What I learned from trying to be a startup founder

Naoki Peter
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

For most of the past decade I’ve been working as a software engineer. In all the different positions I had, my work typically involved designing, implementing and testing web applications. Over the years I gradually honed my developer skills and also acquired a basic understanding of how to elicit requirements and feedback from endusers. However, I knew virtually nothing about how to market and sell a software product or service.

Two years ago I became uncomfortably aware of this deficit when I was trying to build my own tech startup in London with a friend I had met on the Entrepreneur First program. Our product was a web platform for designing Augmented Reality experiences (see this similar editor I built for a Swiss AR startup in 2014). Some of its (intended) unique selling points were a cutting-edge feature for animating 3D avatars with off-the-shelf movements (like running or jumping) and a pretty powerful user interface for storytelling that was streamlined in accordance with some UX insights I got from past projects.

For two months my friend and I visited some of the biggest agencies and print companies in London, showed them our (pretty static) prototype and pitched them the enormous potential of our technology that could transform virtually any flat surface into a stage for a scripted 3D animation or a 3D game (think of something like your own Pokémon Go on top of your magazine or billboard).

Everywhere we went people seemed to be impressed and eager to see more. And yet, despite two months of massive customer development efforts, we couldn’t find any viable market fit. The brick wall we kept bumping into was always the same question that the potential clients would ask us:

What should we do with it?

We were quite clueless. In the course of our careers we had built several complex systems for processing all sorts of information but we never learned how to tell intriguing stories or design visually appealing games. Besides, in view of the enthusiastic reactions we got in our initial meetings we had assumed that we were on the right track and hadn’t given much thought to examining the actual business needs of our potential customers, let alone the sort of Augmented Reality content their own customers could be interested in (if at all). Having no idea about these things, we would simply pitch our tech, which probably sounded impressive but, in the end, wasn’t able to provide any immediate value.

Eventually, as we became more and more aware of our diverging opinions about the imminent reorientation of our project, my friend and I decided to give up our common venture.

Despite the failure, the insights I acquired during my short time as a would-be entrepreneur were extremely illuminating. My key learnings included:

  • Looking for problems that match your solution is a lengthy and often not so promising approach. Better start with a pressing problem and try to come up with the best solution for it.
  • Try to sell early. Otherwise you may not get the most crucial information about what the customer actually needs. If the customer isn’t ready to buy your product yet, ask what’s missing and schedule another meeting for demoing the requested feature right away. This way you can save a lot of time.
  • Don’t pitch your tech. Instead, pitch the most wonderful application of your tech from your customer’s perspective.
  • Learn some marketing basics. Knowing how to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time is a very powerful and highly transferrable skill.
  • Founding a startup is far from glamorous and it typically puts you through a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. To keep your willpower up, you’d better be profoundly convinced that the world desperately needs what you do and that no one else can deliver it the way you and your team can.

Naoki Peter

Written by

Freelance web developer who’s interested in exploring new ways to have a positive impact on the world

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