The First Year Will Suck (And That's OK)

The first year of building gravity doesn’t suck because you’re doing it wrong. It sucks because you’re doing it right.

Last autumn, I met the founder of a promising software startup at a London tech event. His company had launched six months earlier with an innovative platform for the insurance industry. When I asked how things were going, he lowered his voice conspiratorially.

“If I’m honest, it’s brutal,” he confessed. “We’re working ridiculous hours, sales cycles are taking three times longer than we expected, and I wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat wondering if we’ve made a catastrophic mistake. But everyone keeps telling me how well we’re doing because we’ve gotten some press. I feel like I’m failing at something that’s supposed to be working.”

What he didn’t realise was that his experience wasn’t the exception—it was the rule. The cleanest, most inspiring business origin stories are usually the most heavily edited.

We celebrate the businesses that survive long enough to make it look easy, then wonder why our own journey feels so hard. The problem isn’t that your first year is difficult—it’s that no one warned you it’s supposed to be.

The Ten-Year Overnight Success Reality

Slack is often held up as the quintessential overnight success story—a messaging app that seemed to explode from nowhere to everywhere in a matter of months. What this tidy narrative conveniently omits is that Slack emerged from the ashes of a failed gaming company called Tiny Speck.

Stewart Butterfield and his team had spent nearly four years and burned through $17 million building a quirky game called Glitch before realizing it wouldn’t succeed. The communication tool they’d built for internal use during those years became Slack—a “new” product that was actually forged through years of failure and adaptation.

It would be another 18 months of focused development before Slack’s public launch in 2014, itself a full five years after the founding team began their journey. The apparent overnight success that followed represented half a decade of work, failure, learning, and adaptation—all before most people had ever heard the company’s name.

Or consider Mailchimp, which Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius started in 2001 as a side project to their web design agency. For six years, it remained an afterthought as they focused on client work. Only in 2007 did they decide to focus exclusively on Mailchimp, and it wasn’t until 2009—eight years after founding—that they introduced the freemium model that sparked accelerated growth.

When Mailchimp reached a million users in 2010, the business press hailed them as a new success story, conveniently ignoring the previous nine years of patient building. Their “sudden” $12 billion acquisition by Intuit in 2021 represented two decades of consistent work—the ten-year overnight success stretched to twice its length.

These compressed timelines create dangerous expectations. When you’re in month six of your journey, struggling to gain traction while reading about another startup’s “meteoric rise,” the inevitable comparison becomes toxic. Social media amplifies this distortion as founders share polished victories while concealing everyday struggles.

The uncomfortable truth? Virtually every business that develops meaningful gravitational pull takes years, not months, to do so. The pursuit phase isn’t a temporary obstacle to overcome quickly—it’s an essential part of the journey that typically lasts much longer than anyone wants to admit.

The Hidden Value in Struggle

Early struggle isn’t a bug in entrepreneurship; it’s the feature that creates the most valuable lessons.

When Timo Boldt launched Gousto in 2012, the UK meal kit service faced brutal early challenges. Operating from a cramped flat in North London, the team packed each box by hand, often working through the night to maintain quality and meet delivery deadlines.

“In the early days, we’d get complaints about inconsistent portions, missing ingredients, or delivery issues,” Boldt recalls. “I personally called every customer who had a problem. It was painful, but those conversations shaped our entire approach to quality control and customer experience.”

Those early problems forced Gousto to develop robust systems for ingredient measurement, quality checking, and logistics—systems that became significant advantages as they scaled. They weren’t failing; they were learning at an accelerated pace that their competition couldn’t match.

Similarly, Melanie Perkins faced eight consecutive rejections from investors before securing seed funding for what would become Canva. During those two years of technical development before launch, the team repeatedly rebuilt core functionality based on harsh feedback.

“The struggle wasn’t pleasant, but it was clarifying,” Perkins has said. “Each rejection forced us to articulate our vision more clearly and refine our product strategy. By the time we found investors who believed in us, our direction was razor-sharp.”

These aren’t isolated examples—they’re the standard pattern. The constraints of early building create the conditions for your most distinctive thinking. When you can’t outspend competitors, you must outthink them. When you can’t hide behind marketing polish, you must deliver genuine value. When you can’t rely on brand recognition, you must forge authentic connections.

