6 Lessons Learned From Running a Startup Incubator

For the past 100 days, I’ve been running the Bootstrap First Incubator, a startup incubator dedicated to helping idea-stage founders and pre-revenue

Launching a startup is no easy feat. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication, and perseverance. But if you're passionate about your idea and you're willing to put in the effort, anything is possible.

I've had the privilege of working with some amazing startups over the past few years, and I've learned a lot about what it takes to succeed. Here are a few of the most important lessons I've learned:

1. Don't build before customer discovery

Many founders get a great idea and immediately start building the solution they've dreamed up. This is a huge red flag for me (and many investors). When I hear that someone began building their product before making any customer discovery, the first question I ask is, “How do you know anyone is going to want your solution?” Unless they tell me they've had significant discovery conversations with potential customers, they usually can’t provide an answer that gives me confidence there's reliably going to be demand for their solution in the market.

The result is that founders often spend a lot of time and money on a product that nobody wants when, really, this type of waste can be avoided if they conduct customer discovery before building anything, which leads directly to my second point.

2. Listen to your customers: The critical role of customer discovery in startup success

I can't stress this enough: you must listen to your potential customers. This aligns with the second goal of our incubator program—conducting customer discovery. At the start of your business journey, you merely have a hypothesis of a solution. It's not until you start talking with your target customer segment that you can validate that hypothesis. You might learn that nobody wants the solution you set out to build because the problem you believed you were solving isn't a problem many if any, potential customers are experiencing.

If the market doesn’t demand the solution you're building and you continue without making any changes, you will likely launch a product nobody buys. Even worse, you'll spend precious resources—time and money—getting this unwanted product to market, effectively paying a significant amount for your business to fail, even though you could have spotted the lack of demand and course-corrected.

By listening to your potential customers and understanding the pain points they experience, you can design a solution that addresses the most common issues in the market. This approach practically guarantees demand for your solution if your customer discovery yields statistically significant insights.

I'll also add that conducting customer discovery without incorporating those insights into your product offering is almost as bad as not doing any customer discovery at all. You must consider what your customers say when building your product if you want the greatest chance of a successful launch.

3. Love the problem, not the solution: Aligning your startup with market demands

This point directly relates to the first two. A key to success is being in love with the problem you're solving, not the solution. If you're conscious of the actual problem that customers have expressed and you are enthusiastic about finding solutions to that problem, you're more likely to succeed than someone blindly focused on building a solution they prematurely determined the market would want without substantial evidence.

To succeed, you must build a product that the market demands. If you start by understanding the problems customers have and then build a solution that directly addresses those problems, you’re more likely to succeed than if you start with a solution in mind and throw it against the wall (the market) to see if it sticks.

4. The myth of instant funding

In the media, you often hear about the founder who showed up to a meeting with an idea on the back of a napkin, presented it in a boardroom, won the hearts of investors, and walked away with a $5 million check. Yeah, that doesn’t happen—or if it does, it's because the founder has a track record of major successes, and if that's the case, most investors don’t need to see what that type of founder is building to have confidence they're going to hit another home run (or at least get on base).

Unfortunately, this warped media story has given many founders the unrealistic belief that they can raise money off a pitch deck without having a tangible product and customers.

It's not unusual for friends and family to invest in an idea after seeing a pitch deck, but professional investors need to see much more before they feel confident and comfortable investing. That's why you often hear investors asking questions about a business's traction. Investors want to know you have a product that customers are willing to pay for, a solution that scales (meaning it can serve an ever-growing number of customers), and, most importantly for their pockets, that your business is a venture-scale opportunity. This means you're operating in a large enough market and have the potential to grow large enough that for every dollar the investor gives you, they will receive a significant multiple—let's