How Startup Founders Deal with Rejection - 3 Proven Ways
How Startup Founders Deal with Rejection - 3 Proven Ways
One of the defining traits of the most successful founders is how these startup founders deal with rejection. When you create something new, you may find that you encounter lots of pushback. Rejection can come from potential customers, investors, and sometimes even yourself. You might find your own product not “good enough to ship” and reject it before it had the chance to see the light of day.
One of the defining traits of the most successful founders is how these startup founders deal with rejection. When you create something new, you may find that you encounter lots of pushback. Rejection can come from potential customers, investors, and sometimes even yourself. You might find your own product not “good enough to ship” and reject it before it had the chance to see the light of day.
Dealing with rejection poorly is the #1 reason that founders burn out. It is natural, who doesn’t get demotivated by rejection after rejection? However, building rejection resilience is foundational to success as a founder. So how do you build rejection resilience?
Use Self-Storytelling to Handle Rejection
The reason rejection is difficult to deal with is that it can feel personal. When rejection feels like you have personally failed, it hits the hardest. So it is important to avoid getting personal with the rejection. How?
It comes down to the story you tell yourself about the rejection. Those who deal with rejection poorly believe that personal failure is to blame for the rejection. Those who deal with rejection well, on the other hand, use the following 3 ways to turn their rejection into motivation.
3 Ways Startup Founders Deal with Rejection
It’s about the product, not you 🤟🏽
Show it to more customers (aka gather more data points) 📊
Remember your wins, specifically your 5.6 wins 🏆
1. It’s about the product, not you 🤟🏽
Step one is making the rejection less personal. Chances are you think it’s personal 80% of the time, but it is actually personal only 5% of the time. And the 5% of the time when it is personal, it’s not actually helpful to respond as if it is. So how do you not take the rejection personally?
In every interaction, you’re pitching a product, a concept, an idea. When a customer says, “No, thanks.” Think of that rejection as feedback. And read their response as “What you showed me doesn’t solve my problem.” This mindset puts you in a better place to problem solve, and find a path forward without getting mired in the emotion of rejection.
2. Show it to more customers (aka gather more data points) 📊
Getting customer attention is hard. So the tendency is to talk to 5 potential customers, and then feel like you’ve run out of people to show the product. Or you grow weary of the effort. But 5 is not nearly enough data points to validate a hypothesis. For B2B products, you need 20-30 customers to see your product to recognize a pattern. For B2C products, you’ll need to show it to hundreds or thousands of customers before you’ll get a signal. To stay motivated through the rejections, use the Collecting No’s method.
Collecting No’s method
Set a rejection target, say 10% acceptance and therefore 90% rejection.
Now do the math. If you need 10 customers at 10% acceptance, you’ll need to talk to 100 customers before you have enough.
Collect your No’s. As you collect your 10 customers who say yes, also log the 90 customers who say no, and give yourself a pat on the back for each one. Who knows, they might come back and say yes later, which is usually what happens as you build more capabilities and grow.
3. Remember your wins, specifically, your 5.6 wins 🏆
According to this HBR article, humans need a 5.6 to 1 praise to criticism ratio to achieve the highest performance. Keep that in mind.
This means for every rejection you experience, you need 5.6 wins to stay balanced. But you will actually receive the opposite and that’s normal, so you need to build in rituals to counter this criticism ratio.
There are many ways to do this. I keep a log of wins and losses and remind myself of my past wins when I encounter a loss. I collect customer testimonials and re-watch them. I keep a text document of positive feedback from people I have helped. It’s ok to re-use past wins. You are not expected to actually hit a 5.6: 1 customer conversion ratio. That’s impossible even for the best companies with the best products. But you need to make sure your psyche is getting that ratio so you can stay spiritually hydrated for the journey ahead.
Last but not Least
Now you know 3 ways to handle rejection. Excellent 🥂. But wait, you might notice that all 3 ways require your executive function to be working. This means, your frontal cortex has to be in charge, not your reptilian brain. So the foundation for dealing with rejection is …
Get enough Sleep 💤
Without enough sleep, the reptilian brain takes over. When we are fully rested our frontal cortex can process more information. So signals such as rejection can be filtered through the lens of “this is useful feedback” instead of a direct personal attack. But without rest, the frontal cortex is tired, and the reptilian brain takes over. So rejection will more likely trigger a flight or fight response instead. So if you do nothing else, giving yourself more sleep will immediately improve your rejection handling capability. Then layer on the 3 ways above, and you’re off to the races.
Good luck on the journey ahead. And may you weather all your rejections smoothly.
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