Gravity doesn’t emerge despite these constraints—it emerges because of them.

Learning as Primary Currency

In the pursuit phase, a rejection that teaches you something specific about your market is more valuable than a sale that teaches you nothing.

When Monzo began building its digital bank, co-founder Tom Blomfield made an unusual decision. Rather than hiding early technical issues, the team created public status pages showing real-time system performance, including outages and problems.

“Traditional banks hide their technical problems,” Blomfield explained. “We decided that transparency would build more trust than pretending to be perfect.”

This approach turned every system failure into a learning opportunity. Customers reported issues in granular detail because they felt part of the building process. The Monzo community forum became filled with implementation suggestions, feature requests, and detailed bug reports—essentially free product development intelligence that competitors spent millions to gather.

The true currency of early-stage business isn’t revenue—it’s insights per week. Every customer conversation, sales meeting, support ticket, and market interaction contains potentially valuable data about:

How prospects actually understand your offering (versus how you think they understand it)
Which aspects of your solution create genuine excitement (versus which you thought would)
What language resonates with your audience (versus what sounds clever internally)
Which problems cause enough pain to motivate purchase (versus which are merely annoying)
What objections consistently prevent conversion (versus what you assumed would block sales)

Capturing this intelligence systematically transforms struggle from frustrating to productive. When Ben Chestnut began building Mailchimp, he obsessively documented customer support interactions, looking for patterns that could improve both the product and their positioning.

“We treated every customer conversation like a mini research project,” he said. “That’s how we discovered small businesses needed simplicity more than power—the opposite of what enterprise email marketing tools were offering.”

This insight shaped Mailchimp’s entire approach to product design and messaging, creating a distinctive position that larger competitors struggled to match. The learning didn’t happen despite their difficult early years—it happened because of them.

To maximise your learning velocity, build simple systems to:

Document every significant market interaction with specific details
Schedule regular pattern-recognition sessions to identify emerging themes
Translate insights immediately into testable improvements
Share learning across the team to multiply individual experiences
Measure improvements in understanding alongside traditional metrics

These disciplines convert the painful pursuit phase into a strategic advantage—one that companies with easy early success often lack.

Measuring What Matters

“How’s business?”

This seemingly innocent question becomes psychological torture during your first year. The honest answer—“We’re building foundations but haven’t yet achieved meaningful traction”—feels like admitting failure in a culture obsessed with hockey-stick growth curves and funding announcements.

The pressure to show immediate results drives many founders to track the wrong metrics during the pursuit phase. Traditional growth indicators like revenue, user acquisition, and market share have their place, but they’re lagging indicators that tell you where you’ve been, not where you’re heading.

During gravitational building, focus instead on leading indicators that demonstrate strengthening foundations:

1. Learning Velocity

How quickly are you gaining actionable market insights?
Are you developing clearer understanding of your customer with each interaction?
Is your positioning becoming more distinctive and resonant over time?

2. Problem-Solution Fit Improvement

Are customers expressing increasing enthusiasm about your solution?
Is the gap closing between what you offer and what customers need?
Are implementation challenges becoming more predictable and manageable?

3. Early Gravity Signals

Are you seeing unprompted referrals, however small in number?
Do customers use your product/service more intensively over time?
Is customer feedback becoming increasingly specific and constructive?
Are follow-on purchases or expanded usage emerging naturally?
Have competitors begun acknowledging your presence, even indirectly?

4. Foundation Strength

How effectively are you documenting early successes for future proof?
Are you building systems that will scale with growth rather than require replacement?
Is your delivery becoming more consistent and predictable?
Are team capabilities expanding through direct experience?

When Graze launched its subscription snack service, the team developed a “learning card” for each product they shipped. Customers rated flavours, freshness, and portion size, providing specific feedback that quickly identified winners and losers.

“Most subscription businesses track churn as their primary metric,” explained founder Graham Bosher. “We focused instead on measuring how quickly we improved based on customer guidance. Retention followed naturally from that improvement velocity.”

This approach meant that even during months when conventional metrics looked discouraging, the team could see clear progress in the foundations of their future gravity.

