By Chris Heivly, Managing Director at Build The Fort and Startup Community EIR @ Techstars

One of the easiest traps in startup community building is paying the most attention to the startups that already look like success stories. But don’t forget to build the top of the funnel.

You know the ones. They’ve raised a real round. They’ve got a polished founder. The deck is tight. The numbers are starting to show. Journalists want to talk to them. Sponsors want to stand next to them. Community leaders want to point at them and say, “See? It’s working.”

And to be fair, those companies matter. Startups moving from Series A to B, and onward toward IPO or acquisition, are incredibly important. They create jobs, attract capital, inspire the next wave of founders, and give a region some much-needed swagger.

But here’s the problem: if all your energy goes to the shiny middle and later stages, you eventually run out of startups to celebrate.

A healthy startup community is not built on a few visible winners. It is built on a continuous funnel.

That funnel starts way earlier than most people want to admit. It starts with the messy idea stage. It starts with the first-time founder who is not “investor ready,” not media trained, not fully confident, and maybe not even sure whether the problem they are solving is real. It starts with the awkward, unclear, frustrating stretch between idea and product-market fit.

Without any doubt, that is the hardest part of the whole journey.

The leap from idea to PMF is the biggest chokepoint in the funnel. This is where most startups stall out. This is where founders burn time, money, and emotional energy. This is where they need the most support and usually get the least, because they are still rough around the edges. They are harder to identify, harder to promote, and harder to package into a nice community success story.

But if your community does not help enough founders get through that stage, then your later-stage pipeline dries up. You cannot have a sustainable ecosystem if you only celebrate maturity and ignore formation.

That is where community leadership really matters.

Good community leadership means supporting founders across the full arc. It means understanding that different stages need different kinds of help. Early-stage founders need encouragement, customer discovery support, peer networks, mentors who will tell them the truth, and safe places to test half-baked ideas. Growth-stage founders need capital access, executive talent, expansion support, and national visibility. Later-stage companies need ways to stay connected so they can recycle talent, capital, and experience back into the ecosystem.

That last part matters a lot. The goal is not just to produce one successful company. The goal is to create a system where today’s founder becomes tomorrow’s angel investor, mentor, board member, or second-time entrepreneur.

That only happens when the funnel is continuous.

So yes, celebrate the companies on the road to acquisition or IPO. Tell those stories. Put them on stage. Let them become proof points.

But do not forget the founder with a rough idea, a clunky prototype, and more questions than answers.

That founder may not look like the future of your ecosystem yet.

But they are.

And if your community leadership is serious about long-term sustainability, that is exactly where you need to show up.

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