re representing your product value in words that resonate with your customers.
The relentless flood of decisions and priorities is one of the most challenging parts of being a founder. It often can create the feeling that you don’t have time to check in on high-level strategy.
But I tend to see far too few startups having regular and structured conversations on strategy and how it should evolve based on market insights.
This process will provide deeper clarity so that you can make decisions faster, de-prioritize low-yield projects, and spend more time on what matters.
Wishing you many more safe and Pepto-free visits up to 10,000 feet!
This is Extra Extra, a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early sales. I’m Caroline Fay, an exited social impact founder who’s spent my career launching and selling new products. I help non-traditional tech founders build sustainable, recurring revenue.
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Caroline Fay
*The client who hipped me to this concept is Jaime-Jin Lewis, CEO and co-founder of Wiggle Room. Her venture builds tools for childcare providers, and it’s up for a $50,000 prize. Vote for her to win today!
**This set of questions is inspired by Rob Snyder, whose methods I really like for early sales.
