Bethany Koby and her husband Daniel Hirschmann founded Tech Will Save Us in 2012 after toy shopping for their young son left them feeling frustrated.

The company, which makes DIY electronic kits for children aged from four up to 11+, started small: around the founders’ kitchen table — it now operates in 97 countries.

Over the years, Koby says she’s received plenty of advice — some good and other less so.

“The best piece of advice I was given was that being an entrepreneur is a journey and not a destination. Also, no matter how big your business gets, you should know and care about everyone on your team — personally and professionally,” she says.

Conversely, the worst piece of advice she ever received was someone telling her that if you build it, they will come — it’s simply not true. “You need to help them find it,” Koby says knowingly.

Launching a product — what you need to know

Launching a new product is always hard. Businesses need to ensure there’s hunger for such a product, and if there isn’t, they must create it — and when you’re producing something for children, you need to create buy-in from their parents.

“All products need to solve a need, so find out what need you are solving for parents and keep discovering all the nuances in this need,” Koby says.

Communication is also key. “Be sure to communicate in a way that parents understand and that resonates with them — don’t assume they know what your product does and how. Explain, explain, and explain again,” she notes.

Content, although often underestimated, also plays a vital role:

“Parents are often looking for information or guidance and this is a key driver of purchasing. We have built a large and passionate community by engaging with parents in an accessible, informative, and playful way.”

Running a business isn’t easy — the learning curves

As is the case with every single business, both new and old, a founder’s entrepreneurial journey is filled with learning curves — some more steep than others.

Koby says she’s made huge mistakes in hiring and firing. In hindsight, she would have hired people with more senior and with more transferable, similar experience much sooner.

Getting the culture right hasn’t been easy either. “Culture is a mirror of its founders and values evolve over time — they are not static,” she adds.

Her biggest piece of advice in this sense is for founders to keep “iterating, revising, and keeping culture alive and representative of the behaviors and values the business needs.”

Culture, she adds, is the thing that will be there in the darkest days and in the biggest wins.

It’d be foolish to think that every business CEO should behave in the same way.

“Being a CEO is different for every business and every founder,” Koby highlights.

“There is no single job description but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a job description and clear responsibilities,” she says, adding “It was important for me to write out my job and responsibilities as well as what I didn’t want to do or wasn’t good at to build the right team around me.”

Being a small fish in a big pond — and working with sharks

Over the years, Tech Will Save Us has collaborated with several industry heavyweights, namely Google, Disney, and the BBC.

Reaching out to such huge corporations can be intimidating to say the least but Koby says it’s important to know what your business is great at and lean into this area in a partnership.

“When we worked with the BBC, we represented the young person (a child). We are great at user centered product development and this was the key skill and experience we brought to this partnership,” she explains.

“I would advise people not to work for free or sacrifice your business in the hope of the partnership ‘working’ and be upfront in quantifying what you need in order to reach a partnership,” Koby adds.

Try to find strategic alignment quickly. Ask yourself what you and this partner can do that you couldn’t do separately and why you can do it better together — only then, can you expect to form a meaningful and viable business partnership.

‘I don’t know’ is the best phrase for your career

I used to do sales, and I found three words very helpful: “I don’t know.”

The internet is full of articles for salespeople offering alternatives to saying those three words, all with elaborate ways to avoid admitting ignorance. And I get it: telling someone you don’t know something is hard, especially when you’re trying to convince that person to give you money.

But that’s why saying “I don’t know” is so powerful. In a world full of BS, the best way to stand out is to resemble an actual human being. Admitting you don’t know something is the most human thing you can do.

You don’t know everything — which makes sense

I used to build WordPress websites for local businesses in Boulder, Colorado, and I never impressed potential clients more than the times I admitted I didn’t know the answer to a question. It caught people off guard, in the best way, because they were so used to people pretending or weaseling their way out of corners.

“I don’t know,” I’d tell people. “Let’s see if we can figure it out together.”

And then we would. If I wasn’t sure what a setting did, I’d experiment as the customer watched. If it was something that would require more research, I’d commit to figuring it out. But first, and always, I’d admit that I didn’t know.

I built multiple relationships using the words “I don’t know” because people knew I wasn’t trying to hide anything. There’s trust in that. And you know what? The clients this impressed were by far the best people to work with. They were, on the whole, more curious, kind, and generally just the sort of people you want to work with on a project.

Our culture values confidence — it should value competence

I should clarify: I’m not saying you should be proud of your ignorance. Far from it. I’m saying that, when you don’t know something, you should admit it. You can’t learn something if you think you already know it.

This is a hard thing to realize. If recent history has taught me anything, it’s that American culture values confidence more than competence. Being loudly incorrect gets you on TV more often than being quietly curious, and it sadly seems like a quick path to success in business. There’s every incentive to pretend you know everything, and doing so can easily become reflexive.

