Practical SaaS Founders Have Common Core Traits and Many Differences

I talk to 500+ software founders and CEOs a year all over the world. I’m amazed that every entrepreneur’s story is different.

•  Different founder personalities and backgrounds
•  Different times and tech cycles
•  Different markets and verticals
•  Different cities and countries
•  Different technologies
•  Different business models
•  Different funding and end games
•  Different cofounder chemistries

Yet there are common threads that are always there.

•  A misfit founder who wasn’t doing “normal” things like everyone else.
• Going deep into a market to find and create an opportunity before it’s obvious.
• Way more hard work and sacrifice than founders let on.
• Way more experimentation and zigzagging than you can see from the outside. We never see the tries that didn’t work.
• A continuous barrage of seriously hard challenges that would make most people quit, which creates some humility.
• Dedicated and magical teams that don’t give up when it’s tough.
• Lots of help and advice from experienced outsiders who have done it before or are doing it now.
• Starting wide in either their product or market, then scaling fast by focusing in when they find leverage (aka product-market fit)
• Some luck that took years to create and courage to act on.
• Continuous learning about the version of the software startup game they are playing.

That’s just what I see. These are a few observations, not rules.

Maybe these are necessary but not sufficient. Or just what I notice.

What do you see in every serious software founder who is making progress?

#practicalfounders