We talk about one of the topics that just irritates us on today’s episode. How to get past the hard things in start-ups. What is irritating about the “but it’s hard” mentality is people often let the challenge beat them down. We are going to give those of you in the midst of a challenge a little pep talk.

This is what we talk about today:

Why EVERYTHING is hard.

Why you need to be more flexible.

When to quit a start-up (we actually have a past episode about this right here.)

What is a Zombie Start-up?

The best coping techniques for a hard business situation.

The next time you find yourself in a hard place in your business maybe taking a step back and looking at it on the basic level will help. If you want to weigh on this topic you can find it on our facebook group below..

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As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Hiten: Hi, I’m Hiten Shah.Steli: And I’m Steli Efti .

Hiten: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how startups are hard and they aren’t for everyone.

Steli: Yes.  So this is going to be a really uplifting, cheerful episode.

Hiten: Oh of course, yeah.  Yeah, of course.

Steli: It’s like I’ve been struggling with the flu or whatever, zombie bite attack or something.  I’ve been feeling horrible physically for the last two weeks, and as a result also mentally.  And Hiten was telling me how he had a shitty week and we’re like, “Ah, we feel so horrible.” Then when we walked through the list of all the topics we wanted to talk about, we’re like, “Let’s start with the startups are really hard and not for everyone, since we’re already in that mood.”  So if you’re looking for inspiration, maybe this is going to turn into a really inspiring episode, but maybe this is also going to be a more gloomy one.  We’ll see how this is going to turn out.  But let’s talk about, what about startups is hard?  Why are startups so hard?

Hiten: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re starting, you’re generally starting from scratch, and you’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to build a business.  And first I have to probably get a team, or build something myself,” so, you’ve got to find a way to build something, and then after you, there’s all kinds of nuances to that, like why we have tactics like customer development and do things like user research and, you know, sales calls to sort of figure out what people want to buy and all this kind of stuff.  It’s because all we’re trying to do and make sure that we can make money on them.  And that’s like creating new economic value.  It’s pretty hard, because people don’t like to give up their money, basically.

And that’s your path, right?  In any business.  Even if it’s consumer business, in the long run somebody’s got to give you money for something for you to be a business.  So I think just fundamentally starting a business is hard, and if you’ve never done it before, it’s like you don’t know how it feels, you don’t know how hard it actually is.  And one of the reasons this topic is really really really interesting to me is that this thing I hear from people,