But… a short intro might still make sense: Taylor Swift is often considered one of the most successful female artists in music history. With hit albums, record-breaking tours, and a big cultural impact, Taylor Swift has achieved both amazing commercial success and widespread critical acclaim. Her influence extends beyond music into fashion, film, and social activism, cementing her status as a cultural icon.

So, what’s behind her incredible success?

Having been a fan of her music for years (on and off), I finally had the chance to experience one of her concerts this summer. The Eras Tour was simply magical. I was bloooown away by her show, her fans, and the energy in the “room”.

I totally get it now.

What makes her successful? I believe it’s not just the love for her craft, but her exceptional skills in community and brand-building that have propelled her to such heights. Taylor Swift's fans, affectionately known as "Swifties," are more than just a fanbase — they are a passionate, dedicated community integral to her success. Swifties are renowned for their loyalty, creativity, and enthusiastic support, making them a unique and influential group within the music industry.

Taylor Swift’s approach to community and brand building offers us founders and marketers valuable lessons. By incorporating elements of surprise and delight, being highly opinionated and values-oriented, focusing on the little details, and creating real experiences, Taylor has built a loyal and engaged fan base.

Here’s a closer look at how Taylor Swift has masterfully fostered a passionate community and built a successful brand:

Building a Narrative

• Storytelling: Taylor is a master storyteller. She crafts compelling narratives through her music and interactions, making fans feel part of an ongoing story. E.g. Taylor often writes about personal growth and empowerment, encouraging her fans to embrace their individuality and overcome challenges. Many songs tell complete stories with a beginning, middle, and end, often drawing inspiration from classic literature or fairy tales.

• Consistent Themes: Her music and public persona consistently reflect themes that her audience can identify with. By weaving these themes into her music, public statements, and social media presence, Taylor Swift creates a rich, multi-dimensional narrative that her fans can engage with on many levels. This approach not only strengthens her bond with her audience but also ensures that her work remains relevant and impactful over time.

Authenticity and Transparency

• Authentic Communication: Taylor’s direct and heartfelt communication style makes her fans feel connected on a personal level.

• Transparency: She openly shares her journey, struggles, and triumphs, making her more relatable and trustworthy. E.g. Taylor has been transparent about her public battles, such as her fight for artists’ rights against streaming services like Spotify and her legal battle to regain ownership of her master recordings. By sharing these struggles, she highlights the importance of artistic integrity and control.

Opinionated and Values-Oriented

• Personal Beliefs: Taylor shares her beliefs and values openly, creating a community that aligns with her principles. E.g. in her speeches and interviews, Taylor often emphasises the importance of self-respect and personal empowerment. She encourages her fans, particularly young women, to stand up for themselves and their rights.

• Political Activism: She publicly endorses political candidates and speaks out on social issues, which resonates with many of her fans.

Engagement & Interaction

• Active Engagement: Taylor engages with her fans through social media by replying to comments, liking posts, and even joining fan conversations.

• Fan Inclusion: Inviting fans to secret listening parties and considering their feedback in her work makes fans feel valued and heard. Her efforts to connect on a personal level and acknowledge her fans’ contributions reinforce the sense of mutual respect and admiration between her and her Swifties.

Empowering the Community

• Fan Empowerment: Highlighting fan-made content and encouraging fan participation empowers her community. E.g. Taylor created a Spotify playlist called “Songs Taylor Loves,” featuring covers of her songs by fans. This not only showcases fan talent but also gives them exposure to a broader audience.

• Advocacy and Support: Supporting causes important to her fans aligns her values with those of her community.

• Community Feel: Taylor creates a deeply connected and engaged fanbase. Attending a Taylor Swift concert feels like being part of a larger community, with shared rituals and collective enthusiasm.

  

Surprise and Delight

• Surprise Songs: On her “Eras Tour,” she performs two surprise songs each night, keeping each concert unique and exciting.

• Easter Eggs: Taylor is known for embedding hidden messages in her lyrics, music videos, and social media posts. Fans love deciphering these clues and speculating about their meanings. E.g. In the “ME!” music video, Swift revealed the title of her album “Lover” through a series of colorful letters. Or in “Look What You Made Me Do”, fans found numerous references to her past music videos and public events.

Creating Exclusive Experiences

• Special Events: The “Secret Sessions” are private album listening parties where selected fans get early access to her music. By creating exclusive experiences, Taylor offers her fans unique opportunities to connect with her and her music on a deeper level.

• Personal Touch: Sending personalised gifts and handwritten notes creates unforgettable moments for fans.

• Immersive Experiences: Swift’s concerts are not just performances; they are immersive experiences with elaborate storytelling, visuals, and audience interaction.

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Rituals

• Concert Rituals: Taylor’s concerts are filled with rituals, like Swifties wearing costumes related to her music videos or specific eras of her career.

• Fan Chants and Sing-Alongs: Certain lyrics and parts of songs have become communal experiences where fans chant or sing along in unison.

• Swiftmas: During the holiday season, Swift surprises fans with personal gifts, a tradition fans eagerly anticipate.

• Friendship Bracelets: A standout ritual among Swifties is the exchange of friendship bracelets. Inspired by Taylor's song "It's Nice to Have a Friend," fans create and trade custom bracelets, often featuring personal messages or references to Taylor’s songs. This tradition not only fosters a sense of community but also allows fans to connect with each other on a personal level, creating lasting bonds and shared memories.

Details, Details Details

She’s a true artist. By focusing on the little, not-so-little details in her album designs, merchandise, and concert productions, Taylor ensures that every aspect of her work aligns with her artistic vision and creates a memorable experience for her fans. Her meticulous attention to detail enhances the overall impact of her music and performances, making each release and show a thoughtfully crafted event.

• Album and Merch Design: Taylor pays meticulous attention to the design of her albums and merchandise, ensuring they reflect her artistic vision.

• Concert Production: Her concerts are known for their elaborate production, with detailed staging, costumes, and visual effects.

Consistency and Reliability

Last but not least, she’d never be this successful for such a long amount of time without hard work and dedication. She’s providing regular updates and consistently delivering high-quality work. This is how she’s built a strong, trustworthy presence in the music industry. Her reliability in communication and output has contributed significantly to her enduring success and deep connection with her audience.

• Regular Updates: Consistent updates and interactions maintain a strong presence.

• Reliable Releases: Delivering high-quality work consistently builds trust and credibility.

By focusing on these elements, Taylor has created a deeply loyal and engaged fanbase that supports her career with unparalleled enthusiasm — much for us to learn & incorporate into our day-to-day business… let’s get to work!

Enjoyed this article? You might also like my latest article about “How to get from 0 to 100k users - The tactics behind Bento's community-led growth”.

We’ve built a super-engaged, vibrant, and vocal community of users & evangelists around our product and vision.

We made using Bento an experience you wanted to be a part of, like a status symbol you’d like to show off vs. just being a utility product. We made the community part of our journey. 

We built up an emotional relationship with our users, we made them feel seen & heard, we showed them we deeply care and most importantly: we made them dream.

