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20 tips from founders on how to build a successful startup

20 tips from founders on how to build a successful startup

20 tips -article image
20 tips -article image
  • Smart advice for scaling — from those who’ve been there.
  • 01: Fundraising is really hard, so find ways to stay positive.
  • 02: Sell the bigger picture to get press coverage.
  • 03: Choose a co-founder for impact, not speed.
  • 04: Your network might be your exit plan.
  • 05: Get the credit you need before you need it.
  • 06: Support your customers by being human first.
  • 07: Get clear on why you’re hiring.
  • 08: Learn from founders who are ahead on their journey.
  • 09: Get help understanding your financial strategy.
  • 10: Balance new features with bug fixes.
  • 11: Be comfortable putting yourself out there.
  • 12: Remove the finance busywork from your plate.
  • 13: Hard work will bring you the right mentors.
  • 14: You can’t do it all — so don’t feel like you have to.
  • 15: Don’t be afraid to use your own playbook for recruiting.
  • 16: Go all in on the grand vision when pitching investors.
  • 17: Try gamification to create community and drive loyalty.
  • 18: Consider emerging channels in your growth strategy.
  • 19: Bring everyone into the trenches.
  • 20: Embrace AI but don’t force-fit it into your product.
  • Scale your startup with Brex.
  • Smart advice for scaling — from those who’ve been there.
  • 01: Fundraising is really hard, so find ways to stay positive.
  • 02: Sell the bigger picture to get press coverage.
  • 03: Choose a co-founder for impact, not speed.
  • 04: Your network might be your exit plan.
  • 05: Get the credit you need before you need it.
  • 06: Support your customers by being human first.
  • 07: Get clear on why you’re hiring.
  • 08: Learn from founders who are ahead on their journey.
  • 09: Get help understanding your financial strategy.
  • 10: Balance new features with bug fixes.
  • 11: Be comfortable putting yourself out there.
  • 12: Remove the finance busywork from your plate.
  • 13: Hard work will bring you the right mentors.
  • 14: You can’t do it all — so don’t feel like you have to.
  • 15: Don’t be afraid to use your own playbook for recruiting.
  • 16: Go all in on the grand vision when pitching investors.
  • 17: Try gamification to create community and drive loyalty.
  • 18: Consider emerging channels in your growth strategy.
  • 19: Bring everyone into the trenches.
  • 20: Embrace AI but don’t force-fit it into your product.
  • Scale your startup with Brex.

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Smart advice for scaling — from those who’ve been there.

The best founders are masters of both grit and strategy. While they wear pretty much every hat and push through countless setbacks to build their businesses, they also know that sustainable success means working smarter, not just harder. It's the 90/10 rule in action: achieving 90% of your goals with just 10% of the effort — if you know where to focus.

That's why we turned to the experts. As the financial partner to one in three venture-backed startups in the US, Brex has a unique view into founders' journeys. While we help simplify their financial operations with integrated card, banking, expense, and bill pay solutions, we see firsthand how they tackle challenges across every aspect of company building. So, we asked them to share their best advice for building a successful startup.

We've distilled their hard-won insights into 20 actionable tips covering everything from validating your concept and raising money to building your team and scaling operations. Their answers make it clear that every path is different, but some success patterns kept popping up:

  • Their current idea was almost never their first one — and that’s a good thing.
  • You’ll go further with a strong network of founders and mentors.
  • When in doubt, go back to first principles.

Ultimately, in today's world of AI innovation and global remote teams, building a sustainable company requires more than a big idea and hustle. The real key is knowing where to focus your time and energy. Whether you're just beginning to sketch out your idea or you're in the thick of building the company, read on to get real advice for startup success.

01: Fundraising is really hard, so find ways to stay positive.


“It’s hard to fundraise. You’re going to get a lot of no’s and only a few will say yes. Do your best to be resilient and remember to channel self-worth and confidence in your ability to execute and grow your company.”

20 tips_Madeline Fraser
20 tips_Madeline Fraser

02: Sell the bigger picture to get press coverage.


