Breaking Free From Startup Echo Chambers - A Founder's Journey
Today’s advice post is by Dan Lesley, Founder of Homestar. Dan has over 20 years building, growing, and selling SaaS tech startups.
Building Homestar, my CRM for real estate agents, started like most founder stories - full of big dreams and plenty of uncertainty. Running a small team means wearing about 12 different hats on any given day, and sometimes I catch myself falling into those same old startup habits.
You know the ones - those startup mantras that get passed around like party favors. “Fail fast” this and “disrupt the market” that. I used to find comfort in those familiar phrases, especially after my previous SaaS ventures. But that comfort zone can be dangerous.
I got a reality check during our UI development phase. We were sitting around debating the latest design trends we’d picked up from tech conferences, nodding along like bobbleheads to conventional wisdom about user experience.
Then I had coffee with Sally, a real estate agent who couldn’t care less about our fancy interface animations. She needed something that worked for her actual job, not something that would impress other tech folks. That conversation stuck with me and made me question everything I thought I knew about “best practices.”
Getting out of my own head meant making some changes:
- Started talking to actual real estate agents who weren’t wrapped up in startup culture. Their brutal honesty about what they needed was worth more than a thousand pitch meetings.
- Went to random business events instead of just tech meetups. Amazing what you learn when people aren’t trying to name-drop their tech stack.
- Stopped living on TechCrunch and started reading weird stuff. Found some great ideas in retail magazines and healthcare blogs that helped solve our problems.
- Created space for disagreement on the team. Nobody grows from constant head-nodding.
The team got nervous about straying from the usual playbook. Would investors think we were crazy? Maybe. But I’d rather build something useful than just another trendy product.
My previous startups followed all the rules. This time around, I’m more interested in what happens when you color outside the lines. Some days it feels like juggling while riding a unicycle - totally chaotic but somehow working.
The funny thing is, breaking away from startup groupthink has led to our best ideas. Homestar’s evolved into something that helps real estate agents do their jobs better, not just another shiny tool that looks good in demos.
I’ve changed too. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable has made me better at this whole founder thing. It’s messier than following the standard startup recipe, but that’s where the good stuff happens.
When I grab coffee with new founders now, I tell them about stepping away from the echo chamber. Not because I’ve got it all figured out - far from it. But sometimes the best solutions come from turning down the startup noise and really listening to the people you’re trying to help.