The Impact & Outcomes:

1. User Acquisition:

• We established a community-led growth engine

• We grew our overall Bento community from 0 to 100k and our Twitter channel from 0 to 10k followers within 6 months

• We became #1 Product of the Day once we launched on Product Hunt

• One year later, we won a Golden Kitty Award in the category “no code”

2. PR & Employer Branding:

• Big tech magazines like TechCrunch reached out to us to cover our story

• Potential investors and potential partners reached out to work with us

• There was a huge influx of really interesting talent looking to join us, perceiving us as a cool company to work for

• We got the attention of several companies that wanted to acquire us

3. Product Feedback & Insights:

• We developed a group of 3k power users in our discord channel who frequently gave product feedback and supported us when launching new features.

• Our community served as a valuable resource for market research. By observing discussions, trends, and user interactions, we gained insights into market demands, emerging needs, and competitive intelligence.

4. Product evangelism and advocacy:

• Influencers with big followings (300-500k+) voluntarily supported us and promoted us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter

• We turned our users into passionate evangelists who spread the love about our product. Their enthusiasm helped drive adoption and attracted new users.

• They recommended our product to others, provided testimonials, and defended our company in online discussions.

5. Co-Creation and Innovation:

• We involved our community members in the product development journey, this is how we could tap into their expertise, insights, and creativity. This is how we were able to truly address the needs of our target audience.

• At some point, our users created custom widgets and apps for Bento, that they made accessible for free to other Bento users which was the starting point of a Bento Widget Marketplace.

• Observing the challenges of our users and what they struggle with, inspired and helped us to create new content / formats for social.

6. Customer Support:

• Our 3k+ power users actively helped with troubleshooting bugs, sharing best practices, and providing peer-to-peer support, reducing the burden on us having to answer every single question and therefore fostering a helpful ecosystem.

Why?

When we started with Bento we identified one key go-to-market challenge:

⚡️ The link-in-bio space was super crowded. Meaning, lots of existing tools that all look the same AND do the same.

❓The question we had to answer: How do we cut through the noise?

One of the few things that can differentiate you from others is building a strong, opinionated brand + product. We wanted to shape a movement. We wanted to attract users who have similar opinions and beliefs — we wanted to build an emotional connection with them.

We also didn’t have money to spend on marketing and knowing we didn’t like ads anyway, and ad dollars spent get increasingly expensive and unsustainable for brands overall — we decided forming a community could get us off the ground and become a strategic MOAT for us over time.

When people feel they're an integral part of something that adds value to their lives, they champion it.

Looking up to role models like Notion and Figma, we’ve also seen great examples of companies that build communities at scale, which led to a competitive advantage and a strong MOAT over time. The brand is not just known, but it is trusted, it creates a whole experience along the customer journey which keeps users loyal and excited for more.

Products with a vibrant following — evangelists spreading the word — have a key advantage since users seem to have built a connection that goes beyond the feature set of the product. This is why it matters beyond the obvious advantages of “word of mouth”.

A connection that goes beyond the feature set means that users will be patient and stick around even if your competition has additional features. They believe in the cultural values surrounding your product and brand.

Consequently, products with community at their core are more resilient businesses; they can thrive in a downturn by remaining close to their customers and evolving what they deliver as needs evolve.

How?

Phase 1: Define & Set Goals

The good thing is, that most of this is all work you anyways have to do to build a great product. Ideally, this is all complementary.

• Set clear goals and define the baselines:

  • who’s our target audience? what are their challenges & needs? where do they hang out? what do they care about? what do they talk about?

    • Target a niche audience to begin with — for us that was “makers”, specifically engineers and designers as they’ve been heavily underserved by existing link-in-bio tools.

  • what’s our tone of voice?

    • Looking at our competitors but also at what feels authentic to us as a team, we decided on a tone that's approachable, fun, and supportive, yet opinionated and empowering.

  • where do we want to build the community?

    • Choose one key go-to-market channel to start with where your chosen audience hangs out already. Since we decided for designers and engineers, it was pretty clear we had to start with Twitter as our main channel (there’s a strong existing community), with Discord for our Power Users.

  • what’s our story / the story we want to tell?

    • Emphasize a bold vision & story as well as what makes you different from everyone else — for us that meant focusing on simplicity, fun, and visual appeal but also our vision of where we want to be someday.

  • what are the rules & guidelines for being part of our community?

    • this doesn’t need to be fully fleshed out from the start but you should somewhat know what type of behavior you want to support or prevent

Phase 2: Personal Outreach & Interviews

• Start engaging with a small group facing the problem

• Test your value proposition and messaging through personal DMs, calls, and interviews BEFORE building the product — e.g. we reached out to designers & engineers personally via Twitter who used other link-in-bio services already.

Phase 3: Generate Buzz & Iterate

• Once you feel ready, launch with a super clear value proposition

• Create scarcity by e.g. launching a waitlist

• Invite new users weekly to keep up the momentum (focus heavily on the ones that match your target audience criteria)

• Work together with early adopters to drive excitement

• Monitor adoption and iterate based on feedback.

Phase 4: Nurture & Sustain

• Develop a consistent content & community plan, some ideas:

  • Keep the community engaged with fun activities like challenges, games, and sending swag to power users

  • Share community best practices and support

  • Share behind the scenes and offer community hours

  • Show you listen and ship fast through frequent & relevant (!) product launches

  • Inform community members early & involve them in the launch process for big updates

  • Show you care through personal replies, DMs, and emails.

Phase 5: Official Launch

• Officially launch on platforms like Product Hunt

• Reach out to the press to expand your audience slowly but surely

• Celebrate your launch with a little party, inviting community members

Phase 6: Expand with Community Programs

• Co-create content and gather ongoing feedback.

  

• Help your community to support each other, e.g. we created a community resources area on our website and a widget marketplace where community members were able to design custom widgets to make them accessible to other community members

• Celebrate your community, e.g. we introduced programs like Bento Explore and “Makers of the Week” to celebrate great community examples and motivate them to engage even more.

Phase 7: Scale with Evangelists & Ambassadors

Things we wanted to work on as a next step as part of scaling our community & growth efforts further. These are best practices from companies like Notion and Figma.

• Establish official advocate, moderator, influencer, and affiliate programs to create incentives for community members to participate even more but also to scale your community efforts.

• Create business-focused programs and host events to foster community growth across your core markets.

Important to note: These are tactics that worked for us but might not necessarily work for your business / product / audience. E.g. Community-led growth works especially well in a B2C or B2C2B space. Building community in B2B works as well, but the tactics & results will most likely look very different. Also, the success of our community work, was heavily influenced by strong product-market-fit. It’s a lot harder to build community around a product that no one likes 😇 What I can promise you though: Building community early will heavily increase your chances of finding product market fit.

Always happy to help if you have questions or need advice getting started!

Enjoyed this article? You might also like my latest article about first-time founder mistakes.

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About the Author:

Valerie is a founder and passionate community builder. More here.

About the newsletter:

Her newsletter is sent every 2-6 weeks directly to your email inbox. In this newsletter, she captures thoughts, good reads & learnings. Think 0-1, early growth & GTM strategies, community building, brand & product positioning as well as her founder journey.

It’s interesting how, when you start a company, you hear lots of experiences from others or read about them in smart startup books and think you’re well prepared. Then you experience them first hand, make all the mistakes there are and later on it finally makes “click”! You understand what the others were trying to tell you at the time.