“If you’re trying to just sell your product or service, you may fall short. Instead, it's important to pitch a journalist that covers your beat and give them a story that’s interesting and that doesn’t feel like an advertisement. We’ve been in over 500 publications and it’s all been cold outreach. Again, if you give value to a journalist, you can get quite a bit of published content.”

Zach Schleien, VP Marketing & Head of Matchmaking, Spark Networks

03: Choose a co-founder for impact, not speed.

“My biggest mistake was thinking I needed co-founders without knowing exactly why. Now, I’m very clear about the unique value my current co-founders bring, and I respect them deeply. A co-founder should always add massive value to the business; if not, it’s better to keep going solo until the right person comes along.”

Fabiano Rocha, Jumpstart Finance

04: Your network might be your exit plan.

“The truth is, if I was in gifting until I was 90 years old, I would have been happy. But I had met one of the founders of the company that purchased my business five years earlier from being one of their customers — before I even had the idea for Send Ribbon. So my exit came through my organic network and building relationships with other founders and people in New York’s tech scene.”

Kelly Parker, Founder, Send Ribbon (acquired by UrbanStems)

05: Get the credit you need before you need it.


“Finding a financial partner who can scale with you is non-negotiable, especially when it comes to credit. The key is to secure credit before you need it, not when you’re scrambling for it. With Brex, I’ve never had to worry — they’ve scaled seamlessly with Hatchproof, giving us all the credit we need and then some.”

20 tips_Imran Syed (1)
20 tips_Imran Syed (1)

06: Support your customers by being human first.

“Many places say they can solve your finances through AI. Of course, we're using AI to help us grow and scale, but for a big life-changing question like, ‘Can I afford to buy this house?’ — you want to talk to a person you can trust and really build a relationship with. It all starts with being human.”

Sam Lewis, Founder and CEO, Fruitful

07: Get clear on why you’re hiring.

“For most roles, I look at whether hiring would mean leaving money on the table. For positions focused on risk prevention, I consider the potential issues we might face if something goes wrong.”

Fabiano Rocha, Jumpstart Finance

08: Learn from founders who are ahead on their journey.

“Surround yourself with founders who are one or two steps ahead of you because they can look around corners you might not have come to yet. I’ve learned through those conversations a lot about first principles thinking, and the core human-level problems we’re solving — not just the business problems. That helps put into context the problem that everyone in the world faces that your company can solve at scale. That’s how your idea becomes a $100 billion idea.”

Avante Price, CEO, Posh

09: Get help understanding your financial strategy.

“I believe all founders and CEOs have three core imperatives: managing finances — knowing when to raise, spend, or conserve capital; evolving product-market fit with your customers — because it’s never a final destination; and retaining your best people. Financial strategy is critical, and tools like Brex have completely reshaped how I approach it. It gives me the clarity I need without taking up the time I don’t have. It’s a true win.”

Imran Syed, Founder and CEO, Hatchproof

10: Balance new features with bug fixes.


“Find a healthy balance between new feature development and bug fixes. It’s natural to want to build all the new features on the roadmap but you also have to support the features you’ve built for your customers so far.”

20 tips_Thomas Mirmotahari
20 tips_Thomas Mirmotahari

11: Be comfortable putting yourself out there.

“You have to be comfortable with people criticizing you. One of the prerequisites for success in anything is doing things that are perhaps cringe or shameless. Posting content is one of those things, and the only way to get people to stop scrolling is to catch their attention. But I don’t ever want to become a caricature of who I am. I do find that what I authentically feel or think happens to resonate the most.”

Arjun Mahadevan, Founder and CEO, Doola

12: Remove the finance busywork from your plate.

“When you’re a YC company, there are some very well-trodden paths that you should follow to de-risk things. Brex is one of them. In my last business, I spent a non-trivial amount of time, probably 2 hours a week, just sorting and logging personal and business expenses, and that was a real pain. Now I spend less than 10 minutes doing it with Brex.”

Hunter Brooks, Co-Founder and CEO, Ellipsis

13: Hard work will bring you the right mentors.

