How To Almost Kill Your Startup
In Episode 6.2 of The Startup Show, we interrogate the amazing Tatiana Birgisson, founder of rapidly-growing natural energy drink startup Mati Energy. Mati has exploded over the last 18 months, and they’ve started to go up against big, entrenched players, including behemoth multi-national corporations (think Coca-Cola). Find out how Tatiana learned fast, kept her company agile, and how she recovered from a critical mistake that almost killed her company during its first mass-production run.
Tatiana talks about some of the things she didn’t think she would ever need to deal with, including delivering batches to local companies out of her car and hand labeling over 100,000 cans of Mati before she could afford professional canning.
One of the hardest lessons to learn but one that became an incredibly valuable weapon in her startup battle was cultivating and managing the relationships on her team through Mati’s rapid growth. This included letting go of a lot of that aforementioned grunt work, delegating it to her team and, as the kind of perfectionist that most founders are, learning to live with the results.
Culture is a big part of the equation, and Tatiana is aware that Mati’s company culture not only starts with her, but that it also may be the thing that’s going to be the difference between success and failure as Mati battles the giants.
Another great weapon was learning to take on and mitigate risk, including spending massive amounts of investor money to take huge steps in Mati’s production capabilities. Tatiana goes into detail about her first production run, spending over $100,000 to ramp up, and the mistake that almost sunk the company and took nine months to fix.
No one to blame, no one to help fix it, clock ticking, money draining. It would have killed any other startup. Find out how she got through it and how it ultimately made Mati even stronger.