This is now another try to summarise those funny not-so-funny first-time founder mistakes and what I learned to do instead in my second round.

Team

1. 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 Co-Founders: First off — It’s so damn hard to find the right co-founder — it’s truly like marriage and if you find *the one* you should never let them go :) Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be. Honestly, so many things that can go wrong here, so I’m just capturing a couple of things that I experienced myself in several attempts to start companies with others:

   1. Ideally, find people you’ve been working with before — having trust and no ego in the room is the most important baseline for productivity and shipping great stuff — building a startup is already hard enough, you can’t waste time and energy on internal politics. If I were to choose again, this is what I would look for first.

   2. It’s a lot harder to start a company with people you haven’t worked with before. Mainly, as it is difficult to do your due diligence correctly. People say they are acting a certain way but then do the exact opposite later on. Sometimes you don’t have a choice though. So if you decide to go with someone you don’t know, I recommend working on having a TON of hard conversations early on (e.g. at Remi we built our own Co-Founder Matching Questionnaire), ideally doing a stressful test project together. When you then decide to get going, give them the benefit of the doubt. Trust is so important!

   3. For me, the most important criteria are the following:

      1. Must-have: shared characteristics, values & ways of working

      2. Must-have: existing trust base or benefit-of-the-doubt attitude

      3. Ideal: we have a complementary skill set

      4. Ideal: we’ve worked together in a previous venture

      5. Ideal: we’ve become friends (ergo, existing trust base!!)

      6. Ideal: they’ve worked in a startup before

      7. Nice-to-have: they’ve founded a company already or started a side business

      8. Nice-to-have: they’ve worked in a leadership role before

   4. Once you’ve found your co-founder, I think what’s most important is to create clear roles & responsibilities. Ideally, work with people who are 10x better than yourself in other areas. If that’s not a given and you’re similar in your skill set, create clarity from the start of who does what. Have those hard conversations early on. You don’t want to have the debate over and over again later on.

   5. Another clear red flag and opportunity I almost fell for 🚩 People who want more shares because they had the initial idea. An idea counts nothing — everyone has ideas! In the end, it’s all about the team and the execution. Also, usually, the solution changes over time (at least once).

2. 🕵🏼‍♀️ Hiring:

   1. First-time founders many times think that the more they hire, the better/faster they can solve their issues. Have a problem? Throw money at it! I had this belief in my first venture. “How many people do you have on your team?” is a common question you get asked. It’s a dumb status game. Similar to “How much have you raised already?” or managers in big companies who push their egos by the amount of talent they gather in their teams vs the outcomes they deliver.

      1. What I learned in Round 2: Stay as lean as possible for as long as possible. You’ll stay a lot more flexible. Focus on finding product market fit vs. company building. Everything else is a distraction. Think wisely about who you want to hire and what for. Test things yourself before you double down on a skill set you’re looking to hire.

   2. Many first-time founders also think, that they *just* need someone to do the job which is why they hire a lot of working students and interns, completely overwhelm them, and don’t even have time to help them develop. Usually, it’s a cost-saving measure but most of the time, it’s a distraction.

      1. What you should do instead: Hire less but experienced people (ideally as part of your founding team) vs a lot of cheap and inexperienced ones. You can start developing new talent, once you grow but in the early days, you need people who take action & can work in solitude. A 4-person team (e.g. a product person, an engineer, a designer, and a marketing/community person) can get you very far from the get-go.

   3. Do everything yourself vs outsourcing: In my first startup, I tried to do almost everything myself — especially because resources were scarce but also because I wanted to solve it by myself. Many times it took me much longer because I wasn’t reflecting that I needed help or asked for it fast enough. It drove me into depression in certain periods, as I wasn’t getting any energy anymore from my day-to-day work and was doing things that I clearly wasn’t good at or enjoying. Short phases like these are normal, but they shouldn’t be the norm. You need to play to your strengths and partner where you’re weak. How?

      1. Co-Founders / Founding Team: Ideally you find a setup where you can completely focus on your strengths from the start.

      2. Build a network: Gather advisors, investors, strong operators, and other founders around you who are in a similar stage or 1-2 steps ahead to bounce off hypotheses. A small improvement in navigational ability can make you a lot faster because it has a double effect: the path is shorter, and you can travel faster along it when you're more certain it's the right one.

      3. Also, work with freelancers in situations where you want to test certain things and need additional expertise/resources, but aren’t sure yet if you should double down and hire someone full-time. E.g. some roles we clearly shouldn’t have hired full-time so early on. It’s a business risk and in the worst case, you need to let them go sooner or later. Lose-lose.

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🗺️ Location

1. Fully Remote vs In-Office vs Hybrid: My first venture was completely remote — we didn’t even have an office. That’s maybe because we were solving for remote culture ;) maybe also because it was at the peak of the pandemic. Either way, I still am a big believer in remote work and the flexibility that comes with it. I do believe though, that for two company phases, it doesn’t work out.

   1. New Venture: When you’re starting a new business nothing beats the quick conversations you have and iterations you can make when sitting in one room. The energy you create is also a completely different one — in good as well as in bad times. It’s a different kind of magic.

   2. Pivot: When you’re forming a new team or when you’re in a phase that requires a pivot or fast changes, I’d argue it’s a lot harder in a fully remote setting.

   3. It can work but not as well as it does for hybrid & in-office, mainly because remote requires a lot of structures & processes that need to be built up from the start and those are poison for the creativity & fast iterations you need in startups to constantly act and adapt.

🧠 Mindset

1. Decision Making: Analysis paralysis is what kept me at my first startup from moving, iterating, and learning fast enough. Mainly because we had hired too big of a team already after raising our pre-seed round before even hitting PMF. We therefore weren’t as flexible anymore as we were at the beginning when we were still in our experiment + test phase building our MVP.

   1. In Round 2 I learned: Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. So what it takes is radical decision-making! Take decisions fast to iterate and learn fast. Why?

      1. You’ll create double the costs by delaying decisions.

      2. Your chances of winning will increase! Simply because you shoot more on goal than other people. Decisions are cheap and reversible. Ship it and you can still do quick iterations (counts for product decisions, team members, etc.)

      3. It’s important to always be on the action side of things. Don’t wait for other people or other information. The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine.

2. Energy Management: What I underestimated in my first venture is paying enough attention to energy management. They say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And they are right. It’s still so very exhausting and even if you have the best intentions they easily slip. What I learned in my second venture:

   1. Only a healthy body and mind can create clarity of thought and keep the main thing the main thing. Breaks are important to being able to see the bigger picture. Be smart about it.

   2. The more passionate you are about the problem you’re solving the more you’ll enjoy the journey and have fun! People work a lot harder on stuff they are passionate about and they can do it also for much longer. To be completely honest: In my first venture, I wasn’t passionate enough about the topic — I was very curious and interested but it didn’t keep me energized for long enough.

3. Show don’t tell: First-time founders many times spend all their time doing PR, interviews, and going to conferences. I did the same. Don’t get me wrong, some of it might be worth it, e.g. for branding purposes, recruiting talent, and building their network but most of the time: it’s a distraction. It’s pushing the ego more than it is bringing your business forward.

