About half of the 40 SaaS founders I work with have shared that they are getting tired and can’t shake their grumpy moods as quickly.
Is this a mid-summer dip or something deeper going on?
Here are the top reasons I hear that founders are tired and struggling to boost their energy levels right now:
1) They have been the founder/CEO for a long time, sometimes more than 10 years.
This is very common with bootstrapped or lightly funded founders who have grown their SaaS companies steadily for a long time. They are still on a growth track and will sell their companies someday, but it’s taking longer than they thought.
2) Behind mid-year plan with summer seasonality.
Small business owners take time off and buy less new software in the summer. Enterprise buying teams can’t decide with everyone in the room. Summers drag on with lighter pipelines and cashflows. It’s harder to get things done in their businesses, too.
3) For newer founders, receiving more bad news than normal or even a crisis event can knock them down and take longer to get back up.
This can feel especially demoralizing if momentum is down and the business has fewer positives to offset the negatives.
4) For many founders, there is less in-person connection with remote working.
Regardless of where they live, they get less energy from participating in 6-10 Zoom calls daily than meeting in person with teams or customers.
5) Social media’s grind and mental manipulation don’t help.
Whether social media is important to your growth engine or not, keeping up with creating daily content or getting sucked in by the algorithms wears on their energy levels. Crazy politics and negative media don’t help either.
6) There is less energy in the B2B SaaS world to keep your hopes up.
Buyers have slowed, funding is down, AI is uncertain, and M&A is not easy. This is a more realistic time, making it hard to hide from their brutal realities.
7) Some founders have grown their companies but not their leadership teams.
You may have 30 employees, but without serious senior leaders, the weight of day-to-day management still falls on the CEO. This is especially hard between $2M and $6M ARR, where leaders are added slowly and can be too junior to help.
8) Some founders are creators and disruptors, so dealing with repetitive business tasks and details can feel punishing and difficult.
Surprise! After years of crazy experiments, you created a growing business. But now it’s a steady factory that doesn’t want your daily brainstorms and crazy pivots. The bigger your team, the less it wants to change quickly.
It helps to talk it out and realize that every founder has had hard stretches or deep funks they have gotten through.
And realize that our health, expectations, and perceptions shape our moods.
Sorry, there are no clickbait solutions here.
This won’t be your last tough slog. Keep going and keep improving.
#practicalfounders
