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Flywheel #1: You Don’t Have to Fake It to Make It

Laura Fredericks

Welcome to the first Flywheel newsletter!

At this point we're solidly in a new year (good riddance 2020!), and with that comes a fresh start. Maybe you're ready for that too?

So I'm coming to your inbox with a monthly newsletter focusing on entrepreneurship, growth, marketing, and life.

If you're seeing this, you're part of a nascent audience that I've connected with through consulting, workshops, startup mentorship, and the LightSpire blog. I've grown communities for businesses as a startup founder and marketer before, and have helped others to do so through my mentoring and consulting work. But this is the first time I'm building an online audience for my own writing.

Now, I could have claimed that you were part of a massive online audience that I've built up over the years. I could have acted as if my blog has hundreds of thousands of readers and that this newsletter is well established. In short, I could have faked it. And maybe some would even have called that "good marketing."

But as the classic Harvard Business Review article Marketing is Everything tells us, "the job [of marketing] is neither to fool the customer, nor to falsify the company's image. It is to integrate the customer into the design of the product and to design a systematic process for interaction that will create substance in the relationship."

Contrary to guru internet wisdom guiding you to "always be crushing it," I don't think we have to fake it to make it. In fact, I think that "faking it" is a slippery slope that creates an unstable foundation for growth and could ruin your relationship with your audience.

So in this first newsletter about marketing, let's take a look at how we can build businesses and grow without all the bluster along the way.


The toxicity of "fake it 'til you make it"

With the hype surrounding startup culture in the last decade, I'm sure you've heard the "wisdom" of "fake it 'til you make it." This is the idea that in any project or business, you'll start off without a lot of things - an audience, resources, revenue, a team, maybe even a product. The all too common advice is that you should act as if you have some (or all) of these things in place so that customers, investors, and potential partners will take you seriously.

As the cachet of startup culture and the pressure on startups has increased, so too has the "fake it 'til you make it" attitude. It seems like the trend has grown exponentially in our age of constant information, influencers, vanity metrics, and vaporware.

But this "wisdom" is actually just bad advice with a dash of insecurity thrown in for good measure. It leads to everything from unnecessary bravado and outlandish claims to outright lies and fraud. There's a wide spectrum of "faking it" along the way, but none of it is ultimately helpful for a growing business.

Companies like WeWork have been decimated based on the shaky foundations of the "fake it 'til you make it" ethos, and hundreds of other examples have sprung up in the world of startups, venture capital, and guru-like founders.

I'm not interested in passing judgement on the decisions of each founder, but I am interested in why this ethos has become so prevalent.


Doing vs. Done

When we as humans look for inspiration, we often look to those who have accomplished great things in the past. We lionize those who have come before, especially if they have a great story to tell.

But one of the things we sometimes forget is that we are comparing their end states with our beginning state.

We may want to skip over the endless hours of finding our audience, running experiments, and constantly iterating, while battling self-doubt and wondering whether anything we're doing will ever work. We want to move on to the victory lap and the adulation of our peers.

But by faking progress, we are taking staged selfies at the summit of a green-screened mountain without the toil (and real growth) of actually climbing it.

Dinesh Rathod posted this photo of his "Everest Summit" to Facebook. It was later shown to be fake.


This is the mentality that leads to companies like Theranos, one of the most infamous examples of outright fraudulent "fake it 'til you make it" actions in recent history. Elizabeth Holmes and her team wanted so badly to have created a breakthrough blood testing technology that they stopped trying to actually create it. When you want nothing more than the accomplishment, the journey becomes irrelevant.

The ethical and legal implications here are clear. But beyond these, you are creating a business that lacks a strong foundation for true growth.


The House of Cards

People who buy social media followers eventually realize that they don't have a real audience to communicate with. Those who embellish to attract customers come up short when they need to deliver on their promises and get results. Startups that accept money based on outlandish claims will eventually need to face their investors and back up those claims. You'll be tested hundreds of times throughout your journey as a business, and if you've built your growth on a shaky foundation you could easily collapse when things get tough.

A facade of perfection also puts up a wall around you. It closes you off from help in the form of feedback, opportunities, and advice, and limits your ability to see your own weak points. It is only through self reflection, as an individual and a business, that you will grow.

True growth depends on finding and nurturing a community of customers, partners, and investors that share your vision and are willing to trust you with their hard earned dollars to make it a reality.

The partners that will stick with you through the ups and downs of your startup journey are those who want to hear the truth from the beginning. They are the investors who ask, "ok, but how are you doing?" and will really listen to the answer. They are the customers who try your product and are willing to give you feedback until it is great. For those people, sharing your journey is part of creating a real relationship.

Author Adam Grant puts it beautifully: "Projecting perfection protects your ego but shuts people out and stunts your growth. Revealing struggles shows humility and humanity, opening the door to new sources of support and strength."


So what do we do?

We need to move beyond "fake it 'til you make it" and instead embrace authentic communication and hard work.

This boils down to three main points:

1. We should be transparent about the past. Our progress and past experiences can't and shouldn't be changed. Be honest (with yourself and others) about past successes and failures and how you're currently learning from them.

2. In the present we should focus on doing the work, not boasting about "crushing it." Let results speak for themselves. If we strive every day to make our products and businesses better, we won't need inflated claims of progress - we'll have real progress.

3. We should dream big, and tell everyone about it. But we should also tell them about our plans to get to that future, where the obstacles are, and what we're doing to navigate them. Give your investors, partners, and customers the information they need to make their own decisions about your plans.

And if you're starting a new email newsletter, by all means tell people that they are part of something new and exciting. It's way cooler to get in at the beginning anyways.

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Thanks for joining me for this first thought exercise. I hope you'll stick with me as I continue to think through my experiences in startups and marketing, and how they can help others with similar paths to move forward.

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