A startup year full of just-in-time learning
“I feel like every single lesson you learn in a startup is just in time or sometimes just after you needed to know it.” Melanie Parkins, the founder of Canva, said this in a recent episode of Masters of Scale, and this really spoke to me.
Two and a half years after founding imagiLabs I think one of the most important lessons I have learnt is that there is nothing we can’t learn, if we really need and want to!
I wrote my first annual review of our startup life last year, focusing on the idea that every time we commit to doing a certain task we say no to a thousand others we could have accomplished, reviewing what were the things we did commit to in 2019.
This year, for the second annual review, I am highlighting a few important things I learnt — just-in-time (and sometimes a little later than I needed to know them). It is again a brutally transparent account of the last 12 months, which in 2020 included launching our product in the midst of a pandemic, and of course countless downs (financial struggles, production delays) but even more ups (happy customers, growing business).
I started January with taking a full week off (for the first time since starting imagiLabs) and so the first lesson of 2020 was that going on vacation is not only something we should want to do but also something we need. It is an incredible opportunity to step back and put things into perspective, to realize our day-to-day problems with the business might be smaller than we think. And for any founder who thinks they always need to be around to help and fix problems as they emerge it is an important lesson to learn that things actually get done without us (sometimes even faster than if we were around)!
While I took my holiday, Beatrice was visiting our manufacturing partner in China, reviewing the pre-production units of the imagiCharms. In January we didn’t just receive news about COVID (☹️ ) but also 60 pre-production units of the imagiCharms in our Stockholm office, a huge milestone for us!
That being said, our already shaky financials combined with the learning that our production would be delayed (due to COVID and its impact in China already early in the year) led to us co-founders deciding not to take salary for two months. But as I learnt from Paula, not having a salary does not define your worth.
In February I learnt to pitch without investor/startup lingo, as I was on-set, participating in the Hungarian edition of Shark Tank. It really is true, the shorter your pitch the more time you need to put into crafting it. Simultaneously, thanks to being one of this year’s Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellows, I was taking an intense online course on financial modelling. I assume that for anyone with a business background it might be shocking that I really just started to understand the ins and outs of our financial statements and cash flow projections a year and a half after starting a company, but I would say it happened just in time.
In March I continued learning about all the legal and administrative work that comes with founding a company, as we held our first annual general meeting. Although not the type of work that motivated me to start a company, one thing I can say is that being as passionate about imagiLabs as I am is probably the most important qualification needed at this stage, and so I did my fair share of legal studies (in Swedish, a language I do not speak so well).
This was also the month when our imagiCharms were finally mass produced! But I have to give credit to Beatrice for all the learnings around bringing our imagiCharms to life, which she already summarized in a separate post.
By the beginning of April we learnt how to turn a physical event into digital — in fact we helped Womengineer’s annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering day go online. Livestreaming on Twitch, running a coding contest on Discord — we picked up new tools along the way.
This event however, was also a big stress test to our app (which at this stage was due to go live in the App store in a month) and we learnt about an array of bugs and usability problems that needed fixing.
What I remember from the rest of April is trying to improve as a designer. Not as a self-improvement exercise but rather to drastically improve our app pre-launch. I again learnt that asking for help is a strength and thanks to a quick LinkedIn post and a few direct messages I got an inflow of support! I read Atomic design, I talked to Chief Design Officers, read Figma’s documentation to the last pixel… and attempted to create a design system to help the Dev team's (at the time that meant Paula) and the Design team’s (at the time it was only me) collaboration.
Being overly consumed by designing and improving our product, in May I learnt that one should have planned in advance how to take advantage of TV appearances (this is when Shark Tank went live) and good PR. I also learnt that just launching an app is not enough. Promotion is half of the story and so I needed to switch gears! I spent two weeks filming short videos with coding challenges (for our #imagi30daysofCode) for our app, but by day12 I was able to hand over the task, among others, to our incredible imagiGirls. Keeping in mind the lesson that effective founders keep firing themselves from jobs.
