Resilience & Design Partner Inspiration from "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens
Startups often feel like wandering in the darkness, searching for that elusive light, the spark of validation, the right customers, or the clarity to scale. In those moments, the dim glow of a moonshadow can feel like all we have, a faint guide in an otherwise uncertain journey.
Cat Stevens' Moonshadow captures this feeling beautifully. The song speaks to resilience, optimism, and learning to adapt when things don’t go as planned. For startups, this resonates deeply. Let’s break it down.
The Darkness and the Moonshadow
As a founder, you might feel like you’re walking a lonely path, followed by nothing more than the faint light of a moonshadow. You’re constantly waiting for the faithful light of the right customers to find you. Along the way, every setback feels monumental. Losing a customer can feel like losing your legs or your eyes, as Stevens poetically describes. But here’s the truth: these "losses" are part of fine-tuning your model.
In a startup, not all customers are the right customers. Losing the wrong ones is not a failure, it’s a step toward discovering the ones who truly align with your vision. Staying positive through this process is critical. The goal isn’t to cling to every customer but to find those who can become your design partners.
Get Rid of the Wrong Customers
The wrong customers are those who will eventually diverge from your product offering due to technical structure, company culture, or misaligned direction. These customers negatively impact your startup metrics, such as ARR, at critical moments. Early on in pre-seed rounds, encountering bumps in the road with your product offering is understandable. However, as you secure funding, you must ensure all metrics align perfectly with your growth strategy.
If you build a book of business filled with misaligned customers, you set your company up for future challenges. You’ll either face a shake-up correction or accumulate too many product features that don’t align with your vision. Getting rid of the wrong customers early allows you to focus on the ones who will drive long-term success.
Finding the Right Design Partners
The right customers are your faithful light. These are the customers who are ambitious and willing to grow alongside you. They invest their time in giving you constructive feedback, helping you shape your product into something exceptional. Without good design partners, you might as well be wandering in the dark, aimlessly waiting to "lose your legs" or "lose your eyes," as the song suggests.
Design partners are the ones who:
- Provide honest, actionable feedback.
- Share their challenges openly, allowing you to iterate and improve your product.
- Align with your vision for the future and understand the value of collaboration.
By focusing on these relationships, you’re not just building a product, you’re building a community. The rest? Those customers who want to do everything themselves or don’t see the value in your vision? Let them go. They’re not part of your moonlit journey.
"Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light."
When you do find those right customers, it’s like a moment of clarity in the song:
"Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light."
This is your chance to engage deeply. Ask your customers about their journey to you:
- What was your search and onboarding experience like?
- What other roads did you have to go down to get here?
By understanding their path, you can refine your own. Your message becomes sharper, your onboarding smoother, and your community stronger. You’ll become not just a vendor but a partner, aligned perfectly with their needs now and in the future.
Building a Community Together
Great startups don’t just collect customers; they foster a community of like-minded partners. By aligning your roadmap with your design partners and the broader community, you create a shared vision. Together, you can grow and leave behind those who don’t fit your mission.
When you grow together with multiple design partners, you may find opportunities to collaborate with "frenemies, competitors who share a mutual interest in disrupting incumbent giants. These partnerships can:
- Unlock regional conference opportunities by sharing costs.
- Create interconnected referral systems.
- Allow collaboration on complementary roadmap strategies.
For example, you and your frenemies might focus on disrupting larger incumbents by enabling migrations away from their platforms. By reducing barriers for customers to migrate, you collectively grow the market share available to your community of disruptors. Collaboration in this context benefits everyone involved, fostering innovation and lowering costs for customers.
Conclusion: Embrace the Journey
As you step forward in your startup journey, remember this: it’s okay to lose the wrong customers. Embrace the moonshadow as you navigate the darkness. Stay resilient, stay curious, and trust that the faithful light of the right customers will find you. When they do, you’ll look back and see how every step of the journey, even the hard ones, helped you get there.
Have a listen to Cat Stevens' song and be inspired to keep leaping and hopping on that moonshadow. Your perfect design partner customer is closer than you think.