How I failed my first startup

Offone — the world’s first wisephone

I think there is no startup that succeeded from the original, first idea. The initial concept is often pivoted, but most of the startups fail. I’ve read somewhere that only 3–5% of startups survive the first year! Those are really bad stats, nevertheless a lot of us dive head first into this adventure.

I was sucked into this world simply by accident and immediately I was hooked.

This is the story about how I failed my first startup. It was a volatile mixture of good idea, ambition, on one side, and ignorance, poor team member choice, lack of motivation and money on the other.

It all began in 2016. When the sketch in my ideabook started making sense. I was waiting for my friend in the coffee shop, who was late btw, with my smartphone battery almost dead. I’ve decided not to touch the phone in case he calls and just look around.

I felt odd to stare around and do nothing. Since when is it weird to just look around in a coffee shop? Have you ever tried that? I dare you. Leave the phone in a pocket and just do nothing. How long will you endure? Getting anxious ha?

I looked around and almost everybody was staring at their phone. The highlight of my experience was a group of four, sitting together, not talking, just mindlessly scrolling the infinite scroll of doom.

I started to think, what if people decide that they will leave their smartphone at home and meet their friends or family and actually enjoy talking to them? “But they will need the phone to meet each other” you may ask. Yes, I was thinking about it too. So why not they bring a dumb phone with them and eliminate the apps? Well those dumb phones are ugly as fuck in my opinion, and people love to show of their fancy iPhones and Galaxies.

I’ve got an idea, I will use my old sketches of a phone and try to turn them into a premium calling and texting phone with an E-ink paperwhite display and 10+ days battery. Instead of calling it a dumb phone, why not create a new niche and create a movement? A wisephone segment

Offone was born (with the working title at the time — OPhone).

Why E-ink paperwhite display? Because for calling and texting activities you don’t need an OLED display. Black and white will suffice. Another unique feature in Offone was the symbol based user interface (UI). You don’t need to know any language to navigate the menu. Only when finding somebody in the contacts, or writing an SMS, you use letters.

To test the idea I’ve decided to pretend that the phone is already existing and in use and publish it somewhere. I developed a virtual 3D model and asked a friend to 3D print it so I can feel it in my hand.

When the 3D printed model was finished and I saw it, I got butterflies in my belly. I knew I was onto something. Listen to that feeling.

I called my best friend Krsto to take some professional photographs and after a little bit of Photoshop magic we had our phone in the wild.

We decided to go big and ask dezeen.com to publish the idea. Their answer: “Send everything you got, we are going to publish it”. Fuck!. We wrote a crappy text with faked photos and hoped for the best.

In a couple of days word got out and other websites started to share the news (some of them here & here). It was crazy.

In the next two weeks I got in total 9K+ emails, comments, DMs and phone calls.

Didn’t expect that.

Idea validated! People liked the concept of a premium wisephone.

What now? I am an architect and I don’t know a shit about product development, hardware, phones and startups. I was completely confused.

After initial fear, I consolidated my mind and started thinking how to make it happen. I googled the most prominent people in the startup world in Balkan region (I was living there at the time) and asked literally all of them for help. Only one person refused. All of them were willing to help. This was a shock for me because in architecture people don’t like to help others a lot.

After all that help, I was even more confused. Too much information! I didn’t know where to begin but I knew that I needed more people in the team. At the time, I didn’t have programmers or IT guys among friends, so I relied on recommendations without checking them. That is a big No No if you want to start something based on a good foundation.

I found one guy who was recommended to me, and he found another one, his friend. Three of us started working on the development. I was bootstrapping the whole process and drained a lot of my cash and the development was slow and painful. We struggled for months to make a working prototype. Time was passing and we were still at the first step.

All of us had our day jobs but as the time went on, it was clear that I am the only one pushing it hard. Both of them were in long relationships and ready to commit to starting a family. They were in their comfort zone with their big salaries and for them it was enough. Why bother to change the world.

Be careful when you pick your co-founders and teammates. Your vision has to align. Otherwise you are doomed.

Eventually we fell apart and I was left alone with nothing. No prototype, no investment. I was desperate and I was looking for help all over the place. Eventually a hardware company approached me and asked if they could join. They were more than welcome, but for them, this was just a side experiment, not full time commitment.

At about the same time, an investor from the USA contacted us for the investment. Finally a relief. The meeting went well and they asked for the prototype which we didn’t have at the time. I lied that we were testing them to buy us some time and press on my new co-founders to make at least something.

We improvised, we 3d printed the casing, we had an E-ink display and we scraped the inside of the phone from other dumbphones. We shipped one to the USA but we didn’t realize that European and USA networks were different so the prototype wasn’t working.

The clients weren’t pleased but we managed to fix the issue and send another prototype. Spoiler alert: This one wasn’t working as well. The display was fucked up. The investors were fed up and they dumped us. And with a good reason. We can’t even make the prototype work.

This was happening at the same time when I moved to Berlin, Germany. I decided to kill the idea. It was almost three years of developing nothing except the bills. I failed gloriously but learned a lot. I learned a lot on how not to do certain things.

How not to choose a team, how not to spend a lot of money, how to manage stress.

Since then I have been actively involved in the startup scene. I grew my network and my experience. I am working on my second startup and I am helping others validate their business ideas and concepts.

In conclusion: Offone evolved a lot from the initial concept. We cut off all unnecessary parts and streamlined the design. We were thinking of removing all physical ports, charging it wirelessly, and using bluetooth for calls, to make the battery even more durable and the phone more usable.

Maybe the timing wasn’t right…

What could be added now in 2022?

In the era of cryptocurrencies madness and crypto startups growing like mushrooms, what if a cold storage hardware wallet, developed for storing your crypto riches, can have calling and texting functions? Currently all those hardware wallets spend 97% of the time collecting the dust, and only 3% of the time, they are being used. It can be with you all the time and it is offline.

This could be a good idea…

Thanks for reading this far.

In the end, please give me feedback on Twitter. What do you want more or less of? Any suggestions? Please let me know. I encourage you to help me and share your thoughts so I can streamline the process and learn more from you.

Until next time brainstormers.

Marko