   1. Instead, choose wisely: If it is a conference where 90% of your customers will be or a news outlet that’s mainly read by your target persona — do it! If you’re currently hiring and it is a podcast that most likely attracts interesting talent, go for it! But if it’s just a media request that pushes your ego, you better leave it.

4. Focus on yourself, not on others. It’s so easy for a first-time founder to get stressed out by all your competitors. The best thing you can do for your business is to be aware of what’s out there but to focus on only yourself. Keep shipping, and be one step ahead of the others.

5. Opinions loosely held: If you are about to create a category or shape a market you need to do things differently than others. What’s needed is a learner mindset. You need people on your team who are intellectually open to discussing different ideas. People who aren’t married to their ideas, but that are looking for the best possible outcome. People with strong opinions, loosely held.

🏗️ Product — as I wasn’t in charge of it, just a few observations:

1. Reinventing vs Optimizing: In my first venture I thought we needed to create a new category and that meant having to invent something completely new. We thought all of it needed to be new. The problem with this thinking is that you are trying to reinvent the wheel and then also need to create awareness for the new solution (meaning, spending a lot of money on education).

   1. Instead in Round 2, we did the following: In an existing market, where demand and willingness to pay were already validated, we focused on doing one thing 10x better than everyone else. The chances are much higher for winning.

2. Big Vision vs Killer Feature: In our first venture we started super iterative, then when we started raising money though we had to come up with a big vision of where we’re headed. Not just for investors, but also for ourselves as a north star as well as to convince key talent to join us. At some point, we sadly got carried away by our vision and thought way too big, meaning we were building a way too big solution from the start instead of focusing on identifying one killer feature/flow that works (your so-called “wedge”).

   1. In round 2 instead, we focused on: Defining our wedge, in this case, the single-player mode for our product (especially important for network-based and product-led teams to consider), and then making it 10x better than what’s out there in its simplest form vs branching out in different directions before nailing PMF.

3. Ship it: In our first venture we were so embarrassed by our first concepts & prototypes — it took us way too long to go to market and test our idea. Eventually, we overcame our fears and learned so much more once our product finally was out in the wild. Our early adopters appreciated even more being part of the journey and seeing the progress. These early believers will be those who keep supporting you later on.

4. Must have vs nice to have: In our first venture, we identified way too late, that our solution was regarded mostly as a nice to have. Before we were able to pivot to another feature, we ran out of money.

   1. Instead, solve the highest-priority problem you can identify with your customer. Build a must-have vs just a nice-to-have. If they are not already investing in the problem, paying for an alternative, or are already looking for a solution, it’s probably not that urgent (especially in B2B).

5. User Feedback: Your job as CEO of a startup is to hear the harshest feedback from your customers, put your ego aside, listen, then go fix shit. In our first venture, we weren’t intellectually honest to ourselves that our product was only mediocre. There was interest, but no strong pull and we moved too slowly / didn’t take the decision to fix it. Btw, the same happened in our second venture: we noticed that even we didn’t want to use our own product. Luckily we understood that we needed to pivot and took a fast turn.

6. Some other learnings on product:

   1. Onboarding: Don’t underestimate the Onboarding experience — it’s the first impression of the product.

   2. Simplification: radically simplify the product experience. What does your product really need to work? Leave out whatever doesn’t need to be there (also called minimal lovable product).

📣 Distribution

1. First of all, sadly no magic saves a bad product. Marketing is no substitute for a great product with happy customers BUT nothing can amplify the success of those efforts like good marketing. What good marketing looks like:

   1. In the case of a new category, it requires proving that the category actually exists

   2. In the case of an existing category, it requires redefining the category around your disruption

   3. Either way, it takes time to convince the market of your POV.

2. Ideally, your product solves for PMF and distribution early on, as Andrew Chen nicely put it: “(…) startups end up needing both:

   1. an insight about customers that gives them product/market fit

   2. an insight about distribution that creates traction”

   3. he writes more on it here

3. Target Audience: What’s important to mention here: Choose a niche audience and solve a high-priority problem for that very specific audience!! Then, it’s all about quality over quantity. Focus on making a small number of users love you rather than a large number kind of like you. Start with 10, then 100, 1000, and so on.

4. Brand: Another thing I learned is how important building a strong brand & community is to differentiate yourself. At pre-seed, you don’t have much money to spend on marketing. Also, most people don’t like ads anyway, and ad dollars spent get increasingly expensive and unsustainable for brands overall. Most VC-funded startups run paid campaigns chasing sales with no investment in their brand & organic channels. You might hit revenue goals but as soon as you stop spending, sales will stop. Unless you have a big budget, you're going to hit a wall soon.

   1. Instead, start with a minimal lovable brand. In the early days, the best marketing you can do for yourself is build a (personal) brand by talking about your vision, and your product, documenting your story + adding value for your customers (e.g. creating content to help them grow/solve their biggest pain points). Don’t just talk about yourself.

5. Focus on one key distribution channel: Usually one says: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and that’s true. But in the early days, you need to focus & prioritize. Resources are scarce and it won’t work if you are everywhere just a little bit. Test and iterate quickly but then choose one channel to go all in. In my first venture, this was Linkedin, in my second it was Twitter. Make it dependent on your audience and where they hang out most of the time. Once you nail that channel, you can branch out and expand.

6. Create a movement: Customer attention is hard to get today. Don't just sell products -- inspire change. The best businesses build movements. This is how you will win the hearts of early customers, employees, and important stakeholders.

7. Build Community: Just build it & they will come? Probably not. Start building your audience while building the product. Building relationships with early adopters of your product will lay the groundwork for a vibrant community later on. When starting a company, don’t be afraid of the things that don’t scale. You need to fully immerse yourself in the community and become part of it.

Phew! Got a bit longer than expected. Oh well, hope it is of value! Would love to hear more about your f*ck ups, mistakes, and learnings 💥 Drop them in the comments below.

Enjoyed this article? You might also like my latest article about unveiling the second-time founder magic.

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About the Author:

Valerie is a founder and passionate community builder. More here.

About the newsletter:

Her newsletter is sent every 2-6 weeks directly to your email inbox. In this newsletter, she captures thoughts, good reads & learnings. Think 0-1, early growth & GTM strategies, community building, brand & product positioning as well as her founder journey.

One of my biggest learnings as a repeat founder:
It's way easier to build a successful business in an existing market where demand and willingness to pay are already validated (see Linear, Zoom or Figma).

It's waaaay harder though to cut through the noise.

Let's dive in:

🍰 Find your sweet spot: What's something that existing players are lacking or not prioritizing?
Focus on that. And do it 10x better. This will be your initial wedge. Your value proposition should be just that. Focus on an underserved niche and let's go!

🚢 Ship, ship, ship: Build trust in your ability to outperform the competition.
You might be lacking 5 features when you start -- your customers might still choose *you* over the competition because they know you'll be catching up sooner rather than later.

💖 Show you care: Surprise & Delight
Especially in parts where the competition is lacking. This may be things like design, simplicity, brand/storytelling, or customer service. The more you delight, the more people will voluntarily spread the word about you. Free marketing.

🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 Build community: Listen carefully and take them along for the ride
People can copy your product, but they won't be able to copy the relationships and trust you've built. Also: the closer you are to your customers, the better you'll understand what to build and prioritize.