Unfortunately, respecting the “I don’t know” isn’t universal. I asked my Zapier coworkers, and many of them told me that, in previous roles, they’d been punished professionally for admitting they didn’t know something. That’s a shame. Those companies missed out on the best possible version of my coworkers — the version that admits they don’t know something and tries to learn.

Just admit you don’t know

None of this is to say that admitting you don’t know something is easy. It isn’t. My Zapier colleague Breetel Graves recently wrote a Friday update on our internal blog that I can’t stop thinking about. She outlined her internal monologue in the lead-up to asking a question:

This is so human it hurts. I do the same thing: I wonder if admitting I don’t know something will result in some sort of catastrophe.

But you know what? It hasn’t, at least for me — and it shouldn’t for anyone.

This article by Justin Pot was originally published on the Zapier blog and is republished here with permission. You can read the original article here .

4 tips to survive your startup’s awkward adolescence

Growing a business sometimes feels like raising a child. In the beginning, you have a lot of busy, exciting days and more than a few sleepless nights. But eventually, your creation takes on a life of its own.

As your team expands, you must welcome new influences and personalities. And as exciting as it is to see such growth, you worry about losing the magic of those early days. Will you hold onto your ideals? Will your team maintain the kind of trust that fuels collaboration? Will your company’s true potential be realized?

At Contentstack, we are entering a period of rapid growth fueled by our recent Series A funding , and we know that retaining the culture that got us here is paramount to our continued success. But we also know that change is a natural and necessary part of scaling a company.

By reflecting on past ventures, keenly observing our own development, and analyzing relevant research, my team and I ha ve identified some important strategies to grow and evolve a company while maintaining the culture upon which it was built.

1. Give everyone a seat at the table

Contentstack may have been created when the other founders and myself spun it out of our previous venture, Built.io, but the organization would not be what it is today without the contributions of our team.

When we asked employees what they loved about working at Contentstack, one of the most common responses was that each team member felt they had a voice in the organization.

Giving every employee a seat at the table to offer their ideas and constructive criticism builds trust, employee satisfaction, and ultimately retention . This helps ensure that the people who helped create your company culture will stick around and help maintain it.

Giving everyone a voice also helps integrate new employees and bring important ideas and observations to the surface. As we hire new team members, we want them to know that they never need to apologize for trying to make Contentstack better.

New team members can offer fresh perspectives and novel solutions. If our team doesn’t feel like they can speak up, we will miss out on brilliant ideas, easy fixes, and warning signs that can prevent bigger problems.

2. Empower people to do the best work of their career

Along with making people feel heard, one of the most important steps we take to keep great talent and maintain a culture of innovation and growth is to empower Contentstack employees to do the best work of their career.

In the tech sector specifically, it’s not uncommon for passionate, ambitious people to move on when another company or project offers a greater level of opportunity and excitement. We prevent this by ensuring that employees don’t need to look elsewhere in order to experiment and innovate.

In discussing and defining our company culture, team members noted that we have a “bias for action.” Of course, a bias for action doesn’t mean jumping the gun or running with a new direction as soon as we think of it. It means that, when facing the choice between taking action on an issue or opportunity or sitting back and watching, we choose to act.

This proactive approach, however, goes hand-in-hand with giving people the freedom and security to fail . Not every experiment will work, but when an action doesn’t have the effect we anticipated, we focus on what we learned, not what we lost.

When people know that experimentation is valued, whether or not it’s successful, they are willing to take the calculated risks that lead to major breakthroughs.

3. Look for a culture add , not a culture fit

Many growing companies consider culture fit to be an important factor in hiring. But as we expand our team, we are rethinking this idea. We don’t just want people who fit in and keep us comfortable.

We want people who bring new viewpoints and experiences. We want people who will push the company further toward our goal of leading a new field of content experience platforms. In fact, research shows that more diverse staff leads to better performance.

“Nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter,” write David Rock and Heidi Grant in the Harvard Business Review . “Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.”

That being said, we still want to hire candidates that share our work ethic and values. We look for people who possess core qualities like grit and determination, but we must keep in mind that those qualities come in different forms and from different walks of life.

Identifying and hiring for key traits like this is what allows us to expand and diversify our team while preserving our shared identity.

4. Put your values in writing

Just as writing down your goals makes you more likely to achieve them , solidifying and documenting your company’s core values makes you more likely to maintain them. You can’t preserve and grow your company culture if you haven’t taken the time to identify the qualities that make it unique and successful.

That’s why we gathered our leadership team to discuss and draft our core values. We then presented them to our employees to get their feedback and input. Cementing our company identity is necessary not only to preserve who we are now, but also to ensure we become the business we want to be in the future.

Rapid growth is a delicate endeavor for any company. No one wants to lose the excitement and collaboration that helped you get there, but a new stage of growth comes with new challenges that require adaptation.

We will continue to experiment and learn, but we’re confident that these ideas will help us thrive as we progress in our mission to revolutionize the content experience.