The Unglamorous Work that Makes Startups Hard (and Successful)
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #333
Inside the Office
After class this week, a student asked if I’d share some advice for promoting his startup through social media.
Since I spend more time obsessing about social media content strategies than any 40-something probably should, I was happy to chat. I immediately began describing the process he’d need to follow to figure out what kinds of content might resonate with his target audience. Then we discussed building a production schedule so he could post consistently. Then we got into the realities of learning editing software, experimenting with formats, studying analytics, iterating based on feedback, and generally treating content creation like an actual operational function of the business instead of an afterthought.
When I finally stopped talking, he just stared at me for a few seconds with an unsettling mixture of confusion and mild horror. Then he confusedly asked:
“But… isn’t that a lot of work?”
I laughed. Yeah… of course it’s a lot of work. That’s why startups are hard!
One of the biggest misconceptions young entrepreneurs have is that the hard part of entrepreneurship is building the product. And, to be fair, building products is hard. But it’s also the part most entrepreneurs enjoy. You get to tinker with features, refine designs, solve technical problems… basically all the stuff that feels productive and intellectually satisfying. It’s also all the stuff that gives you the comforting sensation you’re making meaningful progress.
But businesses aren’t built from products alone.
Businesses are built from customers.
Unfortunately, getting customers usually involves doing a bunch of work that feels repetitive, uncomfortable, uncertain, and deeply unglamorous. That includes sales, marketing, and everything that goes into those kinds of things. It’s exhausting, time-consuming, slow-moving stuff like follow-up emails, content creation, networking, and customer support. Basically, it’s all the work where you’re asking people to care about something before they have any reason to, which is why it’s such a huge grind.
In fact, the grind of customer acquisition is the main reason so many startups stall out early. Founders convince themselves they’re “working hard” because they’re constantly improving the thing they built while happily avoiding the much scarier challenge of trying to get other humans to actually pay attention to it.
But attention is the job.
And distribution is the job.
Learning how to consistently reach, persuade, and retain customers is the job.
Yes, the product matters. Obviously! But entrepreneurs love to romanticize building while underestimating how much effort goes into convincing the world what you built deserves to exist in the first place.
Unfortunately, this less glamorous part of entrepreneurship doesn’t have a shortcut. But that’s OK, because if there was, successful startups wouldn’t be as valuable, and everyone would have one. In fact, it’s why the real value in entrepreneurship is being able to get customers.
-Aaron
Worth Your Time
The article I’m sharing here is worth your time, but not for the reasons we normally share articles in this particular space.
I was browsing headlines this week when I stumbled across this title from Wired: “A Fundamental Principle of Aeronautical Engineering Has Been Overturned.” And even though I know essentially nothing about aeronautical engineering, I immediately clicked. After all, “fundamental principles being overturned” seems important, right?
However, the more I read, the more I realized the article isn’t really about overturning a fundamental principle. It’s mostly about research being done that’s refining our understanding of something scientists already mostly understood. In other words, the headline is doing what headlines increasingly seem to be doing in the digital age… it’s stretching reality in whatever ways it needs to in order to capture our attention. But that’s exactly why I think the article is so interesting from an entrepreneurial perspective.
On one hand, I’m fascinated by how often supposedly settled truths evolve over time. Science, technology, and business all move forward by challenging assumptions people once treated as obvious. And entrepreneurs have to constantly do the same thing. After all, industries change the moment someone questions a “fundamental principle” everyone else took for granted, and that’s when the best opportunities emerge.
On the other hand, this article is also a reminder that novelty itself has become part of the attention economy. Simply put, a title like “Researchers continue refining an existing aerodynamic model” doesn’t generate clicks in the same way “A FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE HAS BEEN OVERTURNED” does.
That tension — the tension between genuine innovation and the performance of innovation — is everywhere right now. AI headlines do it constantly. Startup founders do it. Investors do it. Media outlets definitely do it. Everyone is competing for attention, which means everyone is incentivized to frame change as revolutionary, even when the truth is often more incremental and nuanced.
But the future usually doesn’t arrive in one dramatic breakthrough that instantly destroys everything we thought we knew. More often, it arrives through a thousand small refinements that, over time, quietly reshape the world. And the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be the people who notice those refinements early.
That’s ultimately why I found this article so interesting. I don’t particularly care that aeronautical engineering got “overturned.” But I do care about how the article reveals something important about the modern entrepreneurial environment. We live in a world where attention rewards certainty, novelty, and dramatic framing, even though progress itself is usually messy, incremental, and ambiguous. And if you can learn to separate the performance of disruption from the actual mechanics of change, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of where real opportunities are emerging.