How Founders Can Make the Grind Bearable
June 16, 2025
Startups are hard, but you don’t need to deliberately suffer to succeed.
If you’re building a consumer company or a B2B SaaS company then the expectations have changed massively since the dawn of mainstream AI. Fast traction is no longer optional.
Unless you’re working on deeptech, you no longer need months and months to find out if your idea will work. You should see almost immediate demand because you’re offering something amazing.
AI allows for you to provide instant value to your customers and in turn ask them to pay quite a lot for the privilege. That’s ok, because these AI products offer game changing outcomes. Remember, 5 years ago nobody would have ever expected to pay $20/month for a search engine.
As it’s such a great time to build, investor expectations have also changed. 6 months to reach $150k ARR from zero used to be ok, now we see teams doing that in 30 days.
Best of luck out there.
