Five years ago I made my first startup. By that time, startup business is booming all around the world, including Indonesia. The concept of startup is pretty simple : instead of working for somebody else, you create your own company. Technology made it possible for us to connect and interact with everyone on earth, and because of that, the geographic limitation of building business was dissolved. The idea of making money by selling something to the entire world suddenly not that hard. At least it seems not that hard.
in 2009, almost half of my friends have their own startup. Most of them create a technology startup — focusing on small application they could create by themselves and sell it into the global market. The App Store and the Google Play make it possible to do that. While most of them doing that, I was thinking that if that many people create startup in order to be different, then they’re actually create mainstream business. Besides, I don’t really like doing things with many people. So I choose to make a rather weird startup : stratup focusing on corporate software.
I create a name for the startup : Creatio . The name was adapted from the concept of Creatio Ex Nihilo because I believe that’s what we’re doing : creating something out of nothing.
By the time I’m doing it, there’s a lot of giant companies already ruled the market in Indonesia. I was actually afraid of not success because I was head-to-head with those giants. But like any other twenty-something, I was naive that I could beat them because I believe I know how to make a better software. Too naïve.
I built a dreamlike startup : A great office in breezy-part of my town, 3 swimming pools provided for the team, a fitness center, complete mini-bar, their own choice of chair and keyboard, laptop of their choice, and a super flexible work time. I hand picked 12 people to build a team and started to promote our services in our town. And as a beginner’s luck, we got a pretty big client : the country’s biggest transportation services at that time.
In the first 6 months, everything went well. We managed to get some progress, and we did get some several clients at that time. That’s when the lessons of startup begin. You see, there’s a fine line between reading an article about startups and actually understand and doing it. One of the essential things about startups is that you have the ability to get dirty in the process of building your startup. And at that time, I can’t because I don’t have the necessary knowledge of how a software and website works. I just count on my team. The inability to understand how things works (technically) makes me unable to help my own team atthose hard-time. Looking at the past, I realized that I’m such a shitty leader for my team.
On the other side, we just keep getting clients, which is bad because we managed to maximize our sales but hardly make real progress in the project itself.
That, is the first lesson of startup : don’t do startup unless you could get your hands-dirty
After 1.5 years, we were forced to close our startup because we’re running out of capital. Before it was closed, I asked each of my team members whether they would help me finish all of those projects before closing our company — even if that means not getting any payment— and they said yes they would. In reality, only three of them helps me finished the unfinished projects. Two of them would later leave in a middle of a project, leaving me with one mate. And this one mate isn’t actually a full-timer. He’s just a freelancer.
In fact, the freelancer didn’t actually have any experience over IT project. He did have a good skill of IT as a hobby, but never done any project before. But by that time I realize that building a startup isn’t entirely about technical and business things. It’s about faith and loyalty.
The second lessons is : It’s better to have loyal and faithful partner(s) who eager to learn, than to have a super-smart partner who doesn’t want to learn.
The fall of Creatio left me devastated. I need a span of time just to recover, working for several small projects in different towns, until I decided to move on and create another startup. But this time, I’m trying to do this startup differently. At first, it only consists of 3 people (including me). We had no office, nor assets. We didn’t have the luxurious swimming pool, no fitness center, nothing. Three of us had different background (secretary, chemistry, semi-technology). The one with semi-technology is me, because I was actually never get my BS
All we have is just a faith that we could do it. And we did survived for 2 years (and counting).
We survived with ramen-profitable, very limited resource, but we’re able to finished one large project involving one of top 100 company in Indonesia consists of 20+ sites all over Indonesia and multiple subsidiary company involved. We’re even able to create a product that we could sell now.
In those years I learned two more essential lessons in building a startup. I learned that in Creatio we didn’t actually understand what we’re trying to create. We hardly have any ide how complex corporate / enterprise software is, and we’re too naïve to see it. Naïve is necessary in startup to keep you stays sharp, to keep you stop from being mediocre, but only if you have the right amount of it. Trust me, too much naïve-ness isn’t good for your business, as too much reality would be.
Therefore, the third lesson would be : Understand what you’re trying to create, even the very detail of it.
I also learned that in those two years, three of us have learned so much in everything. From soft skills to hard skills, we managed to get passed the storm and have sharpen ourselves to a point that we didn’t even realized we could achieved. Three of us learned much about IT, handling business people, and various skills we won’t get in university or if we worked for somebody else. We learned to wear many hat.
Sure, we’re far away from success, we still have countless lessons, troubles, and story ahead of us. But those lessons help us to better understanding the nature of startup, business environment, even our own life.
All of it lead to the fourth lesson : Have passion in whatever you’re doing. Passion, determination, and persistence pays.
Seeing the project scope, that would make us damn rich right? Not necessarily. There’s a lot more lessons in those 2 years and those lessons didn’t come for free. To build a startup focusing in corporate software is more than building a great product and sells it. In a corporate environment, it’s not about the product. It’s about politics of business. And as we know, the main recipe of politics is power, relations, and influence, and we have none of that.
So is there any way to control politics if you don’t have power, relations, and influence ?
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