Startups are child’s play!
Lesson 1: “Take the first step”
In this series of posts I will be sharing startup lessons learnt whilst building Funifi and what startups can learn from kids. This first post was inspired after spending the day with my godson & cousins seen in the picture above as I watched them try new things for the first time.
As this is the start of the series it would only be fit to start from our beginning, from the birth of Funifi. Looking back now over the last 11 months from when we began to where we are today can only be described as an immense roller coaster of emotions filled with highs & lows, ups & downs & round abounds.
Managing Director of Startupbootcamp Copenhagen, Lars Buch put it best
“In a startup you have to embrace uncertainty”
and that is exactly what we have been doing since we started last June at Startup Live Cyprus, embracing uncertainty and conquering challenges as we move forward in fulfilling our companies vision.
Although I want to take you back before conception, before we instilled the fearless optimism children show when trying something new, before we decided to “take the first step”.
It all began towards the end of 2012 with a comment from George Vou who at the time was a colleague I shared offices with heading up Marketing for a popular energy drink across the EMEA region.
“I could start a business with you…”
At the time he mentioned it I tried not to pay too much attention as I had decided 12 months earlier to give focus to my career for a few years before attempting another startup. However it was already too late, the seed had been planted and therefore no surprise that George is now a trusted friend and co-founder with myself, Denis Constantinou & Lach Hespe at Funifi.
The dialogue continued and in early 2013, George & myself decided we wanted to start something together, we realised we were not realising our full potential and wanted to make an impact so we started brainstorming sessions in the evening. Just like every entrepreneur we quickly put together “the list” of potential ideas.
This process went on for about 6 months going backwards & forwards on different ideas but never really taking the ‘leap of faith’ until one day George walked into the office after a meeting and opened his laptop up to find this quote…
It was at this point we decided to “take the first step” and enter a startup competition. We sifted through our list of over 100 potential ideas and picked 1 to enter with. We then called up Denis & pitched him the idea to join us for the weekend.
We arrived at the event full of energy to pitch our idea and hopefully find more people to join us on our mission, but this did not go as planned after pitching and no one wanted to join us. To be fair there was tough competition for talent with over 37 ideas pitched that afternoon.
It was not till the evening when all the teams were called together for a team building exercise that we started working on “iMop”.
The teams were asked to pick 3 words from a bucket and come up with a business idea in 10 minutes.
During the time we pursued to joke around for about 8 of the 10 minutes with totally ridiculous ideas until we decided to take it serious as if we made a good impression that evening it would help when pitching to the judges on Sunday evening. The audience loved our pitch & so did the judges, so much so that we were encouraged to drop our idea & pursue “iMop”.
Having arrived at the event with an idea we had chosen for the sake of it, to being pushed by the audience & judges towards “iMop” it was not a difficult decision to make the switch.
Over the course of the weekend “iMop” became Funifi and we put together a website, registered pages with all social media channels, worked on business model canvassing, conducted market research, put together a minute animation on “how the app works” and a pitch deck to present to judges on the Sunday evening to finish in third place and become the first team to enter a Startup Live event and finish as winners by conceiving the idea at the event.
This was great idea validation for us to start, it was now up to us to prove it in the market. So we decided to apply for accelerator programs to focus full time on our business. Within 6 weeks we had grown the team to 6 members, put together a prototype & been accepted to Startupbootcamp in Copenhagen.
We all then proceeded to take the second & third steps to quit our jobs, pack up apartments & move to Copenhagen for the program which is a story on it’s own for another time. In retrospect we did what any 7 or 8 year old kid would have, packed our bags and got ready for an adventure to play with our ideas not fully knowing where we would end up.
It is now 11 months from when we decided to take our first step and since then we have achieved the following:
- Winners Startup Live
- Accepted to Startupbootcamp in Copenhagen (1 of 10 teams accepted from hundreds of startups across the world.)
- Pitched in front of 250 investors & the Danish princess on our Demo Day after the 3 month program.
- Won a place in Tech Crunch Disrupt Startup Alley & Dublin Web Summit Alpha Ville.
- Grown the Funifi family to 8 members with offices in Copenhagen & Nicosia.
- Raised a $450,000 Angel round from prominent European investors to push the company forward.
We are now working furiously towards launch by end of June and although only the beginning of a long journey together this would not have been possible without the blind faith shown by kids that every step after the first is going to be awesome!
So if you are thinking of starting something, STOP THINKING and start acting like a child, “take the first step” we could not be happier we did!
Funifi is a company founded in June 2013 with the vision of becoming the trusted family network for digital media, building apps aimed towards making a positive impact for every family on the planet.
You can find out more through our website.
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