No Job, No Money, and a Big Problem
Part 1 of a many-part series.
I’ve only ever told a few people the truth about how Steadfast got started. Here’s what happened.
In December 2014 I went into a late Friday afternoon meeting with the co-founders of Sciencescape (now known as Meta). I was expecting to talk about the raise and promotion that I’d previously discussed with one of the co-founders. Instead, I got fired.
I joined Sciencescape before I graduated university, it was the only real job I’d ever had. Myself and a couple other people from the team would often go down for a beer on Friday afternoon (including the CEO), so it came as a bit of a surprise to me when I walked out of that bar without a job.
I got very drunk that weekend.
At Sciencescape users were confused and annoyed by recent feature launches and in some cases were unable to use the product.
I thought that if we would have spent more time talking to and sharing ideas with our users we would have launched something our users actually wanted (or at least didn’t hate).
The problem is that its kind of a pain to talk to users. Sure you learn a lot, but you have to email them to find a time to talk, get on the phone, take some notes, analyze the notes, come up with recommendations and then share them with the team. Rather than go through that hassle, many product teams don’t talk to users at all.
For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about this problem.
I reached out to Kyle, a friend of mine and software engineer (really good at engineering the softwares) to see what he thought. He was a lot more receptive to working with me on fixing the ‘how to make talking to users easy’ problem than I thought he would be.
Turns out developers really hate building things that customers don’t actually want. Especially when managers make them stay late to hit ambitious deadlines for those useless things.
Boom. We have a team. (2 is technically a team, right? right???)
When I got fired, I didn’t know how to get a job. As far as I knew, I didn’t have any marketable skills, and I didn’t get much credibility in the eyes of potential employers for being the “go figure it out” person at a small startup.
It was a bit of a perfect storm. No job prospects + an idea I couldn’t shake = … let’s give this startup a shot.
So this is the genesis of Steadfast. The idea of getting product teams talking to users and a great co-founder was the fuel. Getting fired was, well… the fire?
At this point I have roughly a thousand dollars to my name (with rent due soon). I had no job, no money, and a big problem I couldn’t ignore.
I thought that since I joined a startup very early on I had a good idea of what starting a startup would be like and how hard it would be. I was naive.
It may be that every new founder, by definition, is naive about how hard a startup is, how much work is involved, how much you’re going to cry along the way. But if I knew how hard this was going to be I’m not sure I would have started in the first place.
This has been harder than I could have imagined, but its also been an incredibly fulfilling journey. I’ve made so many mistakes along the way. Somehow we’re not dead yet. It shows you how determined (read: stubborn) I am to figure this out, but also how much support we’ve recieved from friends and loved ones.
We wouldn’t be telling this story without you :)
Coming up: Part 2 — Losing a home and the value of a dollar.