June marked the first time in the history of our company that we had imagiCharms in stock, waiting to be purchased. Suddenly, my most important job became sales. All the theoretical work I had done, hypothesizing what our acquisition channels would be, became a real-world experiment. We spent some time calling our existing customers to better understand how they have heard about us and I started testing several marketing and sales tactics, at all stages of our funnel. Someone more knowledgeable about sales and marketing would probably be shocked by how someone could get two years into a company without understanding much about SEO, ASO, performance marketing and several other tools and tactics, but again it probably happened just in time.
In July I had the chance to chat with Shelby Brown from CNET, and she wrote a wonderful review about our app. Learning to tell our story in a compelling and simple way continued to be an important exercise. While I was busy with sales and marketing, our product team exploded in size, thanks to 8 full time summer interns (many of them from our Alma Mater, NYU Abu Dhabi).
To me personally this meant learning a whole new way of communicating goals and progress to the team. I started to implement weekly all-hands meetings, structuring how we looked at our KPIs, and presenting the numbers and their implications to the team — no matter how bad or good they were.
In August the imagiCharms showed up for the first time in a retail store. To our surprise the first store we visited the store, the product was displayed with the “wrong” side up. Wrong might be relative and we learnt that we needed to rethink and give specific instructions if we want our display units to tell the story of the Charm. Meanwhile we established our first US-based partnership with DIY girls, an organization teaching girls to code in California which was followed by agreements for imagiCharms to be used as a teaching tool in five more countries, among them Stemettes, a UK-based nonprofit we had been hoping to work with since the earliest days of imagiLabs!
I also had the incredible chance to partake in my first professional filming experience (being on the other side of the camera), for the imagiCommercial, which we launched in September. While with most things we do in a startup we aim to always iterate and continuously improve, this was a very different exercise. I learnt that in certain cases one needs to plan out every single detail.
Although we had listed the imagiCharm on Amazon in the summer, it wasn’t until October — come Prime day, that we suddenly started to see an increase in interest and sales. And this was the beginning of a continuous struggle with managing inventory, shipping and learning about the countless tools and platforms within Amazon’s seller central.
By November I had extensive experience pitching via video and speaking on online panels (a very 2020 specific learning) and thanks to an invitation to speak along panelists from Minecraft and Lego I had the opportunity (healthy pressure) to quickly expand my knowledge about the intersection of gaming and education, a learning journey that I am still at the start of. In November I also le-learnt a lesson about showing up. It is so easy to get stuck “inside the building”, and keep our heads down, keep busy building. But making the effort to physically attend a middle school class, and seeing how teachers use the imagiCharms in their classrooms wasn’t just a rewarding experience but also extremely insightful.
December has been a thrilling month with the holiday rush, and I am excited about all the new imagiCoders joining our community who have received their imagiCharms under their Christmas trees. This month has been about caring for customers and users. Our team has collectively handwritten over 200 Christmas cards, we have been personally responding on all platforms where customer queries emerge, be that email, twitter, Discord, our website’s chat, or of course within our own app! We are still just starting to learn about all the ways in which we can show up for our customers! I also continue to learn that taking the time to reflect is an incredible exercise to breed confidence and put things in perspective.
Adding to Melanie Parkin’s observation, my extra cent is that every time I, as founder and CEO, felt like I learnt something properly it probably meant I had been spending more time on it than I should have. I probably should have trusted someone more equipped (with skills, talent and/or time) to take on the task. Luckily, thanks to an incredible team, interns, mentors and friends helping imagiLabs out I have been able to always move onto the next thing that needs quick learning and fixing.
What's next?
In 2021 we will continue growing our community of imagiCoders, and improving the experiences we curate for gaining coding superpowers through play! Naturally, this will require a lot of learning from our side, which we will hopefully continue to do just-in-time (or at least not too late).
PS. This is a reflection/ account from my personal perspective and without serious rigour to include everything. In fact, most things I learnt in 2020 are not included here. Still, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur you might find value in seeing some of the everyday learnings of a startup founder or if you are a fellow entrepreneur you might recognise familiar patterns.