The Productive Struggle Framework

Embracing the inevitable challenges of your first year doesn’t mean passive acceptance. It means extracting maximum value from necessary difficulty through deliberate practice:

1. Reframe Expectations

Release the tyranny of unrealistic timelines by recognising that:

Building initial gravity typically takes 2-3 years, not 6-12 months
The learning curve is steepest during the earliest phases
Comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle creates unnecessary suffering
Public success narratives have typically edited out years of invisible building

2. Maximise Learning Extraction

Implement simple systems to capture intelligence from every interaction:

Conduct structured debriefs after every significant customer engagement
Document specific language used by prospects and customers
Track objections and hesitations systematically to identify patterns
Develop hypothesis-testing disciplines for rapid experimentation
Establish regular team sharing protocols to multiply individual learning

3. Build Sustainable Momentum

Maintain progress through deliberate energy management:

Celebrate meaningful small wins with specific recognition
Create visual trackers for foundation-building progress
Implement protected time for both execution and reflection
Develop pacing strategies that prevent team burnout
Build support systems through peer connections and mentorship

4. Create Gravity Foundations

Focus on activities that build long-term attraction:

Collect and organise evidence of early successes, however small
Invest in relationship depth over transaction volume
Develop systems that will scale rather than require replacement
Refine positioning based on market feedback
Establish consistent brand elements for recognition building

When Joel Gascoigne founded Buffer in 2010, he implemented a simple but powerful learning system: a dedicated notebook where he recorded every user interaction, feature request, and problem report. Each Friday, he reviewed the week’s entries, looking for patterns that would guide the next week’s development priorities.

“We didn’t have sophisticated analytics in the early days,” Gascoigne explained. “But we had direct conversations with users that revealed exactly what they valued and what confused them. That notebook became our product roadmap.”

This disciplined extraction of learning from struggle allowed Buffer to build features users actually wanted rather than capabilities the team assumed would matter. The practice converted their early constraints into a genuine advantage.

Preparing for the Long Game

The entrepreneurial psychology literature reveals a consistent pattern: founders who succeed over the long term aren’t necessarily more talented or innovative than those who fail. They’re simply more prepared for the inevitable difficulties and therefore more likely to persist until gravity begins to build.

Persistence isn’t just about gritting your teeth and pushing forward. It requires deliberate strategies to sustain your capacity for the journey:

1. Resource Preservation

Counterintuitively, the companies that survive long enough to build meaningful gravity often grow more slowly than their peers during the earliest phases. They preserve financial runway, protect team energy, and maintain strategic flexibility rather than prematurely scaling.

When Trello began gaining traction, they deliberately limited growth to ensure their infrastructure and team could maintain quality. “We could have grown faster,” noted co-founder Michael Pryor, “but we chose to grow at a pace that allowed us to learn from our customers and build sustainable systems.”

2. Support System Development

The isolation of early-stage building creates additional psychological burden. Successful founders proactively build connections with peers facing similar challenges, creating safe spaces to share struggles without judgment or comparison.

Tom Blomfield of Monzo became known for his transparency about the challenges of building a challenger bank. By openly discussing regulatory hurdles, technical challenges, and team struggles, he normalised the difficulty of the journey for himself and others.

3. Meaning Maintenance

When conventional success markers remain distant, finding alternative sources of meaning becomes essential. The most resilient founders connect daily activities to deeper purpose rather than focusing exclusively on outcome metrics.

Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp has spoken about how focusing on helping small businesses succeed provided motivation during years when Mailchimp itself wasn’t yet thriving. “We weren’t building an email platform,” he explained. “We were helping small companies punch above their weight. That mission kept us going when growth was slow.”

The Reward of Patience

The ten-year overnight success isn’t a myth—it’s the rule. True gravity takes years to build, not months.

The entrepreneurs who expect and accept early difficulty are the ones most likely to endure long enough to create genuine gravity. They understand that the first year isn’t about perfection—it’s about learning faster than competitors. They recognise that if building attraction were easy, every business would have it. The difficulty is what makes it valuable.

Perhaps most importantly, they see the early pursuit phase not as a frustrating delay before “real” success, but as the essential foundation upon which all future gravity will build. The relationships formed, systems developed, and insights gathered during this challenging period become the dense core from which natural attraction eventually emerges.

Embrace the suck. It’s the price of admission to becoming truly irresistible.