One of the key things I learned early on while developing Comus was something I really wasn’t expecting to learn. In fact, it’s something you’d never assume going in.
We assumed that everyone we worked with would broadly share our vision, or at least understand what we were trying to build.
What we actually found was that quite a few people weren’t particularly keen on the idea at all. Some were indifferent, some unsupportive, and a few were actively trying to sabotage it.
That came as a real shock.
Saboatarge and war games
I won’t go into details, and I won’t name names. But it’s safe to say that someone we believed was on our side turned out to be doing the opposite, trying to drive us apart and derail the entire project. To this day, we don’t even know why.
It took us a while to even accept that this might be happening. At first, we weren’t sure. Things just kept going wrong in ways we couldn’t quite explain
Eventually, the pattern became clear.
The biggest lesson from all of this is a blunt one: don’t trust anyone by default, because they won’t tell you what they are doing.
Keep your vision, dont give up
You have to believe in what you’re doing. Keep your team tight. Keep your circle of allies small. Move fast and break things. Don’t get distracted by other people’s opinions, and don’t give in to their lack of vision, or their jealousy when you’re building something they wish they had the courage to start themselves.
You have to stay true to your vision, knuckle down, work hard, solve the problems in front of you, and push through to the end. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere.
What surprised me most was how many people simply don’t want you to succeed. From an entrepreneurial point of view, I naïvely assumed that people who talk about innovation and startups would naturally support others trying to create something.
In reality, it’s incredibly hard to find people who genuinely believe in your idea. Most brush it off, assume it won’t amount to anything, or quietly hope it fails. I’m not sure whether that says more about them or about us.
Neither myself or Alex had experienced anything like this before, but Comus was not like any business we had been involved in before: it is huge in scope and vision with a massive potential to make money, and frankly, is the kind of product most would expect to come out of some massive Silicon Valley corporate, not two English upstarts.
We assumed people would support that vision, and on the whole, we were wrong.
So the real takeaway is this: focus on what you’re doing. Focus on your team and the project. Cut out the noise. And if things keep going wrong in ways you can’t explain, don’t dismiss the possibility that the unthinkable is happening, that someone may be actively working against you.
It happened to us. It could happen to anyone.
