Sit tight, push forward and enjoy the ride.
Quitting my corporate job
Ever since my first year in University I wanted to start my own company. I felt I wasn’t ready after graduating and I decided I wanted to start in a corporate job. I learned a lot, made many friends and I loved working with the ground floor employees. After four years, I knew it was time to quit and I started to watch many inspiring ‘be an entrepreneur’ movies. I took a week off to focus on making a plan and on the first morning back at the office, I told my manager I wanted to do something else.
Troubles in paradise
The first setback of startup life hit me in the first month. My co-founder got into troubles with his employer and decided he could not join me after all. This was a serious problem as our product — an app that would enable you to get travel advice from your friends — was heavily dependent on his engineering capabilities.
Instead of looking for a new co-founder, I decided to start with a simple website, while learning to code myself in the mean time. I gathered a group of friends in Amsterdam, who were willing to give local advice to tourists. That was the start of Local Friend. Within a couple of months, the community expanded to 30 hosts in 6 cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bangkok, London, Barcelona and Istanbul. We were growing at a 200% weekly rate and two parttime community managers joined the team.
Finding a technical Co-Founder was hard and being a single founder was lonely at times. Things went too slow, so I was really happy when I was introduced to Pablo, a nice Spanish guy living in Berlin. We connected well and after a week of working together in Amsterdam, we decided to give it a shot and continue as Co-Founders. We applied for StartupBootcamp, while transforming the simple website into a working platform with user-friendly features. It felt great to work together and we made a lot of progress in a short time.
Unfortunately, we were rejected by the Accelerator. The number of bookings were decreasing, the cancellation rate was growing by the week and the end of my personal financial runway was getting closer. After 2 months of working together we decided we were not able to turn Local Friend into a sustainable business.
New opportunities
After almost one year of working on Local Friend, it was over. It had cost me a lot of my savings and even worse, I had failed. They say you should celebrate failure and in some way, it actually felt good. I had learned so many things that seemed out of reach a year ago.
I started to reach out to other startups in The Netherlands and beyond. Within two weeks, I got a some very interesting offers that would have never passed by without my startup experience. I felt however that my personal mission of building a company that was connecting people in some way was not over yet. Combining this mission with my passion for travelling, was just a bridge too far. I realised there are many types of business in which connecting people is actually highly profitable…
The Tinder for Jobs
I was fascinated by the equal and informal way of applying for a job at some startups last month. Instead of being interrogated, we were both investigating whether we were interested in working together. I felt this dating like experience could have been a great start off a good relationship. This is how the job application process should be like for all job-seekers!
I spend two weeks on talking to lots of recruiters and HR professionals. They were all struggling with truly connecting to candidates and apparently, applying with your smartphone is almost impossible. I figured an app with Tinder like features might be the perfect solution to this opportunity; it will be informal, give all parties equal powers and it will finally turn the recruitment world into a mobile oriented one.
On a Sunday afternoon, I pitched the idea over a beer to Vincent, one of my cycling buddies. He was really interested about the plan from the start and we both felt we could be a great team together. Suddenly, things were going very fast. Within a month, we had build a prototype and gathered a group of inspiring companies and candidates to participate in a test. While awaiting test results we realised it was time to decide if we wanted to make it happen or not. At that time, Vincent was still in his fulltime job and I had a very adventurous offer to join a 500Startups company in Thailand as their Growth Hacker.
Cocoon is taking off!
I left for a short holiday to Morocco with my girlfriend. After a couple of days of hiking in the Atlas mountains, it was on a ocean view rooftop of our Riad that I decided to give Cocoon a real shot and cancel all other plans.
Back in Amsterdam, the results of the Cocoon prototype were surprisingly good. Driven by curiosity, user engagement was high and we were actually able to match 10 candidates to companies hiring managers. Yes, we needed to improve a lot, but we felt we were on the right track.
In the meantime, we had proceeded to the last round of the selection process of Rockstart Accelerator. The last selection days were very intense, but we had fun and were pretty confident we made an excellent impression on all mentors and investors. A couple of days later, we received the best news ever: we actually made it to the top 10 of over 600 startups from all over the world!
The program of Rockstart Accelerator will be starting this week. I’m really excited about the progress we are making on the product and business part of the company and I’m really looking forward to the coming months.
Enjoy the Rollercoaster
All those inspiring Vimeo movies make startup life look like an awesome walk in the park. I can tell you now from personal experience, it is a very intense rollercoaster. The only thing you can do as a Founder is to sit tight, push forward and enjoy the ride.
