Many are guilty of startup misadventures, I am no different, this is one of those tales…
The day is Friday, 9/14/18 and I feel a bulge in my abs. I know the feeling, I had that same bulge on the other side two years earlier. That bulge was an inguinal hernia that required surgery. This time would be no different, sooner or later there will be a surgery to fix this. There is no training around this thing, there are no alternative treatments, the surgeon has to cut me.
The next couple days were filled with a feeling of impending and complete doom. I felt assaulted, and broken on many fronts. Firstly there is the whole surgery thing, some doctor is going to shove some mesh inside me and sew me back together. This is going to hurt, the rehab hurts, but I have done that before, and I can do the pain. Barring a surgeon butchering his job, I know I can come back fine from this thing. The real doom was felt around the fact that I am currently building almost all my life and career around fitness and lifting.
My only hobby is lifting weights. I am studying to become a personal trainer and get a job doing that. I am also building a startup focused on fitness. Everything in my life revolves around the fact that I have been under the bar lifting weights for 20 years, and the fact that in all that time I have learned a trick or two. My body is currently broken though, I cannot be under a bar. I am early into the development of the injury from what I can tell. I’m by no means crippled, but doing a deadlift would be really stupid right now. I have spent a lot of time thinking that all is lost. I cannot do the central activity around which my career and startup are focused.
All the product testing done on Incelerate(my super cool fitness startup) has revolved around my own training, and working with the actual data and processes I use to train myself. All of this is done now. I can’t work new systems, or build new features to experiment with, I am stuck sitting in a chair indefinitely. This entire product I have built is the product and tools I have wanted and would have liked to have in the past. I have put everything on myself, the product development, the testing, the marketing, everything.
I am early on with everything with this startup but have started to think about and start moving with my content marketing. Again most of this content revolves around my own weight lifting and things inspired from that. Everything has been on the table to do, from hardcore exercise science articles, to fitness and lifting stunts on YouTube. Now that feels limited, I can’t even take a picture of myself in the gym for Instagram, because well, I’m no longer in the gym. A lot of marketing doors have closed with that. Really it feels like a lot of doors have closed for me in the several days.
Really I have come realize pretty fast here, that these feelings and perceptions of my reality are nothing but a lie I am telling myself. Building a fitness startup, or even personal training, they are not about me actually working out. This startup is not about me at all. These ventures are about my experience and passion, not about what I can do today. I lost that somewhere along the way. I am a coach, I am a cheerleader, but I’m not the one playing the game. It matters that a basketball coach used to play, it doesn’t matter if he can still play. I kept falling into a mental trap, thinking that heavier lifts would make my startup better in some way.
Nothing I could do in the next year in the gym would have really made a difference that the last 20 years wouldn’t have already done. More experience and domain knowledge is always good. 20 years experience means I have those boxes checked. In fact if you look at some of the other lifting apps out there, I have more time under the bar than their entire founding teams. I have the experience and knowledge to build a quality product that can help a lot of people.
I think experience and wanting more knowledge is a mental trap for startups. Most startups are about helping the common person and intermediate people. Elite and advanced people are going to need something a little different, and I must ask myself if I am the guy to help those people. I am not elite, I am a hobbyist at this stuff. If I was going to be elite, my body would have responded by now and become elite. I have the skill and experience to build some cool stuff for normal people wanting to be strong. I will NEVER have the experience to build tools for elite athletes without a lot of outside help.
All in all I lost sight of what mattered and why I can build a pretty cool app and startup. There are really two things that I have going for me. I have passion and I have experience. Those are the two things that matter. How much I lift today doesn’t matter. How fit or healthy I am at the moment doesn’t matter. A focus on myself put me in this position, but to build a business, focus on others is far more important. A lot of good startups start from a founder’s hobbies or interests. This is a good thing. But if you’re not careful you’ll end up like me thinking if you build up your bench press you’ll build up your business, and that’s really not how this all works.