Beyond the Growth Curve: Why Azumuta’s Founder Says Success Never Feels Like Success
“Actually, in the moment, I rarely feel like it’s working.” In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Azumuta founder Batist Leman delivered this surprisingly candid admission about the founder experience. His insight challenges the polished narratives we usually hear about startup success.
The Perpetual State of Not-Quite-There
“You’re always super busy. You’re doing deals, you’re doing hires, you’re handling all kinds of things,” Batist explained. “It’s always like there is a huge amount of work on your plate, and in the meantime, it’s also, you want to do go faster and faster.”
This constant forward momentum creates a peculiar blindness to progress. “In the moment, you never think that. It’s only when you stop and you think like, oh, two years back, and now we grew times ten, for example, and then you realize, okay, it is going fast, but we just don’t realize that you are so focused on doing the work.”
The Shifting Goalpost Effect
What makes this perspective particularly valuable is how it reframes seemingly major milestones. “With every decision like that, a really big decision,” Batist shared, “like, I know very well that when I was working as an employee, then becoming an independent and having my own business is like a huge step for me, but then afterwards, you are like, okay, that was not a big step at all.”
This pattern repeats at every stage: “That was a very small step, and I don’t know why I was ever afraid of doing that. And it continues to be like that. So then if you are starting your own company and you are, like, really hiring people that work for you instead of just doing things on your own, that’s a huge step as well… And afterwards, it’s like, wow, it was not huge at all.”
The Gradual Nature of Growth
Rather than dramatic breakthroughs, real progress often comes through consistent iteration. “It was never like the first 90 days,” Batist noted. “It was always something gradual for me. Like, you’re doing these projects, and then you are building these projects, and in the meanwhile, you’re also thinking about building a product and you’re experimenting with things.”
This iterative approach became fundamental to their success: “We really have a culture of doing things iteratively. We also listen very well to our customers. So we really started with Azumuta based on questions that we got from the market.”
Measuring Progress in Retrospect
The challenge isn’t just psychological – it has practical implications for how founders should think about measuring progress. When asked about when things started working, Batist revealed: “Yeah, that’s a good question. Actually, in the moment, I rarely feel like it’s working. So you’re always super busy… It’s only when you stop and you think like, oh, two years back, and now we grew times ten.”
This suggests that traditional metrics might not capture the day-to-day reality of building a company. Instead of focusing solely on current numbers, founders might benefit from periodic retrospectives that compare longer time periods.
The Universal Experience
This perspective resonates beyond Azumuta. As Batist noted, even the most successful companies face similar challenges: “I think every founder that I’ve talked to, even, like, the most successful founders with multi billion dollar companies, a lot of them have a similar view, that it never really feels like everything’s just running smooth and there’s no problems. Like, there’s always problems. The problems just evolve and change over time.”
Reframing Success
For founders navigating their own journeys, Batist’s insights suggest several key principles:
- The feeling of being overwhelmed might be a sign of progress, not failure
- Major milestones often feel smaller in hindsight
- Progress is usually gradual rather than dramatic
- The right metrics might be retrospective rather than real-time
- Problems don’t disappear – they evolve
Perhaps most importantly, this perspective suggests that the constant feeling of “not quite there yet” isn’t a bug in the founder experience – it’s a feature. It’s what keeps successful founders pushing forward, even when they’ve achieved what others might consider remarkable success.