Toronto Entrepreneur

Tangible work is your fuel to get through the hard times at a startup. If you’re a handy man you mostly work on tangible things at your work. If you are a philosopher or a theoretician, you probably work on concepts and ideas most of the time. But at the early stages of a tech startup you need to do both and you need to do them well. But what you have to keep in mind is that you need a regular dose of tangible duties in your work. That’s because in the early stages of the startup the only reward you get are those tangible tasks. You may not have a full product, and therefore no users. If you’re looking for investors and haven’t found any money, you have no money either. See there’s no rewards but those tangibles. So include them in your work diet.

Some good tangible tasks can include writing code, making connections at events, work on your presentation slides (if you’re looking seeking investment), start a blog about your company, tweet either about your company or even better, about the industry you’re in. Show people that you really care about what you’re doing. These tasks really help you feel rewarded and therefore you have some fuel to move forward. When people see you care, then they’ll care about you. Don’t forget though that coming up with strategies for various parts of your startup are very important and you should strategize well in order to succeed.

Have fun at work. You and your partners and your employees (if you have any) should feel excited about coming to work every single day. You know that excitement that corporate victims have on Friday afternoons for the day to end? That’s what I’m talking about. You may have to give up an hour of work for fun everyday but all the other 14 hours are going to be much more productive. Never forget that in a startup all you have is each other and people should energize one another. Make an everyday effort to make someone’s day. Buy people chocolate or their morning coffee. Fix that annoying bug and tell everyone the good news. Come up with fun, creative games (like chair hockey during Netscape’s startup days). If it’s a really cold and snowy day, and everyone is a bit down, get everyone together and go skiing for the day. Think of your startup as your baby. Wouldn’t you always try to have fun with the baby while you’d also make sure he was doing his homework?

Stay focused on what you’re doing now. Being in a startup really means doing 15 things at a time and these things aren’t fix bugs 1-15. That’s just one of those 15 things labled “fix the bloody bugs :)”. You should be organized but you should stay focused. You cannot think of all the things at the same time and do them well. Working on all these things is the fun part of being in a startup because you don’t do the same thing everyday. Startups are very exciting and excitement needs effort. A good party doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires a good amount of effort but it’s damn worth it. You see, us entrepreneurs have a tendency to measure our performance over short intervals of time. We ask ourselves what did I get done today? And we tend to value a task that is complete more than several half completed tasks. That’s just how we think, so stay focused to get tasks done. Then move onto the next task. And by the way that doens’t mean you’re not multi-tasking.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard