Building a Startup with Families

As this journey with building our startup has evolved it has felt at times that things are not on the right track, in particularly when we were looking around us at the silicon valley articles and some startups out there, we were seeing that our journey was a little different. At the main point it was taking too long to ship, to launch and generally get something out there to the world. But there may be some other factors at play on our journey that I hope we can learn from together. And highlight actually some other things we “shipped” that may not of related to our startup in the beginning but sure is starting to come to fruition now.

The first thing that comes up for me is, maybe most of the “startup” related content out there was focused on the typical situation with founders. Single, share housing (sleeping on the couch sometimes) and sipping a coffee / hamburger combo for dinner, hustling to make it all work, to ship! and in general, debiting energy from the future with the perceived cultural norm to push and be the first to market or a any of the other reasons I am sure your familiar with.

Why has it taken us so long to sail this ship! Maybe it was just life preparing us for building something that may actually support our (those around us and hopefully humanity) journey on this one strange rock. (Great series by the way.) (-:

Or maybe it was our backgrounds, different to most startup founders, possibly they (in general of a silicon valley hipster) where learning to code at young ages, or dived deep into computers in general very young, setting themselves up for a streamline path to building a multi million dollar app or slipping into Googles or Facebooks offices as a young intern coder.

Or maybe it was just the size of the project and alignment to our purpose here on earth (maybe our egos too lol), and maybe it just needed time to grow. See like a baby you don’t ship that thing over night, or ship a part of it, his leg! or nor do you build it in one month. It takes 9 months, something quite profound for a very profound outcome. Maybe not all startups are the same. (As I pre anticipate Y Combinators founder, saying “bullshit, you just got to build something people love and and shut up and ship!”. But that’s another story to tell when we get to that point.

Or maybe we are just lazy, unproductive, unfocused and just not hustlers prepared for the world of launching a successful business. And total failures!

Our Journey

So what happened over the four years when we did not ship/launch this product. Maybe you can learn from us here, we hope you do. Maybe just maybe we shipped something else?

If any of this below relates to you, the rest of the article may be more relevant to you now or your future self may get a kick out of it also.

• If you have family, and your growing humans (young children — Yes I mean dirty nappies and sometimes sleepless nights).
• You have the very beginnings or an already established startup or any business really.
• You have been struggling to navigate the current options in funding mechanisms to overcome the bootstrapping slog.
• You have aging parents that need support, and friends that you actually care about (I’m not talking Facebook friends guys).
• You are learning to do more of what you love whilst paying the bills and changing nappies.
• You value personal growth over external materialism whatever that means to you.
• And more specifically if you have a Saas/tech type startup our journey may also relate more so.

This may be more relevant to you if the above guidelines are similar to yours. But here I hope to share what we learnt along the way whatever your current or future situation is or will be. Maybe you want family, tribe, a partner around you in the future, it all applies.

The Real balanced Journey of building a startup with a partner, family and our in-perfect way.

First of, it’s really been 4–5 years since we really activated our startup, DiscoveReel. It even kind of went into hibernation for a good year or so, with no team working together, yet always in the back of the founders mind something was being iterated, evolved, innovated upon and brewing for the right moment to pounce. For me at the time I was not on the team, I was just about to leave the Military after 6 years fixing war planes, to join a yacht sailing around the world, pretty exciting right?, boy did I not know what I was getting into on those high seas in the Bermuda triangle. At that stage I didn't even know what a Startup was, let alone what a SaaS company was, at that time maybe I thought this was a highly trained military unit, i.e SAS = Special Air Services ready to blow Osama bin Laden’s door in.

As the others worked together on multiple other projects to bring in the money,they labelled themselves as bootstrappers when referring to working on DiscoveReel, meaning that they were on a self funded journey of building a startup, vs getting traditional funding. Over the years a few things happened that may of not allowed us to launch or ship something but we grew a foundation. The foundation consisted of a few things that we feel is important.

1. Children, kids, offspring, disciples, whatever you want to call it.
2. The skills to save us the money when coding the platform (We were quoted 250,000USD to build our platform over a year with an external company (Epic google dev’s). Now we are doing it ourselves with some outsourced hours of help, for extra coding intricacy.
3. A team, with a purpose, and a brief history together or more so a family with strong bonds.
4. The street knowledge of life, i.e how to manage money, whilst raising small gremlins.
5. A closer connection to ourselves through personal self discovery.
6. The connections and acquaintances that aligned to what we are building and where excited to support and fund us now.
7. A small community of families meeting every week to discuss our fails and successes and share home cooked meals.
8. We shipped and launched a membership model website building company and a few other side projects with a fat — fail = (valuable learning experiences).

