680: (Solo) The Thing Nobody Tells You About Building a Business Alone

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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Welcome back to another episode of the Foundr to Foundr Solo Podcast episodes. This is where I go deep on a topic, sharing everything I've learnt from building Foundr for the past 13 years. So today I wanna talk about something that doesn't come up much in business content. And I don't wanna be a downer when I talk about this guys, but this is part of the problem. Because when you're experiencing it, the silence around it really makes you think that something's wrong with you. Because here's the thing, right guys, running a business is lonely and usually not in the way that people expect.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (1:48)
So I've interviewed over 700 founders on this show now. Over 100 of them are billionaires. People running companies with hundreds or thousands or tens of employees, back-to-back calls all day, high energy, surrounded by people that need you.
When I asked them privately off the mic, after recording stops, so many described the same thing, especially solo founders. If you're a solo founder, you don't have a co-founder. It's this feeling of how lonely this journey is and how completely isolated you can be, in a way that's hard to even put into words. And when it comes to the loneliness, I'm talking about not being physically alone. It's about carrying that weight that you can't put down and you just can't hand it to anyone else. Like how scary is it for those of you listening, where every single founder has been through this, where you're just like, I don't even know if I'm going to make payroll. And it's just this massive like, oh my God, like what am I going to do? And I want to be honest with you guys today because I've felt it more than once in my journey. And I wish someone told me earlier that this is completely normal. And unfortunately, it's a rite of passage. Like when it comes to building a successful business or any business in general, as a founder, the highs are high and the lows are low. And there was a period, I've never talked about this really publicly before, where the founder almost broke me. We're spending a million dollars a month on Facebook ads and our returns were strong. We were scaling up B-time, COVID, education. It was really rocking and everything was working. And then almost like overnight, our return on ad spend just dropped. And we lost, ended up losing like half a million dollars in a single month. And I didn't even know what to do. Like I remember literally crying. I was so lost. And I was sitting there thinking, like how the hell am I going to get out of this?
Like I felt like I was at rock bottom and I was in the bottom of this well, all darkness, no light above you. And it's hard to talk about these things publicly, right? And the loneliest moment wasn't the loss itself. It was walking into the office the next morning, getting on calls, showing up for the team. Because as a leader, they're looking to you to be the steady one. Like they need you to be grounded and clear. And unfortunately, I had no one to share this journey with. And I had to be that person that privately, I was carrying something that felt like it might end.
And I was able to get through it. And I want to talk to you how I've been able to get through these kinds of things. But let's dive into this gap. So a Harvard Business Review study found that 50% of CEOs report feeling lonely in their role. And one in three founders that have no one to talk to about the hardest parts of the job. And researchers have found that entrepreneurs are five and five and a half times likely to experience loneliness than the general population. And these numbers really stayed with me, right? Like honestly, I think the real number is probably higher. Founders who are struggling the most are usually the ones that are the last to say anything because admitting it feels like a weakness. And if there's one thing that founders are trained to do, it's not to show weakness. It's everything has to look perfect on social media. Everything has to look amazing. You're like worried about what other people think. And you've got that fear of judgment. I never forget when I interviewed Scooter Braun, he once said to me like, on the outside, it can look like you're absolutely killing it. And then, you know, from the inside and what really is going on, people would just have no idea whatsoever how much you're struggling. And I've spoken to a lot of founders and it's not obvious, right? But when things get difficult, you can't walk into a team meeting and say, hey, I'm not sure our strategy is working or I'm worried about cash. Because you don't want to scare people, right? I'm not sure we can make payroll in three months. You can't do that. And people are counting on you to lead, so you carry it all alone. And I remember sitting on a decision to do a restructure.