📣 Share your story: Build an emotional connection beyond the feature set
What sets you apart from the rest? An authentic and opinionated brand. People follow people and ideally, your customers will be able to relate to your story. Make them feel something. Kinda special these days.

That's a wrap! Hope these tips were helpful 🙏

Let me know if you have any questions, feedback, or additions.

After selling my first company I was devastated. Round 2, meaning starting something new, truly wasn’t my first thought. Rather the opposite.

Selling sounds so cool at first, but sometimes it’s the only good option you have.

When you’re getting started, you’re planning to build something big, something that changes the status quo, something that has a lasting impact.

Selling isn’t necessarily what you dream of... Although it still might be a better outcome than many others, e.g. just shutting down or insolvency.

Many people give up at this point and return to being employed. It might appear safer, less lonely, and offer more structure. And I don’t blame them. It depends on your life’s circumstances and your current priorities. Then there are others, that have reflected and understood that founding just isn’t for them. Fair enough.

But I’d argue, that most are just scared. Scared? Yes, scared. Because the first journey was so deeply painful. And again, I don’t blame them. They got themselves a bloody nose. The journey can be very (!) painful. The highs are high but the lows are even lower.

When we told our investors, we were going to stop working on Remi, our lead investor said something that I still remember as if it was yesterday, he said: “Don’t worry. PayPal was only successful on the third try.“

I heard him say those words but they didn’t catch me. I just wasn’t very confident anymore. Most other investors were mad at us and had been slapping us in the face while we were already lying on the ground suffering.

But even worse were the thoughts I had about myself:

I thought I might not have what it takes to be a successful founder. I thought that I wasn’t good enough… everything felt hard & heavy. The sleepless nights. The anxiety. I knew that 9/10 startups fail… but it didn’t matter. I wanted to be the exception! Don’t we all?

I was emotional and irrational.

But after a very low period, taking some time to reflect and recover, thinking about the words of our investor, I said to myself: F**k it! You’re always shit at something when you’re doing it for the first time. Let’s do this again! Let’s do it better and let’s see what happens.

So I kept on trying and in Round 2 I truly understood:

Things get easier when you’re doing them more often. You learn. You do things differently. Many times the circumstances just aren’t ideal on the first try (team, network, economic situation, you name it). You might go with a different team, a different problem, or a different funding source. You become less anxious & more confident. You know what to watch out for. You know what you want and don’t want. And the best part: You have more fun!!! 😍💥

What counts in life, also counts in entrepreneurship.

Big shots are only little shots that keep shooting. The more shots you take the more successful you will be. It’s no guarantee for success. But the probability of winning drastically increases.

Keep trying. It’s worth it. Let’s go for Round 2! 💪🏽

btw, if you feel seen at this point and can relate, whatever the outcome:

Take a deep breath and be proud of yourself for jumping! Be proud of everything you’ve achieved. It was extremely brave to jump into the unknown. You’re further than many others who’ve never even tried. Instead, you’ve learned a trillion things that will help you achieve big things — no matter what you do next: Round 2 or Employment. You’ll know best.

This was more of a motivational piece :) My next editions will be about my biggest learnings as a first-time founder and the Bento Story — a series of articles about the behind-the-scenes of launching & growing Bento, let’s call it “Behind the Grid”.

Stay tuned and subscribe to not miss it.

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About the Author:

Valerie is a founder and passionate community builder. More here.

About the newsletter:

Her newsletter is sent every 2-6 weeks directly to your email inbox. In this newsletter, she captures thoughts, good reads & learnings. Think 0-1, early growth & GTM strategies, community building, brand & product positioning as well as her founder journey.

We're writing this with both a laughing and crying eye. Building Remi has been one of the greatest privileges of our lives. The number of milestones we reached and ceilings we shattered is still amazing to us, even now. We’ve learned so much in an incredibly short amount of time, and we would do it again in a heartbeat.

Why we decided to stop working on Remi and sell the company

Founding a startup is one of the hardest and most rewarding things a human can do. During two intense years, we

• raised a €1.2 million pre-seed as an all-female team, from the most amazing and prolific investors across Europe and the world ( representing a small 2% of all-female, VC backed startups)

• built our MVP ourselves with no-code tools like Figma, Bubble and Zapier - with the skills we learned in On Deck's No-code Fellowship - no previous design or technical skills.

• launched a new product idea in a newly emerging market.

• built a rockstar team of 10 builders, marketeers and operators - fully remote, from more than 8 nations across Europe and Asia, and a wonderful community of remote workers, people managers and thought leaders

• acquired an amazing set of 80+ teams and got our first paying customers - asking us to pay (that's a pretty good sign of PMF)

But the circumstances were still tough, and timing can bite you in the ass. We got ready to raise our seed round just when the market dynamics started turning. We'd made great progress to show to investors, but we were still early stage - and the decreased appetite for risk did not match the opportunity we offered.

We also faced some strategic challenges. Despite adding 80+ teams within 6 months and great usage and retention signals (3+ days/week usage and 75% 6-months retention for our power users), we still struggled to answer the following questions with the clarity and conviction we would have needed to push forward:

• Who is the primary user? Who is the product cheerleader?

• Who is the buyer? What is the long-term willingness to pay? How can we keep this from turning into "last in, first out"?

• We're in the business of networks. How can we create a habit-forming product and effectively manage our dependency on network effects (see Meerkat effect) over the long term?

• How can we defend Remi's reason to exist (and the user to invest) to an already tool-overwhelmed user? Is Remi a replacement to a Social intranet, an add-on to Slack or something completely different?

We still very much believe that the pain point we tried to solve is a big, and an urgent one. There's no doubt in our mind that remote work is here to stay. But for a Culture-as-a-Service product to be successful in the market, we needed to prove that it could serve not just as a lagging, but a leading metric - and proving that required more time.

We still very much believe that our approach to building a remote culture product (async, bottom-up vs. top down, short but habitual interactions) was the right one to create a distinct value prop. But we also saw a lot of productivity tools adding culture-focussed features, and in the fight for attention in a very tool-oversaturated market, it would be a continued struggle to successfully defend a standalone tool.

Finally, our vision to create the leading Culture OS for the new era of remote and hybrid work was an amazing north star in many ways, but we would have needed a clearer wedge to focus our product and GTM efforts, learn faster and get to PMF faster.

Why we decided to partner with Range

We still very much believe that remote culture building is the next big frontier in the future of work market. With that in mind, our key goal for Remi's acquisition was to ensure we find a partner that shares our values and mission to make remote work more human and connected. We found this partner with Range. Like Remi, Range's mission is to help teams build trust and connection in just a few minutes each day, no matter where they're working. We're super thankful for the Range founders Jen and Dan for their trust and partnership, and we know they will take great care of our users in the future.

What's next?

Building a startup is no joke - it's been an intense two years. We both need a break. But we're both relentless doers who can't sit still for too long, so we already have a few projects in mind, and one very concrete one planned:

We want to collect our learnings from taking Remi from 0 to 1, and share them with fellow and future founders. We've learned so much along the way - and we think that this knowledge should be accessible to anyone. It's the knowledge we wish we would have had when we started Remi - sometimes concrete insights (How to get your first investor to say yes), sometimes it's that extra sprinkle of "yes, you can do this, just take that little extra step here and you'll get there" without which we would have probably stopped long before. We'll be sharing a mix of both concrete instructions and a healthy dose of being real and supportive talk on our channels. Beyond that, we’re also keen to help startups in more concrete ways to tackle their challenges - we’ll be offering consulting or brainstorming sessions. Keep your eyes peeled, more on this soon.

