A startup year in review — the founding story continued
We overestimate how much we can do in a single day yet we underestimate what we can achieve in a whole year.
This really stuck with me from one of our team retro meetings. This point was raised by Boris, our hardware engineer and the reality of it really just hit me when I started writing this reflection. It’s been almost a year since I wrote about the founding story and the first few months of imagiLabs — and here is a short-ish and very honest account of the year that followed. 12 months taking us from pre-product and pre-funding to first founding and … closer to a launched product.
During 2019, every single day, I have constantly felt like I am behind. Not just a little behind on a few to-do items but buried by the amount of responsibilities I did not attend to (like unanswered emails, I am sorry, I am doing my best!). One of my biggest learnings this year has been how finite and limited time is and that every time I commit to doing a certain task I say no to a thousand others I could have accomplished.
With that let’s look through what we at imagiLabs have said yes to in 2019.
During the cold and dark winter mornings early January we were in the midst of redefining what imagiLabs’ first product should be. A fun accessory that can be customised through coding… we ran through our product designer (my high school classmate), Mate’s sketches again and again until we landed on the keychain accessory concept, and what eventually became the imagiCharm.
We started February out by joining Sting, a start-up incubator in Stockholm. I like to think that Beatrice and I have been structured since the start but suddenly, there was so much organisation to everything we did. We learnt about all the things we were supposed to be doing, new ways of thinking about milestones, financing, marketing (pretty much all things non-product) that we hadn’t tried that we hadn’t yet, but most importantly we got to sit around a bunch of other crazy people like ourselves — entrepreneurs working on their dreams.
In March we received our first larger grant which could be spent on salaries for our team. I remember staring at the email and being excited but not allowing myself to burst out in happiness just yet, knowing that I can’t fully trust my Swedish language skills. Quickly I asked a native Swede to confirm and indeed, after 12 months of working on imagiLabs and our dream without being paid and getting close to our financial limits, we were given support to continue focusing all our energies right here!
The same month, Ericsson officially became our customer. Our team went to Paris as part of our partnership with Ericsson and showcased our app and imagiCharm prototype at the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week.
Meanwhile, I was back in Stockholm at a networking event for the speakers of the upcoming Women in Tech conference when I received an email from Apple Developer Relations with great news and an interview invitation with a very short notice of 2 hours. Never mind that it was 8 pm in Stockholm already and I might have had a glass of wine. But the call went well, which leads us to April.
We spent the first two weeks of April in Cupertino — as part of the second cohort of Apple Entrepreneur Camp. On my 12 hour flight to San Fransisco I had all the time and space I needed to play around with our new brand created by a group of talented and big-hearted students from Hyper Island. For two weeks I was a full time designer again and we spent long hours white-boarding and redefining our app.
We came back from sunny California filled with confidence — Tim Cook tweeted about us and Paula had agreed to soon quit her full time position as a software engineer in Hong Kong, and join us as co-founder and lead developer full-time in Stockholm! But back in Stockholm I was up against a new battle I had never done before: closing our first investment round. By early May we got together a great group of investors who are just as excited about equipping and empowering young women with skills and confidence to learn to code as we are. I am eternally grateful for all the tips, pep talks and support other founders, friends and our business coaches gave during this time. Reading Venture Deals was also immensely helpful.
By the time I managed to finish the investment paperwork we were in full Kickstarter preparation: shooting our video, working with our ambassadors, building our marketing materials. Finally, on the 28th of May we launched our campaign. The entire month of June was filled with anxiety, sleepless nights, excitement, questioning and not giving up. We didn’t have an easy ride. After the initial momentum of having our early fans pre-order their imagiCharms, things slowed down. It was painfully slow. But through close to something like a miracle in the end we made it — with an inflow of support in the last 24 hours, close to 600 imagiCharms were pre-ordered and we hit our goal. (Kickstarter works with an all or nothing model — if the goal is not reached the creators do not receive any of the funds/ pre-orders).
I thought July was going to be a month of recovery and soul searching, but actually there was no time to rest -yet, even if the months before had been tough on us. But here we were one year after the official registration of our company — so much has happened, so we did take at least a moment to celebrate that!
I was at Almedalen, the so called politicians’ week in Sweden as one of the finalists of a startup competition, Techarenan. At Almedalen we met with Emelie from Womengineer — another organisation working to fix the gender imbalance in tech & engineering. I know about a lot of organisations with a similar mission and finally met someone who just like me said it out straight: we have the same goal, we should collaborate. Finding meaningful partnerships is tough and important and I am really excited about where this will take us!
I was in London for a short day and a half. We have been part of a community of Hardware startups, called the Hardware club and I showed up in-person hoping to become a more engaged member of the community. We found our manufacturing partner through some of the other companies in the club so it was a worthwhile trip.
The month of August was our peak intern season with 4 interns working side by side with our small team. Paula’s big move to Stockholm was another highlight. We spent our days working hard (mostly on our product) and late afternoons taking in the sun and warmth of the Swedish summer. I read the book Measure what matters as I was struggling to understand how one actually structures setting goals and tracking progress for a company. We also programmed Instagram filters with our ambassadors (the imagiGirls).
In September we traveled. While Beatrice was in China meeting potential manufacturers I was in the US as part of a program for young European entrepreneurs called YTILI. I always struggle to know how much time I should be spending learning versus executing. But I was in a moment of so many questions. We were without our head of marketing, and I was managing the task. During my 10 days in Seattle and DC I met some incredible young people running inspiring companies across Europe and I had the time to just talk and talk and learn from them. We also went to the National final of Venture Cup, a startup competition in Sweden — where we did not win. We took home two awards (and the $ it comes with) in the regional final back in May, but you cannot have it all right? On the other hand, Forbes Hungary wrote an article about us and since then my family hasn’t asked when will I go back to finish my masters degree.
In October I went to Berlin for the first part of the Google for Startups Female Founder program. I loved the pragmatic support, a company as large as Google but still remembering the days it was a startup has provided specific advice on how to make app development and go to market roadmaps. We faced the reality that we won’t be able to ship the first imagiCharms before March, and as soon as it was confirmed, we told our Kickstarter backers.
November we spent the most time with our users again and that is always a simultaneously excruciating and exhilarating experience. On one Saturday morning alone, we taught coding to 270 girls using (partially) handmade imagiCharms (thank you Beatrice & Boris!) and our app. We went through a rollercoaster ride of feelings — our product is awful, it’s not ready yet. It does not work. On the other hand hey it works and there are people who are waiting for it and who are using it. What is more, week after week we got to see the excitement of girls as they were writing their first lines of code and saw the imagiCharms light up!
I also spent a whole lot of time thinking about our reason for existence, our narrative. It was sparked by the 25 minute talk I had to give at Slush, a huge (and dark) tech conference in Helsinki.
We haven’t quite stopped working even over the holidays (startup life — I guess, Beatrice is actually spending the first day of the new year traveling to Shenzhen) and even when we do my brain keeps ticking about imagiLabs. But December is a great time to take a few hours to focus on reflection, check in on progress and appreciate all that has been achieved this year, a much needed exercise that I definitely recommend!
What’s next?
A whole lot of work to get the imagiCharms and our app out to the market in 2020 and along the way making the tough decisions — what are the things we should say yes to?
PS. This is a reflection/ account from my personal perspective and without serious rigour to include everything. In fact, most things we did in 2019 are not included here. Still, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur you might find value in seeing some of the work a startup founder does or if you are a fellow entrepreneur you might recognise familiar patterns.
