A “Buddy System” For Entrepreneurs

By Elyse Ball
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You wouldn’t go swimming alone, lift heavy weights alone, or work in a lab alone. Most of us won’t even go to the movies alone. But when it comes to starting a company, a surprisingly high percentage of us are willing to go it alone.
Finding other entrepreneurs to start a company within Northeast Ohio has always seemed particularly tricky to me. There aren’t that many people who want to take a risk of becoming an entrepreneur and even fewer of them are interested in working on someone else’s idea. However, you don’t necessarily have to find an official co-founder to reap some of the rewards, like accountability, competition, honest feedback, and emotional support. Instead, consider creating your own entrepreneur “buddy system” with a few other entrepreneurs you trust and respect. You can do this by: 

• Developing informal friendships with a few other entrepreneurs
• Hosting a regularly scheduled meetup with a few people you trust
• Staying in touch with people you were in an incubator or accelerator with

As you interact with other entrepreneurs, think about who you’d like to continue to strive alongside and the kinds of outcomes you can achieve with a little help from your friends.

Accountability

Holding ourselves accountable is extremely hard, and it gets much easier if we have another person involved. This is why fitness buddy systems are so effective. When we share our goals with someone we respect, we’re more likely to persist and achieve them. It also helps if we share our goals with other people who understand how life, conflicting priorities, and the unforeseen challenges of entrepreneurship can make it harder to achieve our goals.

Entrepreneur Justin Sachs posted a few concrete pieces of advice for finding an accountability partner: (1) Make sure it isn’t someone you are too personal with, like a long-time friend or family member, because they are more likely to let you make excuses. (2) Make sure they are invested in your success, because they need to care enough to hold your feet to the fire. (3) Have regularly scheduled check-ins, because these create automatic deadlines.

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Competition

During the recent Summer Olympics in Tokyo, two U.S. runners simultaneously broke the world record in the 400 meter hurdles. And this wasn’t the first time it had happened. Since 2019, every time Sydney McLaughlin and Dalilah Muhammad faced off in competition, one or both of them broke the world record. “Iron sharpens iron,” McLaughlin said of Muhammad, noting that their competition was critical to their mutual success.

Healthy competition that stems from mutual respect and a desire to see yourself and others do their best can push you to new heights. When I participated in the National I-Corps program, my team pushed ourselves by striving to get the most customer interviews of any team in the cohort. The interview totals for every team appeared online as we input our new interview notes. We ultimately came in second with 118 customer interviews in seven weeks, and I’m certain the last 10 or so interviews we did were a direct result of watching that leaderboard.

Honest feedback

One of the most inspiring examples of the power of feedback and iteration is an simple study that was part of Adam Grant’s recent book, Think Again. An amateur artist is given the task of drawing a butterfly. After each attempt, the artist gets feedback from other untrained amateurs. By drawing #6, he has an impressively lifelike rendering. The kicker: the artist is a first grader. 

Specific and honest feedback has the power to help us see new perspectives and improve far more rapidly than we ever could on our own. Two Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs, Alireza Bagheri and Nate Hawk, met during the I-Corps program and have used that same principle to push each other to advance their startups. “It’s been said that there are two types of people, lions and gazelles,” Nate says. “I would say that with Ali and I working together, it’s like two lions. It sounds like it’s bad but it’s not. It’s a good thing because we’re constructively criticizing each other.” 

​Emotional support

Entrepreneurship can be an emotional roller coaster, even when things are going well. Knowing there are other people who are going through the same things and are in your corner can make a huge difference. Northeast Ohio entrepreneur Matt Crowley found his support network while participating in the TechStars Accelerator. 

“Even though [TechStars] was 13 weeks of really intense ups and downs, what I did was make a bunch of friends for life,” Matt says. “So if I could suggest one thing, even if a startup is not going through an accelerator, is find other entrepreneurs that can become your best friends. Because you will need that social safety net with all the highs and lows that come with your business every day.”

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