Streaky Cost and the startup of a lifetime
Hi, I’m Streaky and I’m a founder. I write about my startup while it’s heading for the cliffs.
Anything I write before we finish our airplane on time to avoid a crash, will hopefully suffer less from survivor bias. Yet, the reason for writing this is not to educate anyone. I haven’t gathered enough data to be convinced I’m right about anything.
I’m doing this because startups are f*cking hard and I need to find something to relax me. Writing down my thoughts will hopefully make them seem less heavy. These days, everything seems urgent and life-threatening for the helpless creature that is our business, but that can’t always be true. Sometimes I look back and think “that was actually fine” and so I’m hoping writing about the struggles will give me some perspective.
My startup
We’re two people. I started out on my own and after a little more than a year, my co-founder joined me. He’s doing the commercial stuff: raising money, talking to customers and partners etc. I’m the tech guy. I write the backend code (C#), frontend code (Dart / Flutter) and design the app and web. I love writing code, especially for the backend. I think I’m quite good at it, even though I lack formal training. I pity the first dev to join us. Not because I write bad code, but because I’m not used to writing code with others. We already hired that guy by the way, but we can’t pay him yet. He will start as soon as the investors give us some cash.
Our startup is a platform that deals with B2B and B2C in an energy-meets-mobility market. We have a laser focus on what needs to be done, but unfortunately we need to do a lot. When investors ask us for more focus, I feel they would have also asked Tesla to build just the electric drive train, or Uber to build only the driver app. Vision and VC don’t go hand in hand, I think.
I’m going to keep jotting down my thoughts here as long as I feel like it. I hope it helps me cope with what I think is a make-or-break period for me and my company. Either we find the investor and are in for a hell of a ride, or we sell what we have and try to not let the disappointment ruin anything else.
If we get through this, it will all have been worth it. Remember, if this were easy, someone else would have done it before us. I started this ride with naive optimism. That got me to build something that other companies have been trying to build with 50–100 people and couldn’t get done in a few years. We’re live in three countries and once we get extra dev capacity, I can finally focus on growing in these countries beyond the 20% MoM that we do currently.
Optimism. If this were easy, someone else would have done it already.
Streaky is obviously not my real name. Apple generated an anonymous email for me with the words Streaky Cost and some gibberish, and I like it. Perhaps one I day I will reveal my identity here. Until them, I am Streaky. Streaky Cost.
