Part 2: How startups succeed, a leadership lens

In Part 1 we explored why startups fail through a leadership lens. This part is about what strong technical founders actually do differently.

Below are some key actions you can take as a founder to build leadership into your startup. These are illustrative, not exhaustive, but they are the ones that I believe separate durable ventures from fragile ones.

Lack of Market Need

Stay close to the problem, not just your solution.

Spend time every week talking to real customers, testing assumptions, and seeking perspectives that challenge your ideas. Set up regular opportunities for your team to observe customer behaviour firsthand and reward them for raising inconvenient truths.

The goal is not to validate your brilliance but to discover what the market actually needs.

Insufficient Capital

Treat cash as a strategic resource, not a spreadsheet.

Model worst-case scenarios, track burn weekly, and make funding decisions before urgency forces you. Pick three scenarios (A, B, and C) for how revenue, customer uptake, or technical challenges might play out. Discuss with your team what you would do in each case: what to pause, what to accelerate, and what trade-offs are acceptable. This simple framework gives you visibility and agility without drowning in spreadsheets.

Being deliberate here is how you buy yourself options (and no, not the financial kind!) Room to maneuver is the lifeblood of a startup.

Poor Management Team

As a leader you need to hire for complementary skills and perspectives, not comfort or similarity. This is harder than most people think.

Invest early in psychological safety, and clarity on roles and decision-making. Hold people accountable when capabilities or values do not align with the company’s needs. Strong teams make better decisions faster and let you focus on product and strategy.

Competition

You need to define your problem space clearly and make deliberate choices about where you will compete. Build a unique value proposition and protect it over time. Understand what is easy or difficult to copy about your solution.

Use competitive intelligence to guide your strategy, not to chase every feature or price move. Focus on your own path and avoid treating competitors as enemies - circumstances change, and today’s rival could be tomorrow’s partner.

Flawed Business Model

You need to confront economics early. Heck, it should be part of the evaluation of whether you even start moving an idea to a product or service.

Be able to explain in one sentence how the business makes money and in two sentences how it scales.

Test pricing models, validate willingness to pay, and change the model if evidence shows your assumptions are wrong. Let revenue and cost dynamics shape product and strategy, not the other way around.

Ineffective Marketing

You need to treat marketing as a strategic function, not "fluffy noise". Set clear goals, trust skilled marketers to execute, and align marketing with product and sales.

Track impact for what works for your target customers or stakeholders (not marketing fads), and intervene when strategy drifts from your core story. Marketing is translation, not decoration, and clarity here amplifies everything you build.

Product Issues

You need to define quality standards before pressure dictates them, because your product reflects the decisions you allow as a leader.

Decide what is non-negotiable and where trade-offs are acceptable, even under investor or market pressure. Focus ruthlessly, prevent feature creep, and iterate based on real user behaviour. Build processes that make good decisions obvious and continue asking, "Is this work really moving the needle?"

Ignoring Customer Feedback

Listen before you optimize. Build basic and simple dashboards, user interviews, and metrics that surface feedback early. Reward your team for flagging problems and act on signals before they turn into churn. Treat complaints as leading indicators and use curiosity as a leadership skill.

Rapid Scaling

Understand your operations, processes, and culture before increasing headcount or volume. You need to balance preparing your team and systems with not overbuilding for a stage you haven’t reached yet - this timing is one of the hardest trade-offs for any founder.

Protect customer experience and culture deliberately, because they degrade faster than revenue grows.

Legal Challenges

Strong founders treat legal and regulatory requirements as strategic infrastructure. Clarify ownership, IP, contracts, and compliance early. Engage legal advisors proactively and reduce ambiguity wherever possible.

Design freedom by building constraints that protect your company long term so decisions can move fast without fear.

Final Thoughts

If you are a technical founder, your instinct will always be to build.

My advice is simple: You also need to build the organization.

Build trust. Build clarity. Build the conditions that let good work happen.

That is how an idea evolves into a successful company.

I’d love to hear which of these areas has been (or is!) the hardest for you as a founder, share your thoughts in the comments or reach out directly.