Startup On The Move: Leaving The Garage

About a crazy decision to spend 12 months in 12 emerging countries

They say remarkable startups tend to be born in a garage. Most often in sunny California, the proverbial cradle of new technologies.

As I write these words, I do sit on a tiny IKEA couch in a small garage. Except, I don’t work here. It’s where me and one of my co-founders live. And it’s not in Silicon Valley, but under the cloud-laden London skies.

The average rent for a standard apartment was beyond our means so we found a refurbished room that, in better times, used to serve as a car park. We moved here to participate in a 3-month startup accelerator, which, more than anything, pushed our team to move for a limited period of time under the roof of Google Campus, and to replace Skype meetings with some intensive work side by side.

I’ve never dreamt about building a startup. It hasn’t been so long since the time when I would not have been able to define what exactly this word meant. It just somehow happened that, after I’d spent many weeks trying to find a solution to something that had been bothering me for a while, it came to me that without founding a “real” company, only few would take me seriously.

To emphasize this point, please bear in mind that I am a) a woman, b) a non-engineer, c) Czech (i.e. from the “East” of Europe as people like to remind me when they glance over my tall figure and Slavic looks).

And while I was sowing the seeds of a future online platform on a shoestring budget, not knowing where exactly my endeavors would eventually lead, I figured that my project could qualify as an innovation experiment — one of those that, from time to time, turn crazy people into billionaires, or rather more often end up in dried-up bank accounts and painful failures.

My last well-paid job had seen me in Brussels, working at one of the EU institutions. Back then, I had something that I am palpably lacking now — security. The material one, most of all. But something was driving me out of my comfortable office, into adventures, travel, and self-exploration. That’s why one day I quit my job, donated a lot of my clothes to charity, and moved to Lebanon, a country whose language I didn’t speak and where I didn’t know a single soul.

I fought bravely for all that, up until a point where I was courageous enough, and not completely broke yet, to think about starting my own business.

And there was this one thing that saved me then: my laptop and poor Internet connection.

Even as a complete beginner, I was able to find resources that helped me start my first blog, build my first website, learn about SEO, issue invoices, track my expenses, or manage my marketing campaigns. The more I learned about the tools I found after hours of googling, the more I realized that many people around me didn’t know about them at all.

The Alice in me peeked into the Wonderland behind the mirror of ones and zeros, and she refused to return without bringing something back.

When the conflict in neighboring Syria got nastier, I moved to the peaceful and lush Bali, where, with the help of a simple website builder, I put together a first version of MAQTOOB, which was supposed to be a place to easily find helpful and affordable business tools. And not until I received some fairly positive feedback over the coming months did I start putting together a group of talented individuals who then developed the prototype into a fully-fledged app discovery platform.

The design was being brought to life in Beirut, the code in Prague, and the content in Marrakech, until the call of the garage mentioned above brought some of us together in the land of the Queen.

Our stay here in London has been overflowing with amazing experiences and we have had a chance to meet many competent professionals who helped us steer the startup in the right direction. Yet, bound by our nature and the vision behind MAQTOOB, we’ve recently felt very strongly that it’s time to hit the road once again.

For startups in the likes of London, Berlin, Singapore, or San Francisco, it’s rather easy to learn about newest services that make our lives so much easier, be it apps for finance management, creating to-do lists, chatting with a remote team, or receiving online payments. We take it for granted that “there’s an app for everything” and we can’t by far imagine running our businesses without our smartphones and laptops.

However, tech startups are only a tiny fraction of the more than 120 million SMEs all around the world, who usually depend on Excel sheets at best.

When we organize our workshops, introducing handy tools that help entrepreneurs improve their productivity, we are always almost ashamed to bring up the “obvious suspects”, such as Trello and Buffer to give an example. But again and again we are astonished to learn that majority of people have very limited knowledge of these, as well as of other apps that are pretty familiar to the startup community. And that is to refer to the people we meet in the heart of the Tech City.

Me and my co-founder Adil, having both travelled extensively in the past, have always felt that awareness of available business software is alarmingly low outside the traditional tech hubs. And at the same time, every single day, we experience ourselves how technology helps us save loads of time and money.

That’s why we’ve made the uneasy decision not to continue networking and fund-raising in Europe in the months to come, but instead to pass the next year visiting 12 countries that are on the rise in their respective regions. Starting April 2015 through March 2016, we want to spend one month in each Lebanon, Morocco, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India, in order to meet local entrepreneurs and organize workshops where we introduce essential business tools and discuss bare fundamentals, such as how to build a website on your own, how to establish social presence, or how to sell stuff online.

We see the platform we have built as a mere starting point to help us connect with the growing community of a new breed of entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to embrace their freedom of choice. We like to choose if to work from an office, a coffee shop or our bedroom; we like to combine business and travel; we prefer to spend less time on tasks that can be automated; and we want to be more with our families and friends.

Technology helps us do things faster, better, more efficiently. And all the time and money we save are out there for us to improve the quality of our lives.

Our choice was to take a risk and go the unconventional way — unconventional for a startup, whose existence is by definition more than fragile. The path we’re embarking on is driven by a need for a bridge between the world of technology and the world of small business.

We hope to meet our target users instead of waiting for them to come to us. And more than anything, we want to learn from entrepreneurs we meet along the way.

Follow our journey, as we post updates, photos, and information about our next steps. And keep your fingers crossed for the big trip of a small passionate startup.