Lessons learned over 2 years in my startup

Today I accepted a job offer. I made some commitments to my team, to my girlfriend, to my parents, to my creditors, to my investor and to myself and structured employment seemed the best way to meet those commitments. This was a big change for me since I have survived the last 13 years as an award-winning freelance filmmaker, and more recently, an award-winning tech entrepreneur.

For the first time, I was leveraging my MBA Training and my experience in my 2-year startup to find the best job I could. That experience of building something from nothing, goes a surprisingly far way.

At this point I see fit to document what I learned in my two years of running a startup full-time in the innovation hub of the Caribbean and now that I have had some time to reflect, this is what I would say to the startup community:

Go to market quickly

Do a landing page explaining what the problem is you’re solving, what your solution is, who you are, what people say about the solution and what the reader can do about it . It takes about 4-hours to put up online and less than $60 if you have basic design skills and know how to get a domain name. It’s a big ‘what-if’ to get so much business in your first 6 months to need anything more than a contact form and phone number for people to call for you to tell them how you can help them. The ‘tech’ part will come later… much later.

About helping customers

No matter what you advertise, customers will ask for anything but… which is ironic, because if you try to promote anything else they will assume you do what you first advertised. People fit you into their mold based on whether they need you or don’t. Bottomline, remember your bottomline. It doesn’t matter if there is someone in front of you — a software engineer from Stanford University — willing to pay you to milk a cow, the point is they are willing to pay you. Take the money and use the opportunity to ask as many questions as possible (and read this article). This is where your market insight comes from. You should take customer questions and ask suppliers for answers to those questions. Document everything. The value you and your co-founders bring to the company is the information you individually put together for later reading, interpretation, curation and presentation on a slide deck.

Co-founders

This is a confusing topic. Technical co-founders are a especially difficult to find. Those who are best friends with their co-founder since elementary school are the lottery winners of startups. For 30-something startup entrepreneurs (and for when I do this again 40-something entrepreneurs) all your childhood friends have real jobs and are facing midlife crisis. Do it alone till you come across someone that helps you define the problem you are trying to solve… not the solution. If you agree on that then you get a more balanced perspective. Make sure they have different skills from you, but do not get stuck on the technical co-founder stuff. One of you can learn to code, or concentrate on the product and be responsible for recruiting talent on Upwork. The other has to sell, sell, sell.

Sales

When investors talk about traction, they never care about how much views your website gets, they care about how much money you make. If you get a lot of views/attention, you have to figure out how to turn that into revenue. Otherwise your business is worthless.

Another big lesson: We made more money from our repeat customers than the people who didn’t know us. The easiest path to more sales is to go back to customers you had a good experience with and ask for more business.

But what about product?

It is said investors get a better rate of return from a product firm than a consulting firm, therefore we should aim to be a product firm. Get this in your head. You are a consulting firm before you are a product firm. These are the steps I wish I understood earlier:

1. Do research on a problem, preferably in an environment where you are being paid to do something related or anything to earn your keep
2. Tell people you can solve this problem
3. Find out how much people are willing to pay by testing different prices and seeing how many people respond
4. Keep recording market insight and how many possible customers you can get. We found out too late how tiny the market was here in Jamaica
5. Document processes as patterns develop in how you solve problems (e.g. lots of essays and flow charts of the manual stuff you do)
6. Assign time and costs to the steps in these processes
7. Read about technologies (Manuals, tutorials etc.) that could help you… just read, do not code, this is a trap!
8. Find engineers in your network to talk to about these technologies. Do not spend time in your own head on this. A lot of time gets wasted this way
9. Find out about people who use your service and develop user profiles, and user stories
10. When you hear prototype, think Powerpoint — not Java or Objective C — Coding will steal the best years of your life. Know only enough to vet good engineers
11. Get money to build the product and pay programmers, do not use money out of pocket. If you are pushing sales, smarter people than yourself will invest in you to build the product. The engineers will work based on your mockups, processes and capacities that you want to sell. So make sure you have those documented somewhere
12. Have a roadmap of products you want to make, but just write them down, prepare to build it slow. The goal must be focused on sales and the conversations with customers.

Full time

30 hours a week was the expectation of my investor going into this to build a product full time. If I looked at the responsibility as 30 hours per week as just product and the rest of the time as running a consulting firm then things would have been a lot more defined. I would not have been so focused on selling a product that was not fully defined by the market. Even with another job doing 40–50 hours per week, I could still be working on product, as I still pull 60 to 75-hour work weeks on average anyway.

Where do I go from here?

While writing this post, I got one call asking us to register 50 businesses over the course of a year. Another agency committed to investing in 10 startups. Our incubator committed to between 20 and 40 registrations for the year. A few pilot prospects, have called back for meetings. We have 283 visitors to our site last month and an opportunity to make a more compelling offer to convert to sales. It’s a smaller market than we thought, but there is enough promised work to have a bright young administrator earn their keep using the system the team developed. In the end we created a job for one person, even if it was not for anyone on the team that started. In my new job I can still gain market insight, read about technology, talk to prospective customers about the problems they face and tell them about how the product we made can help.

I can use the time I do have — 15–30 hours per week — to pivot into other products in the ways I described above. For what I know and who I know now, that’s plenty.

Conclusion

To my future self: When you do this again, don’t quit the day job (or give up the revenue stream), don’t run out of money, don’t learn to code. Talk to the customer, Impress the skirts off your potential investors and future co-founders, and start the conversation with your slide decks. That is where you started and that is why they love you. Play to your strengths.