Welcome to the Grocerease blog
18 months ago I left my job and I’ve never looked back since.
For almost 2 years I was a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. While there, I worked on a variety of projects and industries. These were fast paced and challenging, yet the impact we were making and the lifestyle I was living was not what I wanted. So, entrepreneurially, I had also begun working on a side-project with a few friends. After a year and a half we realized that the side-project was stalling, and it was not going to become a startup unless we put in the effort necessary. That’s when I decided to leave the confines of my job to lay the groundwork for the startup, to embark on this entrepreneurial journey. That startup today is Grocerease.
When I left, we had a few ideas on the table. The Grocerease idea was the most developed, but it was far from certain that it would be the vision we would be pursuing today. A few months later, my two co-founders left their jobs to join me in pursuing our dream of becoming entrepreneurs. To date, it has been the most rewarding and exciting period of our lives! In fact, the reason this blog has been delayed for so long is because we’ve been totally engrossed in this process of building and growth, both of the company and ourselves. This rate of growth and change is exciting, but the fast pace makes it easy to forget the challenges we’ve already faced and the process by which we endured and found solutions. While amazing and enlightening, majority of the growth and learning we’ve experienced remains within our closed environment. I feel it’s long overdue to take a step back and share with the world what we’ve been doing and what we’ve discovered.
When we were all finally out of the corporate environment, we set about evaluating all the opportunities that were in front of us. We knew that Grocerease was an ambitious project. Being a scale and network business, it would be years before we would be sustainably profitable. This also meant we would need a capital injection, at some point in the future, to make Grocerease succeed. Knowing that we are going to need external sources of funding, we made a prudent decision to evaluate the other ideas that were available. A few of them came to us by means of our network, and we saw this as a valuable opportunity. This was an opportunity to work with real business people and seasoned entrepreneurs while learning more about this ecosystem in South Africa. We did end up learning and gained valuable experience in the process, but it was definitely not what we expected. Oftentimes what you expect an opportunity to provide you with is not actually what you receive. Almost always, the experience will grow you.
“Oftentimes what you expect an opportunity to provide you with is not actually what you receive. Almost always, the experience will grow you.”
It was during the end of last year that we realized we had reached a ceiling. We learnt what we could from these interactions and the projects weren’t moving forward at the pace they should have been. They weren’t moving forward at all. They had become distractions, in the larger sense, from our path towards Grocerease. We decided to drop them and to properly set the goals that we wanted to execute towards and achieve. After all, we left our high profile careers (as some would call them) to pursue our idea for Grocerease. If we wanted our company to succeed (and we did) then we had to put our full focus and effort behind it. We had to be rigorous in avoiding distractions. We wanted to know that what we were building towards was something that had a shot at changing the world. Finding that answer was not possible unless we dedicated our full time and energy to bringing Grocerease to the world, to the future.
Many of you reading this are unfulfilled with your current occupation. You want to have an impact, join a startup or perhaps start one of your own. We were there too. It seems daunting, especially when you are just starting along this path. You don’t know where you are heading, but you do feel that you have to move from where you are. You feel like you were meant for greater things, but don’t know what they are. You may even know what you should be doing, but not how to get there. Trust those feelings. We have felt like that too. The uncertainty that plagues you, plagues us all. This is part of the human condition, and life. As entrepreneurs, we have accepted it and moved ourselves beyond it. We’ve learnt that you don’t have to have it all figured out before leaping, and that, sometimes, it’s more fun when you don’t have that comfortable cushion of knowing what’s on the other side. Through our own journey, we’ve gained better perspectives of ourselves, the world and our role in it.
“We’ve learnt that you don’t have to have it all figured out before leaping, and that, sometimes, it’s more fun when you don’t have that comfortable cushion of knowing what’s on the other side.”
Through our blog, I hope to guide you along our journey of discovery. I want to expand your perspective with insights into startups and companies and culture as we go about building a startup of our own. We will share the frustrations we’ve encountered, and those still to come, and how we have approached solving them. We will share our views on successful companies, lay the foundations for Grocerease and set the vision for the future we want. I want to inspire you to realize that companies can be positive engines for change. To realize that work, purpose and happiness can, and should, become synonymous with each other.
As a company, and as individuals, we have come a long way to get to this point. Yet we know we have even further to go. We don’t know where this path will lead, and that’s even more exciting. We are not concerned about the end destination, 20% growth targets or million dollar valuations. It’s about this journey of ours. This journey of building something bigger than ourselves.
This is our journey of building a value-driven, innovative and successful company.
This is our journey of building a startup.
Welcome to our blog.
Thanks for reading😄 If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to share and give it some👏 (up to 50!) so others can find it too.