Parting thoughts

What brought us this far is you, our dear customers, users, investors, early supporters as well as our amazing community of remote lovers. We can’t thank you all enough for your trust, early support and feedback - without you we wouldn’t have gotten this far.

Let’s keep in touch and see you soon 👋🏻

Rebecca and Valerie

FYI: this article is cross-posted from Linkedin and was written in August 16, 2022.

Was ein großes Glück also, wenn wir die Wahl haben, einen Job zu machen, der uns Spaß macht. 

Was ein Glück, einen Job zu finden, der sich mit der eigenen Leidenschaft verknüpfen lässt. Und diesen großen Teil „Arbeit“ für dich lebenswert zu machen. Das Hobby zum Beruf machen“ - das ist, wovon viele Menschen träumen. Wenn der Job uns einen weiteren Sinn im Leben gibt, neben der notwendigen Lebensgrundlage. Neben der Tatsache, etwas Geld in der Tasche zu haben, um sich das Leben zu ermöglichen, das man sich vorstellt. Nämlich in den verbleibenden 20-30% unserer Zeit. 

Spinnen wir das etwas weiter… wir sind also mindestens 40h die Woche bei der Arbeit. Oft werden Arbeitskollegen Freunde und wenn alles richtig gut läuft, fühlt man sich manchmal vielleicht sogar wie eine kleine Familie, die gemeinsam durch dick und dünn geht. Distanz, was ist das? Bei uns verschwimmt Arbeit und Leben. Wir gehen in der Arbeit auf, wir erhalten Anerkennung dafür, dass wir uns ständig wandeln, Feedback einholen, lernen, wachsen, besser werden in dem, was wir eh schon gerne tun. Ziemlich gut genutzte Stunden, oder?

Was ein Glück, wenn es so kommt. 

Ich suchte nach meiner Zeit bei Twitter, einen ähnlich inspirierenden Ort - denn bei Twitter hatte ich gelernt, dass das geht! Ich wollte keinen Job mehr machen, mit dem ich mich nicht identifizieren kann. Zumindest so lange ich die Wahl habe. Ein Unternehmen, das ein „Why“ hat, einen Purpose und eine Vision. Im besten Fall eine, in der ich mich mich wieder erkennen kann. Eine, für die ich gerne morgens aufstehe und an der ich mitwirken kann und will! Ein Unternehmen, in dem ich gefördert und gefordert werde. Das mir hilft, meine Schwächen zu identifizieren, meine Stärken zu leben und im besten Fall weiter auszubauen. Ein Unternehmen, das die gleichen Werte verkörpert und lebt, wie ich sie leben möchte. Oder, die ich vielleicht sogar mit gestalten kann? Ein Unternehmen, das Wachstumspotenzial hat, genauso wie ich. Eines, in dem man im besten Fall zusammen lernt und wächst. Ein Potenzial, das ich mit ausschöpfen bzw. weiter ausbauen kann... oder vielleicht sogar neue erkenne? Ein Team, das mich inspiriert, von dem ich lernen kann, das an einem Strang zieht und sich gegenseitig unterstützt aber auch mal an die eigenen Grenzen bringt. 

Was ein Glück, das ich das alles vor etwas mehr als 3 Jahren bei Opinary gefunden habe.

Was ein Glück, das mich mein ehemaliger Twitter-Chef Rowan mit den Opinary-Gründern Pia und Cornelius verknüpfte. 

Ich zog also von Hamburg nach Berlin für Opinary. Eine Stadt, die ich irgendwie nicht mochte, die mich aber irgendwie immer wieder magisch anzog.

Was ein Glück, dass obwohl ich nur wenige Bekannte und keine Freunde in der Stadt hatte, bei Opinary Menschen fand, die mich mit offenen Armen empfingen, die mir nach einer Nacht und Nebel Aktion halfen (ja, es ging dann sehr schnell ;)), die Umzugskisten im Office unter zu bringen. Menschen, die schnell nicht nur Arbeitskollegen waren, sondern bald schon Freunde wurden. Freunde und Arbeit, die mich vergessen haben lassen, dass ich mich auch oft sehr einsam fühlte in der neuen Stadt und weniger schnell Anschluss fand, als ich es erwartet und mir gewünscht hatte. Freunde, die an einem gemeinsamen Projekt arbeiteten, sich besser kennen lernten, vertrauten und auch mal stritten - aber vor allem Lust hatten, was ziemlich Cooles gemeinsam auf die Beine zu stellen! 

Bei Opinary wollen wir Menschen im Netz helfen, ihre Meinung zu teilen, zu bilden und Orientierung in der Informationsflut zu finden. Und wie cool, wenn man dadurch auch noch durch smartes Marketing (we call it "better Ads") Geld macht, das ggf. die Gehälter von Journalisten zahlen kann, deren Beruf und Arbeit so wahnsinnig wichtig sind für die Bildung, Information und Aufklärung unserer Gesellschaft.

Was ein Glück, dass ich zur richtigen Zeit am richtigen Ort war. Opinary war zu dem Zeitpunkt knapp 1,5 Jahre alt. 15 Mitarbeiter. Es gab einige spannende Verlagspartner an Bord, 20 Mio. Nutzer, guter Tech Stack… aber das Geschäftsmodell lief noch nicht richtig rund - wie machen wir Geld? Vor allem mit dem dritten Mitgründer Max und dem bestehenden Team, ging es für mich also darum, eine Monetarisierungsmaschine zu bauen, die sich trägt. Challenge accepted!

Jetzt blicke ich 3 Jahre zurück. Ich lief und manchmal rannte ich - immer schneller, immer weiter. Ich machte mal mehr und mal weniger Pause - aber meist zu wenig. Ich wusste, wo ich hin wollte und es machte mir Spaß, immer besser darin zu werden. Ich holte mir so viel Feedback wie ich brauchte, um zu verstehen wie ich an das nächste Ziel komme oder das eine "neue Ding" lernen kann - aus der Company und von außen. Wie früher beim Leistungsschwimmen war das auch ziemlich schmerzhaft zwischendurch. Ich lernte meine Grenzen kennen, ich lernte sie zu überwinden und ich lernte wie ich mit mir und meiner Energie haushalten kann und muss. Aber aufgeben? Niemals! Ich baute ein 20 Personen Team auf, mit dem ich zusammen rannte und immer noch renne. Ich lernte, nicht nur alleine auf dem Feld zu stehen, sondern sehr schnell, was wichtig ist, um ein starkes Team zu bauen, zu entwickeln und gemeinsam auf ein Ziel hinzuarbeiten. Auch mal in den Hintergrund zu treten. Von Single Contributor to Coach & Mentor, Vorbild und Partner in Crime zu sein - wissen zu transferieren und zu teilen. Ziele zu setzen und zu begeistern. Eine gemeinsame Vision zu haben. 

Es kamen und es gingen Menschen. 