“You can’t be afraid of failure; the key is to put yourself out there and meet people. You probably won’t find the perfect mentor right away, and you’ll need different kinds of mentors at each stage of your company. Make sure that whoever you decide to work with respects and supports you and your vision unconditionally.”

Madeline Fraser, Founder and CEO, Gemist

14: You can’t do it all — so don’t feel like you have to.

“Employees were using personal cards for expenses, travel, offsites, and stipends and then sending me emails requesting reimbursement. I asked myself, ‘why am I doing this every month?’ I didn't know a solution like Brex existed that would be this easy, yet still appropriate for small and growing teams.”

Jake Disraeli, Co-Founder and CEO, Treet

15: Don’t be afraid to use your own playbook for recruiting.


“We do everything from first principles, including recruiting. For instance, our head of tax was our first company-changing hire, but it broke all the common startup rules on what your first five employees should be. However, from a first principles perspective, hiring this person made a ton of sense for us and we threw out the playbook.”

20 tips_Andrew Rea
20 tips_Andrew Rea

16: Go all in on the grand vision when pitching investors.

“A big problem we faced early on in the fundraising process was vision. It was very hard to pitch something bigger than what the solution is today. Sometimes it can come across as exaggerating what it is. But that’s the entire thing you’re fundraising to do — to bring that idea to that next level. Good investors want to see that you have that vision and know where you’re going to take the company. So the big shift from Seed to Series A is expanding your mindset to turn your idea into something much bigger.”

Avante Price, CEO, Posh

17: Try gamification to create community and drive loyalty.

“The crux of gamification is: How do we take something and make it more fun, add a bit of urgency, and create a feedback loop? The more you can make your product feel part of someone’s identity, the better your retention, the more predictable the revenue, and the more business value you can create. You see it with airlines and hotels and their status programs. It empowers users to stay loyal to your product.”

Parth Detroja, Founder and CEO, PairAI

18: Consider emerging channels in your growth strategy.

“Social media is a really good way to litmus test the market, so I started creating content on TikTok initially to gauge whether there was real interest in our services. I would advise other founders interested in an organic growth strategy to get on TikTok first because discoverability is the easiest.”

Kathryn Cross, Founder, Anja Health

19: Bring everyone into the trenches.

“We have this internal principle at Public that every manager is also an individual contributor, so everyone needs to be deep in the work. It’s important to have people who love the craft and nerd out on the details because it’s easy to get distracted as you build and scale quickly — it happened to us. Now, we’ve gotten back to being obsessed with the work and the product itself, which is super important.”

Leif Abraham, Co-Founder and Co-CEO @ Public

20: Embrace AI but don’t force-fit it into your product.

“AI certainly can be hype-based. Sure, sometimes you have to lean into the hype for things like fundraising, but to build a long-term sustainable business you have to stay focused on your customers. So the guiding principle for us is to be consistently focused on solving specific problems for the end customer. It’s extremely important to avoid force-fitting AI in your product just to ride the AI wave because I’ve seen it cost even established businesses a lot of money.”

20 tips_Zoe Weil
20 tips_Zoe Weil

Scale your startup with Brex.

Thank you to these amazing founders for sharing these hard-won lessons so that others can learn and accelerate their own success! We hope these insights can help founders grow their networks, improve financial efficiency, and build their businesses faster.

Ready to put these insights into action? Try connecting with founders who are 12-18 months ahead of you on their journey to get fresh perspectives, and experiment with TikTok or gamification to drive engagement. And don’t forget to build your financial foundation early with solutions that scale alongside your ambitions.

The right financial infrastructure can accelerate a founder's vision and startup growth strategy. As the leading financial stack for startups, Brex helps you make every dollar count with solutions to increase your spending power, extend your runway, secure your capital, and automate important financial processes. Sign up for Brex today and get:

The best part — Brex’s financial platform grows with you, so you can start with the solutions you need now and add additional capabilities as you scale.

As Gemist founder and CEO Madeline Fraser reminds us, "Everything is going to be OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end.” So keep building, and let Brex shoulder the financial workload.

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