Write because you are a nobody.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where advice from the brightest most successful individuals is omnipresent. Whether Physics, Finance, Mathematics or dozens of other realms of expertise you can find active blogs by industry leaders producing fringe content.

When it comes to startups you have living legends like Brad Feld, Sam Altman, Alexis Ohanian, Tim Ferris, Marc Andreeson, and dozens of others pushing the envelope daily. Unfortunately that isn’t even close to good enough. These guys have massive followings and do their best to inspire, guide, and teach at the highest levels. However, I am looking for less philosophy and more tactical/actionable advice from people in the trenches.

Here are two examples.

It is great to hear leaders like pg voicing opinions regarding a shortage of engineers (and those who disagree) and the difficulty many people are having hiring them. However, there are probably 500+ people who will read this post who have an incredible story about how they snagged that kick ass engineer. I know you’ve got an interesting story on how you stole him/her from the grips of Mother Google, convinced them the leadership position was more valuable than the net hit to salary, or simply payed up because time was more valuable than dollar bills. Where are those stories. I want the advice from the people who are 6 months ahead of me! Those are the stories that will help us build businesses.

Hearing pg recommend shooting for 10% weekly growth if you want to raise funds aggressively is super valuable. In fact, we utilize this knowledge when we’re planning our strategy. But how much more valuable would it be to hear 25 different stories from companies that succeeded or failed miserably in their pursuit of that number? Seeing what strategies worked in what cases would provide insight INFINITELY more valuable.

So where is the disconnect?

It is the lack of voices from people currently in the trenches. It has literally been months since I read a single article from somebody in the bootstrap-series a realm with an opinion that wasn’t luke fucking warm. At best you get some bs article about like “how we got into yc and aced the interview” or “how we got to 50k in mrr in 6 months” which is a click bait attempt to push their product. Building a company is hard and thousands of people are doing it; where the hell are their voices? It isn’t really surprising we don’t see them considering the vocal minority has taken complete control of our social media sharing link bait elite’s daily bottom of the barrel articles. There is no incentive to push high quality content when your entire business model revolves around ads and listicles get the most eyes.

Some sites try their best to capture the stories and essence of entrepreneurship, but inevitably it ends up being stories of how somebody built an incredibly successful business. The problem is your perspective is completely skewed with every additional month you are in operation. I literally struggle to remember how I thought about things when we started LawnStarter last August 2013 and only offered lawn care in Manassas and Reston. If I was to give advice to somebody starting a company there is absolutely no way I can put myself back in that mindset. I doubt many people can somehow separate themselves from their recent experiences to hop into the mindset somebody at a different stage is experiencing. Accelerators like Techstars or yc definitely help with this since the MD’s are consistently dealing with the same stage problems, but a very small subset of the startup community has this guidance.

It can be terrifying to talk about your thoughts or experiences before you are a success, but if I had 100 stories from people who had just closed their seed round I would be infinitely better off that somebody with a few pieces of advice in an essay written to address an entire market.

Ryan and I have tried to document some of our experiences from learning to code to fundraising to expanding to our second market offering lawn care in Austin, but we need hundreds of people to put their voices out there. Preferably in a self deprecating tone. Stroking your internet ego doesn’t help anybody but you. This shit is hard, and from what I hear it only gets harder, but it is also a blast and you couldn’t convince me there is a better path in life. If 90% of companies fail doesn’t it make sense we should hear those stories too, and preferably as it happens?

Why don’t we talk about our mistakes as they happen? In the last 2 months I have personally fallen into the ego trap of wanting to increase headcount irrationally, having to redo our employment docs, found myself avoiding some crucial parts of the business that I just hate dealing with, and dealing with a miscommunication of the salary we were offering a hire (still not sure how the hell I did this).

I’ve tried to write about some of this in hopes that is helps, but I doubt it has impacted more than a couple people. In aggregate however, we can have a massive impact. The guys everybody look up to are going to keep inspiring people, but it is also our responsibility to help the next gen of startups regardless of how it makes us look.

We should write because we are nobodies, because we have no idea what we are doing and neither does anybody else, because we don’t have any expectations to live up to. The people 6 months ahead of me with their business have provided the best advice for us, lets pay it forward.

People simply writing more about their experiences will be a great start, but I propose perhaps we throw together a site where people can blog about their experiences in this specific niche anonymously or otherwise. If you are interested in doing the terrifying thing that appearing human can be shoot me an email steve@lawnstarter.com.

In the off chance you live in one of our service areas (Washington DC, Fairfax VA, Alexandria VA, Centerville VA, Rockville MD, Germantown MD, San Antonio TX, or Orlando FL) we’d love to have you as a customer! Just mention you read this post and we’ll make sure to hook you up with a discount.