Why Are We Surprised That Startups Are So Freaking Hard?

Building startups is not a particularly glamorous thing in spite of how the media makes it look. A lot of it is just doing sales or doing customer support hundreds of thousands of times over and over again and being really committed to becoming exceptional at it.

This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he’ll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop?

And for the rare successful operators who do go on to start a new company, most opt to copy a successful product and compete for market share. Today, the market is overrun with luxury credit cards and task management tools. While often lucrative, these are also generally  bad quests . While the players may profit from winning market share from