How to deal with ambiguity in startups

Tech startups are pretty ambiguous enviornments. This is especally true the earlier the company is in its lifecycle. If your employer doesn't yet have product-market fit, it's an especially ambiguous environment! And learning how to handle ambiguity well is critical to doing well in any startup.

If I could reduce this post to two words, it would be this: given an ambiguous situation, take action. What action you take, of course, depends on the situation. But you need to move the needle in a startup, and the best way to do that is to take action on a problem, even if you are unsure of the optimal solution.

Let me make this more concrete. In a recent job, I was tasked with running the growth and marketing for the company, even though I had no experience with either growth or marketing. But I did have some experience with business development in startups. Maybe I could apply lessons learned in that context to a different one?

And this is what's key: you need to learn to assess a situation, and figure out what tools in your arsenal will help you stumble towards a solution.

This is still not very concrete. So let's start with business development, because it is from the lessons and skills that I learned doing business development for a startup that I was able to successfully figure out how to do growth and marketing for a startup.

In one of my previous jobs, I was tasked with developing a funnel of business development partnerships. I needed to figure out, quickly, who the major players in the target industry were, and I needed to figure out how to get in touch with them. OK, well, the first step here was: how do I contact these people who I don't know? I googled: "how to find email addresses". Amazing: there's a company called RocketReach.

So, having taken action, without really knowing what the result of that action would be, I discovered that there exists a tool to find email addresses! Now we're cooking.

Next step: how to find a list of organizations and companies that operate in this particular industry. Well, again, Google to the rescue: "trade associations for [industry]." I suddenly had a list of trade associations, whose members operated in the industry I was targeting. Here's where it gets interesting: trade associations usually have a list of corporate members. And they make this list public, in part because trade associations tend to think that if Company XYZ sees that its competitor Company ABC is a member of the trade association, then Company XYZ should be a member, too.

So now I had two pieces of information: RocketReach is a tool for finding email addresses, and trade associations tend to expose the names of their corporate members. Marry the two pieces of information: I had a list of companies for which I could source email addresses of relevant people via RocketReach. Brilliant: faced with a deeply ambiguous situation, I made progress by taking action.

This sounds very simple in retrospect, and if you naturally have a bias towards action, it also sounds obvious. But you'd be surprised: a lot of people don't have a bias towards action, especially when they are faced with ambiguous situations for which there is no certain answer.

So let's go back to my earlier point about growth and marketing for a startup. One of the things that I needed to do was to get a blog set up, and start producing content, in order to grow our waitlist. Writing content is easy enough (hence this blog post that you're reading). But how could I do this at scale? What tools were available to me? What kind of content do I need to generate.

So, back to Google, to stumble around. "How to write a blog for business" or something similar was my initial search. A post published on Grammarly was the first result: Our 8-Step Guide for How to Write a Pro Blog Post. While this was interesting, it didn't really give me any information that I didn't know. But: "content". I noted that word appeared frequently in this post. And I was looking to figure out how to market this company. "Content marketing": maybe that's a thing.

More action: "tools to automate content marketing." This led me down the rabbit hole of SEO and AI-generated content, the process for which you can read about here.

So, to review: startups, especially ones which are pre product-market fit, are very ambiguous. And you need to find a way to deal with that ambiguity productively. At heart, this requires that you take action, even though you are uncertain as to how to solve the problem.

Try to decompose the problem to what you know, or what you can figure out quickly. Often a seemingly intractable problem submits to a solution once sub-problems are solved.