How To Identify and Respond To Your Startup’s Haters

You need to understand them, but you don’t owe them anything

Joe Procopio
6 min readNov 6, 2023

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When you take big swings, some people are going to push back. Sometimes they’re right. Most of the time they’re wrong. Occasionally they’re idiots.

To level-set that premise with a simple real-world example, I want to start by globally responding to some of the pushback I’ve received for a post I wrote calling the startup ecosystem broken without providing the (required) proof as to why the startup ecosystem is broken.

And please note, this is not about me or my writing. I already hate myself for this response post, especially for those snarky parentheses in the last paragraph.

Those are just there to poke the haters.

Anyway, I went back to that post and re-read it a couple times, looking for where I went wrong. And I confirmed that, no, I wrote exactly what I set out to write. So I read it one more time. Then it hit me.

The problem wasn’t in the post, it was the expectations of the reader.

Is that my fault? Yeah, probably. Do I regret it?

No.

The thing is, I have provided a multitude of reasons as to why I believe the startup ecosystem is broken. I’ve…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com