Ich überlegte mir Vertriebs, Marketing- und Kommunikationsstrategien, wie Opinary weiter wachsen kann, ich sprach auf Konferenzen, Podien und anderen Bühnen, ich baute Geschäftsbeziehungen auf, die bis heute halten. Mein Team und ich haben über 3 Jahre 300-500% Wachstum von einem Jahr aufs nächste gemacht, so konnten wir auf bis zu 60 Kollegen wachsen, wir öffneten Offices in London und New York und bauten Strukturen, die skalierbar auch in diesen Märkten funktionieren konnten. Wir feierten, wir machten Fehler und lernten (mal besser und mal schlechter ;)). In den 3 Jahren habe ich mich oft wie die Gründerin selbst gefühlt, ich konnte viel lernen, Neues aufbauen, gestalten und anderen etwas mitgeben. Ich war (und bin) stolz bei Opinary zu arbeiten und trug es so auch nach außen.

Was ein Glück (und doch auch harte Arbeit), dass mir zuletzt das Vertrauen entgegen gebracht wurde, sogar Teil der Geschäftsführung bei Opinary zu werden. Denn ja, ich fühlte mich nicht nur wie die Gründerin, sondern ich steckte mein Herzblut rein. Keine halben Sachen. Als Chief Revenue Officer verantworte ich nun vier unterschiedliche Bereiche bei Opinary. Dieses Jahr streben wir Profitabilität an. Es sieht gut aus. Ich bin stolz auf das, was wir zusammen gebaut haben. Und ich bin unheimlich dankbar für all das Erlebte und Gelernte.

Was ein Glück, wenn man irgendwann aber auch merkt, dass es vielleicht Zeit wird, weiter zu ziehen... loszulassen. Wenn man merkt, dass die Lernkurve abflacht. Wenn bestimmte Dinge, die man sich wünschte, unerfüllt blieben oder anders verliefen, als man hoffte. Wenn man sich nach „mehr“ oder vielleicht auch "anders" sehnt. Das schmerzt und ist alles andere als leicht. Man krallt sich fest an das Bestehende, an die Comfort Zone. Es tut erst nur weh und man weiß nicht, was es ist. Und dann tut es weh und man versucht, den Schmerz zu lindern. So ist das, wenn Arbeit und Leben miteinander verschwimmen.

Wenn man so will, kann man es mit einem Beziehungsende vergleichen. Langsam wird einem bewusst, dass man sich gegenseitig nicht mehr gut tut. Man liebt sich sehr, aber es ist Zeit, getrennte Wege zu gehen. Eigentlich will man nicht, aber eigentlich schon. Und… man, ist das schwer, wenn nichts Explizites vorfällt, es keinen super klaren Grund gibt, wie etwa jemand Neues, der in dein Leben tritt. Ein neuer Mensch, für den du den anderen verlässt. 

Stattdessen ein Liebevolles: 

„Hey, bleib doch mal stehen. Schau mal wieder auf dich. Du bist so viel gerannt, du bist müde. Und das ist okay. Und sag mal, ist das eigentlich noch der richtige Weg? Wo bist du eigentlich gerade?

Innehalten. Und die große Frage:

Wo willst du eigentlich hin?“ zu dir selbst.

Erst ist da Angst. Dann sind da Verantwortungsgefühl, Loyalität, Gewissensbisse & Zweifel: 

„Brauchen sie mich nicht jetzt besonders? Kann es woanders genauso so werden?“ 

Man versucht es noch ein zweites Mal, vielleicht sogar ein drittes Mal:

„Das muss doch irgendwie klappen?!” 

Und für eine Zeit tut es das, aber es kostet Kraft. Es macht nicht mehr so viel Spaß, wie es das einst tat.

"Wo bleiben die mir bekannte Begeisterung, Leidenschaft... das Leuchten in den Augen?"

Und dann denkst du irgendwann mutig:

“Vielleicht musst du rausfinden, ob es anders sein kann.“

Und dann weißt du auf einmal: 

"Jetzt ist es Zeit, zu gehen.“ 

Was ein Glück.

Was ein Glück, denn dieses Glück haben nicht viele im Leben. Sie bleiben an dem Ort, in dem Job oder mit dem Menschen, der eigentlich nicht mehr wirklich zu ihnen passt. Sie halten fest und bleiben unglücklich. Und vor allem, verschließen sie sich vor Veränderung, vor neuen Chancen & Möglichkeiten.

Was ein Glück, das ich nun loslassen kann. Nach vorne blicken. Und mich nun einfach freue: Auf das Neue, das Ungewisse.

Was ein Glück.

Ein großes DANKE aus tiefstem Herzen an Cornelius, Pia und Max und das gesamte Opinary-Team. Ohne euch wäre ich nicht da, wo ich jetzt bin - ohne euch, wäre ich nicht der Mensch, der ich jetzt bin. Danke.

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FYI: This article was cross-posted from Linkedin and was published on October 1, 2020

Many people say quitting a job without knowing what comes next is a brave move. Well, it is!

Let me add this: For a person who loves to be in control and to plan everything very precisely (sounds like me!) it is even harder.

Doing so during a global pandemic… what the h*** was I thinking?

So I thought it’d be interesting for you to share my 5 biggest learnings 3 months after entering the unknown:

1. Don’t stress yourself 😌

For me one of the biggest challenges even before quitting my job were questions like this to myself: "Who am I actually without my job?" and "What do other people think of me if I am unemployed?", "What if nothing successful comes out of this?", "What if finding something new exciting for myself will take far longer than expected?".

Let go of your own inner critic.

This is just too much pressure. The true question I should've asked myself is: Why do I bother? And what is the worst thing that could happen? This is all about me. About me wanting change. About me longing for "more" or simply "different". This is about me finding out what I love or maybe just proving to myself that this one idea is what I should to.

It's not about other people.

And yes, people ask and they will continue asking what you're up to but I've learned over time: If you are fine with your decision and you know that this is the right thing for you to do - then you will answer with a confident smile and say: "I don't know yet. I'm here to find out."

And this will feel good.

2. Expect things to happen differently than you think 🤡

Ha, we all know this, right? But still we expect things to go fast, easy, great or as expected. Well, (sadly) I chose not to take the easy way because easy would've eventually been waiting in my former job - in my comfort zone - for the next job that might interest me, that helps me climb the career ladder or earn more money. I knew though that I was a 180% person, so finding something on the side, also with lots of responsibility and being loyal to my employer was nothing that worked for me. I just wasn't able to make the time.

So quitting without anything new on the side felt right at some point as I wanted to give myself exactly the time I deserved to make a good decision.

Truly the past three months have felt like a rollercoaster to me.

I was sooo excited and proud of myself for the decision to quit my job and finally have time for myself, I planned on taking two months off, to take a break, to furnish the new apartment, to read and learn. It worked fine for the first two months - I did enjoy my time off and was able to answer with a confident smile to others that I would want to find out what comes next during this time off. After exactly those two months (that I was planning and expecting) everything felt hard though. Because the real unknown started just then. I felt like after a boat crash -- no idea what comes next, no goal (therefore learning was no option either - because what to start with? for what?), no drive, no motivation. I ended up sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day long and being annoyed by myself for 2 weeks. People telling me to read this, and do some course here and just do that - annoyed me even more!!!$?!

