Founder’s Stories #2 — Toni and Infomix
How to get very far, lose everything and start all over again
This is a real story. The first time I’ve heard it I thought that it should be a movie, or at least a book, but it is just as real as you are.
This is a story of how a young boy starts from scratch, gets really on fire with his entrepreneurial project, gets all the signs of doing it right, fights till he can no more, loses everything and starts all over again.
Ready?
When you’re young and free, hungry for more, curious of everything, you arrive in Madrid and you start an academic career. You choose journalism because everything you did before seemed like a perfect sign that it would be your way.
Then you face the theoretical classes, the stiff reality, you wait one year and one year more but you have not touched any microphone or camera yet. Frustrating.
Instead of increasing your Playstation consumption, you start your own project, you search for your own solution to get some practice in what you love, and you want to help other people to get it as well.
This is how Infomix was born. Imagine a platform with a self-produced video content that you can consume whenever you want, before Netflix has come to Spain. (That’s actually pretty amazing, isn’t it? To be there before Netflix starting a very similar platform?)
Few enthusiastic students start recording their own material, interviews, reportage, stuff they care and want to talk about. One year later it is a thriving platform, full of content and it starts expanding to other Spanish cities.
What started as a tiny student project actually manages to grow organically, draw attention from media, win prizes and give many people tons of inspiration.
After a while Toni wins the prize for the best entrepreneurial project among students and gets to meet the king of Spain. He also gets a scholarship to study an MBA in a prestigious business school in Madrid and although at first he was asking himmself the essential question: ‘Does it has anything to do with the NBA? Will I play basketball there?’, in the end he gets an excellent business education and completely changes his mindset into a business-oriented, conscious strategist.
He finishes the MBA, the project is still there, but there comes a job offer from a consulting company and although this time he is also asking himself the essential question: ‘What does a consultant actually does, what is it that I am supposed to be consulting?’, he says yes.
Six months pass and he learns how to do business proposals and work on a proper strategy. The entrepreneurial flame doesn’t let him do it any longer than half a year and so he says goodbye and goes back to taking care of Infomix full-time again.
It’s like resuscitating a person that has just lost her consciousness for a while: motivating the team, recovering the organisation, making everything take on speed again.
He works in a co-working in his university, hard and persistent, and then suddenly another miracle happens: one of the short films that are available on the platform becomes totally viral. Everything is on the right way again, millions of visits come in, the flame is burning.
And than there is something even bigger than a miracle: Infomix gets selected to enter one of the most prestigious startup accelerators in the country, La Lanzadera.
Toni doesn’t think too long, although he cannot believe it, he suddenly moves to Valencia, starts living in his grandmother’s flat and works hand by hand with the most promising founders in Spain.
Soon his co-founder joins him in there (moving also to Toni’s grandmothers flat) and here they are, on their way to take Infomix to the next level (talking about fancy terms like exponential growth, KPIs, innovation…)
Up till here, it all seems like THE entrepreneurial journey, like all the signs are there, like you have a viral video, you are in the best accelerator, everybody loves your idea, you win all the prizes, you hang out with fancy people, you already expanded nationally, you love your idea yourself, you’re just really making it, right? Well, read closely what happens next.
All these months, Infomix was growing, but no money was coming in. Accelerators usually don’t pay you a salary so Toni keeps living with his grandmother and eating mostly rice with tuna. The pressure is bigger and bigger as the months go by.
Finally, the whole Inofmix team becomes demotivated and frustrated enough to leave the project and go find a safer life. Toni is left all by himself, increasingly neglecting his own health and well-being, as it becomes impossible to meet the KPI requirements and keep running the whole thing alone.
Toni is left by himself, with no cash in his pocket (nor in his bank account), with unfulfilled expectations and an exhausted body.
His family advices him to just make a CV and go look for a job so that he can recover from the nightmare of disappointments, as well as from the mental and financial struggle.
Somehow an old friend of Toni is meanwhile working at Mediaset (one of the biggest media companies in Spain) and there is an open position that seemed to be needing just him. They give Toni the opportunity to grab a train to Madrid within 24h, do the interview and then move all his life from Valencia to the capital within the next 7 days and start a new job, a new life, leaving Lanzadora and Infomix behind.
My fingers burn from writing down as fast as I can, my heart beats faster because I cannot believe that Toni is actually still alive, that he is smiling and that he sits in front of me, telling me this story while sipping on his coffee, transmitting not regret or anger, only peace.
I cannot help but burst out with the question that is burning inside me since a while: Will you ever go back to entrepreneurship?! (After everything that it has done to you?, I think but do not add.)
He smiles and doesn’t really hesitates, the answer is yes. It is not clear how, or when, or even where, but Toni believes that entrepreneurship is something you carry within your heart, it is a spirit, a state of mind. You cannot get rid of it that easily. You can never get entirely rid of it.
Now he is recovering and enjoying a little bit more stable and structured existence, he is sleeping better and eating well, but when the flame that is burning inside of him will get stronger again… who knows where will he end up.
“I needed time to rest. Right now I have a timetable, a salary at the end of the month, I stopped eating rice with tuna, I sleep better. It’s a physical and mental recovery, which was necessary, but the entrepreneurial flame is still burning somewhere inside me. Small, but still there. As I get stronger, it gets stronger as well. “
At last, I ask him for some advice for people who consider starting their own businesses (I fear for a moment that it might be simply: don’t try to become entrepreneur if you want to stay sane, but it is not), here come the most important ones:
- If you want to become entrepreneur only to make money, don’t become entrepreneur. This is not the way.
- Being a solo-entrepreneur is very hard, but finding a good team is even harder. Pick your people wisely.
- Never forget who you are. Sometimes you get so drown into the sea of tasks and challenges that you forget yourself. You need to be fine and healthy in the first place, only then your project can work.
- You will need some money, to live and to start something for real. Either you start selling from the minute one or you have some savings on your bank account. You cannot run a business when you cannot afford a proper meal.
- Your intuition is your superpower, listen to it. No matter what people say, it is just an opinion. If you really want to do it, do it.
What you study in the university, what you see in the media, the legend of nicely dressed young guys sitting with their MacBooks in open offices and living the entrepreneurial dream…
I hope this story makes you realise that it is really, really not that easy.
If you don’t have one of the three essential things to start from scratch: money, contacts, education, it might get really hard.
I am not saying it is not worth it, I am just saying that there is more to it than what you might initially think.
Many thanks to Toni for sharing his personal journey with all this details, for his time and a ton of inspiration. If you want to make a movie or write a book, feel free to contact him.
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Akimad is a digital agency offering design and development services. We believe in realistic innovation. We like to help entrepreneurs not to fail, or at least to fail cheaper. We share our experience and support founders in creating an agile process of idea validation and product development. Say hello! www.akimad.com
Written by Daria Krauzo.