This we believe and feel, is paying off, or more so it will later, but for now it was frustrating to ourselves and the team to not launch. After 4 years we made a shift, something happened we started to feel and actual BUILD something tangible this was only a few months ago, some things intersected and grew together, and maybe some cosmic divine timing!.

The shift

Why the shift?, it just came with time I think, maybe the pressure built or maybe it just felt right to take more action. Most likely it was a combination of both. Whatever it was it initiated us to start to raise 60,000USD, learn to code, learn to be human again with people and learnt to ship and share something, anything.

But now in our back pockets there was something, there was something important and intrinsic to the success of our lives for the long run, even if the startup failed dramatically. (Personally not an option) but this is a statistical possible reality.

We built a family, whether it be one on one with a partner, or 1 or 2 kids and a few pets, but more so for us it is a group of families, you could maybe call it a community to help with day to day life. This cannot be forgotten. It’s crucial. The essence of community and life long bonds I mean.

To many founders, we tend to forget about the life outside of our startup. Whether it be a partner, friends, a family member or their small families or local /global community. We tend to dedicate all of our energy on a future vision of what it could be like. But I propose something else, in hope we and you don’t get to the shiny golden gates of success whatever that is for you and your surrounded by no one. Or you get to the end of the days for your startup, whether you have sold for millions or billions and now left with no team, no tribe or family around you. Or in the rare but statistically likely scenario you go bust. Maybe the worst case scenario for a moment.

So what could a startup with families around it look like. What if we started to build things, businesses for our families. If we took some of the wise wisdom of the old Cathedral Builders, they never expect to see the completion of the Cathedral, they know that this is for their children’s children to see. That can pretty much kill your ego I think, but I believe we must start thinking like this. It does a few things. More on this and about Steven Hawkings thinking on Cathedral thinking, and the mindset around this.

Cathedral thinking

One, it grounds you in reality, accepting your death or your ego death of working on something and not getting the full perceived benefits of it or standing on the winners podium with everyone looking at your success!. Secondly what it does is it focuses your energy into the things that matter, holding your family, partnership, or tribe together whilst building and amplifying the effectiveness of that pyramid sized (hopefully without slaves) project your building. So how do we create a more balanced empire where everyone is empowered to build a pyramid like sized project with people around them when they finish a day and go home from their startup. How do we integrate our business/startup life into family, friends, tribe life? more on this in our coming articles, it’s a work in progress! but you must be proud! we shipped this article for you!

So have we built? or shipped anything? and why the f@#ck not?

My argument is that we have, even though we are super biased, we have honed ourselves, our families and our skills to build a Cathedral. We like to look at it as a small army of Spartans, now that story is amazing. 300 Spartans (+ a few more if you read history, but let’s keep it at a cool 300 for now) conquering an astonishing 200,000–300, 000 men. Now how does this relate. It means a small efficient and trained force can withstand the giants of companies out there with many employees or in general the energetic force to produce and run a wholesome successful startup.

This is our thinking and it’s only one side (ours) of the story, our partners and Wife's sure sometimes don’t understand what’s all that important, but below that there is a sense that things will be ok, if we all focus on our mission and something will be built that will stand the test of time and constant change ahead. Including our extended family and team.

So the plan now. We will continue to build. And learn what it means to build a Cathedral style startup and share it with you. I get it, we have to ship something! but the time will come. And for now, it’s better in my experience to have a balanced journey then a journey with super highs and super lows. We are looking at one more week before we launch our beta, after 5 years. And that’s something exciting and overwhelming at the same time, “will they like it”, “will they use it”, “does it actually bring value to our subscribers lives? We hope so and have to believe in the fact that a happy family is a happy and successful startup too.

We’ve got this, you me and humanity. If you want to join the discussion with other founders with families we will have conversations and share inspiration here on our Discord Channel — this is your invite: https://discord.gg/PjtuERk

We’ve got this,

Dean

If you liked this, please consider recommending it below.

Hello! I’m Dean, I’m a veteran turned startup guy, looking to be a better human whilst building the frameworks we may need in these accelerating times of change. Reach out for a conversation and to grab a virtual or physical coffee.