Startup- Productivity: How to Manage Stress and Burnout as a Founder

Welcome to a new edition of Building Digital Products (BDP).

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Building Digital Product (BDP) by Osita is a monthly newsletter that supports founders, investors, and startup enthusiasts with insights and principles on how to build better products and startups.

This is my 28th edition and eleventh edition for the year.

BDP's theme for 2024 is "Resilience."

Here is a little snapshot of me.

Osita James is a technology entrepreneur and a partner at BlackCrest Legal. The start-up advisory law firm (BlackCrest) has successfully advised start-ups across Africa in investment deals worth over $20 million. He holds an MSc in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from the Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, a bachelor of law from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a Diploma in Technology and Innovation from the Nigerian University of Technology and Management. He writes poetry and fiction in his free time.

He supports African founders with professional legal and start-up operations advice and can be reached at osita@blackcrest.africa or here.

Today's edition will explore the mental challenges of building a startup and how founders can navigate them while maintaining productivity.

Anxiety is the greatest threat to all creative endevours. Those who wallow in the pit of anxiety are often too engrossed to see a path to progress. - Anonymous.

When I started my first startup, I thought I would do a few things online and boom! customers would come running from everywhere. I was wrong. I would later learn that marketing had little to do with product quality and more with customer perception. I had experienced the highs and lows of doing business, of having expectations after sales calls and coming up empty-handed. I have experienced low sales, customer complaints over products that were a labour of love and VC rejections. Many founders face all of this alone and I think it is unhealthy.

In today's edition, I will be sharing 6 tips that have helped me manage my mental health as a founder and business owner.

Pro Tips on Managing Stress and burnout as a founder

1. Take a break
2. Clear communication
3. Evolving operations processes
4. Delegation
5. Growth mindset
6. Community

1. Take a break

This may seem like an over-flogged point but it merits its repetition. Founders sometimes need to take a break. Founders are usually dreamers with big vision. They work tirelessly to bring their dreams to reality. They sometimes get so engrossed that they forget to take a break. It is not uncommon to see a founder who doesn’t go home after work and spends extra hours working on their products. While this can be good and speaks to commitment and a strong passion that can push the product to product market fit, it can also be an indicator or zeal that quickly translates to burnout.

Every founder needs a break. Research has shown that rest allows people to perform better. This also applies to founders. Founders need to put down their PC, their tools or their research materials and rest. Sometimes we make more progress when we take things slow than we speed things up. Building is as much an art as a science, and all great artworks take time.

2. Clear communication

One of the biggest reasons for burnout is when the founder tries to do the role of other team members. It is true that while bootstrapping founders may struggle to get the best talent but this shouldn’t decrease the productivity of bootstrapped founders. Founders can make things easier to do by communicating them very clearly. As a founder don’t assume anything with your team. Don’t assume the product manager is good at documentation. Communicate your documentation standard. Don’t assume the content intern is good at social media, communicate your social media content standards. The clearer your expectations are, the easier you will make it for your team members to meet them.

3. Evolving Operations process

A startup has operations that underline its value creation process. For a startup operations to be relevant it usually has to be evolving. This means that the founder’s team members have to constantly update the operations processes based on legal and global best practices and trends. A market vertical like e-commerce logistics is constantly evolving. Players need to stay abreast of global trends on the most efficient ways to manage logistics operations. Amazon has bots that manage inventory and save them millions of dollars in productivity annually. Smart founders need to know the trends in their industry to work more efficiently. A CRM for example can save a founder thousands of hours managing customers. A payment solution can save the founder thousands of hours in payment operations and so on.

4. Delegation

The need to feel busy is something founders should de-emphasise. Being productive is far better than being busy. A busy founder does any and everything and is seldom very effective. There are two broad categories of stress, unproductive stress and productive stress. Productive stress for a founder of when you expend energy and resources doing things that effectively move the needle on your KPI progress. The key word is effective. An ineffective founder will focus all their energy on doing everything even if someone else could have handled it better. A founder should not handle operations, fundraising, business development (sales) and Human Resources management if he or she can help it. By delegating one of two functions to another team member better qualified to handle those functions, founders are better able to think clearly about their long-term priorities, plan and execute. A founder who does everything in his startup is seldom able to strategize effectively on improving KPIs. They may also suffer burnout.

5. Growth Mindset

Every founder needs a growth mindset to navigate failure and the challenges that come with building. A growth mindset is a learning mindset where the learner sees challenges as a learning curve rather than a hindrance to progress. The more challenges such a person faces, the more lessons they learn. This is so important to founders who build their business from scratch. They attach emotional inclinations to their products and are often unwilling to budge if a superior argument against the success of their current product. The inevitable failure of the product can break such a founder. Especially when they feel like the product means everything to them. Founders should keep an open mind and be willing to take feedback on their products. Especially from founders who have been building longer in the same industries. Founders should accept that their products may not work out but choose to put in their best all the same. Founders should not put undue pressure on other team members regarding the execution of a product strategy but have defined product roadmaps that are communicated clearly to their team members.

6. Community

Everyone needs people. No one can do everything all by themselves. But even more important, people need people who are doing something similar to talk with often or share ideas and frustrations to stay resilient through tough times. The role communities play in founder development cannot be over-emphasised. From Google Developers Community to startup grind, communities have always played a big role in startup development globally. Every founder should be part of a community of other founders building bold ideas. Sometimes seeing other people talk about their challenges can make a founder feel not so alone. Other times it can teach them what to avoid or even give them ideas on what to improve in their operations. Being part of a founders or startup community can help a founder manage stress and burnout. By sharing ideas and contributing to a community of like-minded people, founders can find solace in the kindred spirit of innovation and resilience in building products that can change the world.

Conclusion

Burnout is real. Every founder should look after their mental health. Neither funding or a great product guarantees success. The best each founder can do is try their best. Founders should communicate their expectations to their team clearly, delegate more and associate with a community of like-minded people. To all the founders reading this, I hope you're not too busy to care about your mental health.

In all you do, keep building.

Remember that you only fail when you stop trying.

I am rooting for you.

If you loved this edition, please share it with another founder.

Keep building,

Osita.