I started doubting myself:

"Was this the right decision?"

"Omg, I should've just found another job and be happy with that."

3. Stay brave 💪🏻

Wait, what? No, no, no...

What I truly learned in this time is to expect down phases and embrace them. To accept them. They will come for sure and you can't always be confident. When parents, grandparents, and friends ask you for the 100th time: “SO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW???” They don't mean it in a bad way - they care about you or might just not know what else to ask you.

But what you truly have to remind yourself in this specific moment before making a fast move in the wrong direction (as feeling too much pressure on yourself):

What is the worst thing that can happen?

Is there a true (e.g. financial) urgency or are you only pressuring yourself? Or even worse: getting pressured by others? What could possibly go wrong? That you waste 4 months or maybe even 1 year of your time? So what? And to be honest: Is it really wasted or is it the perfect time to get to know yourself better and find out what is getting you out of bed in the morning?

I learned to find my gut feeling during this time again. Feeling myself. Yes. I somehow went numb before, didn't pause anymore, didn't listen to myself — to what my body needs, what my heart tells me, what excites me. It helped me so much to keep balanced and especially to keep calm, to stay strong — by just embracing the hard times, the hard feelings.

So stay brave. Take your time. It's worth it.

4. Talk to as many people as you can! 💬

I had told myself that I would announce my leaving via social media because then people would know that I was leaving and would surely approach me with new job offers (The idea of founding a company was in the back of my mind already but I still wanted to have a fall back option at that time). Ha, well say hello to Covid! People didn't have many jobs to offer at that time. Some approached me but it surely was far less than I would've expected or hoped for. It's a global crisis — what was I thinking? Well, to be completely honest... I decided to quit before the pandemic hit us this hard but I still said to myself that I won't wait until after. Might be a bit naive. But it's not going to be any easier if you do it later — trust me.

You gotta jump anyways.

My second thought was, that it would be great to go to conferences, events, meet-ups — get to know people, and catch up with others. Something that just comes easy to me. Well say hello to Covid, once again!

That didn't work... so I started reaching out to people I knew, met via Google Hangouts, went for a walk (in distance!), or met via Lunchclub (a very cool startup that matches you with people with similar interests — in your city or around the globe). Just talk, understand their problems, and their needs, talk about big and small ideas, and get feedback on thoughts. Simply getting inspired.

Wow, that worked well! It helped me so much to get a better idea of what's out there, what I like, what I don't like, bouncing ideas back and forth.

It helped me strengthen my idea of wanting to found a company, too. And at the same time build a network of like-minded people — great!

This truly has been so important. You might have a strong network already, maybe not — but never underestimate the importance of talking to others and especially asking for help or simply getting advice, talking about your situation. I got so many intros to tools, books, articles, people — what else could one wish for?

Things just add up step by step...

5. Confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy 💫

Through talking to people I met this awesome other woman who was in the same situation as me, who had just quit her job, who had the same intentions about starting a company, who had similar ideas and dreams, and guess what: we are now on the move to founding a company! Together.

It took so much pressure off my shoulders to know I was in this with someone else. I know I have somewhat of a plan again, a roadmap for myself and us, but we still embrace the unknown and take things as they come.

We don't know if we succeed but this stays true:

Confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't believe in yourself, think positive, and take chances things won't change for the better.

Don't let fear or self-doubts make decisions for you. Let opportunity guide you.

The worst thing that can happen is that you learn. ✨

FYI: This article was cross-posted from Linkedin and was published on October 1, 2020

I was only 25 and couldn't rely on a big network to find a new job.

Here's my story and a few of my learnings to find new strength, self confidence and ultimately a job 👇🏼

It's late 2016, Dick Costolo had left a year ago and the company prepared for an acquisition by Google or someone else (which never happened after all but who knew…).

Goal: getting as lean as possible as fast as possible.

What that meant? 90% of the German team (my team) and many other European teams were let go — from one day to the other. It was definitely handled better than it was now (referencing the Elon take over). And still...  layoffs are nothing you can do particularly well. No matter how much you try to, it sucks. For all parties involved.

It was a first for me and the hardest moment of my working life until then.

I always dreamt of working at a big tech company. I wanted to change the world through tech and Twitter was always on top of my list.

I had just taken on a new role, and flew to our partners in Istanbul. At the airport, I then heard the news. I was in complete shock and didn't know what to do. 3 hours flying back home, no internet connection, not knowing what's happening.

The only good thing was that I wasn't the only one: My colleagues and I were all sitting in the same boat and that made me feel a bit less alone, a bit less terrified, a bit less miserable.

Finding a new job wasn't the hard part. It was the feeling of being irrelevant and that no one cares about you... that was the hardest. A few weeks later my then-boyfriend broke up with me and so I lost my home, my partner, and my job in the blink of an eye.

The aftermath of a personal crisis.

The aftermath of layoffs.

Finding a new job wasn't the hard part. It was finding something that excited me: Working on a product that I can identify myself with, that has an impact on people's lives, where I feel challenged and inspired, surrounded by smart people I care about.

Here are a few things I have done to get out of my personal roller coaster experience that felt like only going downhill but turned out to be successful after all 👇🏼

1. Buy yourself time: severance package

I needed time. Since we were a bigger group of people, we had negotiated with our lawyers a good severance package to buy us a bit more time to think about what we wanted to do next. The beauty of living in Germany is that we have employee rights :)

2. Buy more time: start freelancing

I didn't want to take on the next best thing which is why I started freelancing to explore new possible paths. I reached out to former colleagues and asked them for intros. My then team lead at Twitter helped me a lot to get a foot in the door.

3. Start journaling

To get through this terrible time it helped me a lot to write down my feelings and reflect on the days: What made me feel good? What made me sad? What good can I see in this current situation? What do I want to do differently tomorrow?

4. Note down your values and requirements

I also wrote down for myself, why I had enjoyed working at Twitter so much: what were the values, the characteristics, which tasks gave me energy, what challenged me, what inspired me & and also what I didn't want in my next job to happen.

5. Talk to friends and ask for help

I let everyone in my surroundings know about my current situation. I know this is hard sometimes, but the more people were aware, the bigger the possibility for new opportunities became. I asked them about cool companies and jobs they heard of.

6. Note down your strengths

It's important to re-learn about how valuable and amazing you are. I noted down my achievements and which character traits of mine brought me there. It helped a lot with re-gaining self-confidence. Also, ask your friends and former colleagues about this.

7. Personalise outreach and try to get intros

What helped me a lot was updating my CV, but then really personalizing my outreach for the specific company I applied. I researched them heavily on social media, especially the person I'd be working for.

The outcome

Roughly 6 months later I started a wonderful new job -- amazing people, vision, and product. It was a bit opportunistic, a step back at first glance, but I grew in responsibility and with the challenges day by day. Btw: this job came through an intro from my Twitter team lead.

3 years later I ended up being part of the executive team.

⏭ 6 years later, if this would happen to me now, I would still be in shock but I know I made it out of this situation once before. I learned how to get out of it, I taught myself to be confident and to believe in myself.

& you can do it, too! 🌟

If you need advice, sparring, intros or just some uplifting words - please reach out to me 💌

FYI: this article is cross-posted from Linkedin and was written in November 22, 2022.