One startup

Back in 2008, I decided to quit my job and build a startup, along with a friend. Everything seemed very exciting, getting new clients, starting new thrilling projects and creating a new office, our office. We began by hand-crafting a couple of websites for agencies, small companies, and sometimes large companies. In the first four months or so, we didn’t have any clients thought it could be the end, a startup that lasted four months, what a failure. But we managed to get a few clients, mostly small businesses or startups, like ourselves.

After two years of hand-crafting websites we started to focus into challenging and exciting applications, we loved developing complex applications for our clients, to help them manage their businesses, every project that engages a little more thinking than just building a website, we were there to seize that challenge. Those applications still help our clients today, and we couldn’t be more proud.

A couple of months later we got ourselves a meeting for a challenging project in the UK, we were thrilled, who wouldn’t be right?

One little step, from Portugal to the UK, pretty simple.

After a couple of meetings and traveling to the UK the project was approved, we were quite ready to start, probably, one of the most exciting journeys of our lives. The project began to grow, and in a way, we ended up growing along with it.

We had accomplished something, we built a startup, and that same startup was able to achieve an exciting and challenging project in the UK, the feeling was remarkable, unique.

Nowadays I have a great job, due to the UK project, and I’m lucky enough to be part of a fantastic team, and I am grateful for all of that.

Today, after almost five years, that same startup we built back in 2008 is about to shut down. It was one hell of a journey, and we learned a lot with it.

Usually, you learn the most significant things in life from your mistakes, and you need to feel those mistakes. We failed, right, but I’ll never make the same mistakes next time.

Quoting Randy Pausch:

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture