Why Your Startup Needs a Happier You

Benjamin Friedman
March 11, 2025

Morning beehiivcommunity!

This newsletter turns experience into lessons you can apply to your startup. As a growth partner for visionary founders, we help sharpen leadership skills and unlock growth potential.

Photo by Surface who can be found here.

The Overlooked Key to Startup Success: Prioritizing Your Happiness

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Albert Schweitzer

Maintaining happiness is essential for startup founders.

Building a startup is an intense, demanding journey. The constant stream of meetings, events, and presentations can be tiring for anyone and particularly draining for introverts who need solitude to recharge.

But happiness will sustain your energy and focus, shielding against burnout. Happy entrepreneurs not only perform better, but also attract valuable talent, customers, and investors to build a lasting business.

This week’s post covers tips and strategies for finding balance and happiness as a founder, with special attention to the needs of introverts.

Startup Spark

“The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill

While optimism doesn't guarantee success, it fuels motivation and helps uncover the best possibilities.

Startups face constant setbacks, such as product failures, investor rejections, and market shifts. Yet successful founders see these challenges not as dead ends but as valuable learning opportunities.

Constraints often spark creativity, and every challenge presents an opportunity to pivot. Take Slack, for example: after struggling as a video game company, they transformed into one of today's leading communication platforms.

Expert Tips for Startups
Quick, valuable insights from accomplished founders

How Smart Founders Can Weather Almost Any Storm

Entrepreneurs navigating today’s tough venture climate must focus on resilience by exploring diverse capital sources beyond equity, such as non-dilutive funding, venture debt (cautiously), and grants.

To control expenses, founders should manage burn rate, forecast revenue accurately, and extend their runway. During challenging times, they must remain strategic, adaptable, and focused until conditions improve.

Above all, founders need to maintain transparency and strong relationships with their investors, boards, and teams.

Oliver Libby is the Managing Partner at H/L Ventures which strives to help mission-driven founders build inspiring, valuable companies from inception to exit. The full video can be found HERE.

The Bad Ass Bookshelf

Our partner, The Bad Ass Bookshelf, is a free book club where leaders grow through carefully curated readings on business, management, productivity, and personal development.

Each month, members vote on a book selection and share their insights, culminating in a discussion of key takeaways.

The group’s leaders, Tris J Burns and Fiona Burns are passionate about building businesses and improving our lives.

It's completely free to join! Join HERE:

How We Can Help

Over 90% of startups fail. Build Scale Grow helps founders beat these odds by efficiently scaling businesses and aligning vision, resources, and efforts.

We partner with founders to build and manage teams, systems, and functions, such as Customer Success and Revenue Operations, that drive rapid growth.

Book a free 30-minute call HERE to see how we can help.