Making momentum when there is none
The hardest week at a startup isn’t when everything is going wrong. It’s when nothing is going at all.
No signups. No responses to your cold emails. Your Slack is quiet. You refresh your analytics dashboard and the numbers look exactly like they did yesterday. You know you’re building something real — you’ve seen the problem up close, you’ve talked to people who have it — but the world doesn’t seem to care yet.
This is the wall most startups hit and most don’t get past. Not because the idea was bad, but because founders interpreted stillness as a verdict.
It isn’t.
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When we started Remittance Go, we had a clear picture of the problem. Companies getting slowly robbed of time. Not robbed dramatically – no one in a mask, just the slow drain of repetitive tasks. An Allied Health company might lose 8 hours a week. Every week. For years.
The problem was obvious. The solution was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was how to get anyone to trust us with their money when we had no track record, no brand, and no momentum.
We have users in the single digits. I don’t mean single-digit thousands. I mean single digits.
This is a normal place to be. It just doesn’t feel normal, because we’re supposed to be more successful by now, right?
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There’s a specific psychological trap that kills companies in this phase. You start treating momentum as a precondition rather than a product.
“Once we have more users, we’ll have social proof, and then we’ll get more users.” “Once we raise a round, we’ll have credibility.” “Once we get a press mention, people will take us seriously.”
These things aren’t false exactly. Social proof does help. But thinking this way makes you passive. You start waiting for momentum to appear from the outside, as though it’s weather.
Momentum isn’t weather. It’s something you manufacture.
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The way you manufacture it is almost embarrassingly simple: you do things that feel too small to matter.
You email ten people personally, not through a bulk tool. You write a stupid letter. You go to events in the hopes you get one customer. You are the smallest fish.
None of these things scale. That’s exactly why they work at the start.
In a world with no momentum, small actions compound faster than you think. One user who trusts you tells a colleague. The forum post gets indexed and a stranger finds it three months later searching for the same question. The user whose bug you fixed leaves a review.
You can’t see the compounding while it’s happening. You can only see it in retrospect, and only if you kept doing the small things long enough.
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The other thing that kills companies in the still period is the pivot reflex.
When nothing is happening, it’s tempting to conclude that the problem is the idea. So you change the idea. New market. Different angle. Adjacent product. The thinking is: if this were the right thing, it would be working.
But traction at the very beginning is a function of effort and trust, not just fit. Most ideas that eventually worked looked identical to ideas that failed, at month two. The difference usually wasn’t the idea. It was whether someone kept doing the uncomfortable, unscalable things long enough for compounding to kick in.
I’m not saying never pivot. Some ideas really are wrong. But before you conclude the idea is wrong, be honest about whether you’ve genuinely exhausted the manual approach. Did you talk to fifty potential users, individually, and get fifty no’s? Or did you try an automated outreach tool and wonder why it didn’t work 12 days later.
Those are not the same thing.
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There’s a phrase people use: “do things that don’t scale.” It gets quoted a lot, usually by people who treat it as a cute historical footnote about how Airbnb photographed apartments. But it’s not a historical footnote. It’s a description of the only available strategy when you have no leverage.
Leverage comes later. At the start, all you have is direct action — person to person, problem to solution, friction to resolution.
For us, that meant standing in person where our users were. It meant working on Christmas. It meant going upto random bookkeepers. It felt inefficient. It was inefficient. But, it’s kind of working.
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There’s a version of this post that ends with a tidy formula. Do X, then Y, then Z, and you’ll manufacture momentum. I don’t think that’s honest.
What I can tell you is the shape of it. You find one person with the problem. You solve it so well that they trust you. You ask them who else they know. You repeat until the repetitions start happening without you.
That’s it. It’s not mysterious, but it requires a tolerance for the period where it’s working and you can’t tell yet.
The founders who make it through the still period aren’t the ones who found a trick. They’re the ones who decided that the absence of visible progress wasn’t evidence of failure. They kept doing small, direct, human things while everyone else was waiting for momentum to arrive.
Momentum doesn’t arrive. You build it, slowly, until one day it builds you.
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Rhys
Remittancego.com
