From zero to profitable business in 3 months — Follow my journey!

“silhouette photo of mountain during nighttime” by Benjaminrobyn Jespersen on Unsplash

📝 Intro

As many of you have probably noticed, recently many of these “Startup Challenges” are appearing. Here are just some examples, with many, many more to be found:

“12 Startups in 12 Months” by Pieter Levels, “12 Startups in 12 Months” by Lukas Papay, “I’m shipping 12 startups in 12 months” by Sean Walker, “10 Startups in 24 Hours” by Ben Tossel, one one of the most recent: “How I built a startup on twitch in 24 hours” by Pat Walls. Actually, as I have been just going through Twitter, I saw the next one already started a few days ago.

Mostly the duration of these challenges varies between 24 hours and 30 days, with on the one hand motivating but on the other hand somewhat clickbaity titles: “Building a startup in 24 hours” — well, that sounds great!

But let us be honest for one second — building a startup within 24 hours is hardly possible. You can certainly lay a foundation, but a startup is definitely more than a hacked together CRUD app which is connected to some APIs.

This does not mean that these challenges are bad per se! I think what they are especially good at, is the following:

1. They show what is possible in such a short time
2. But even more important, they show what is NOT possible in such a short time (at least to those, who not just read the title)
3. Iterating through the build-measure-learn cycle fast, even though most 24 hour challenges seem to have the focus on the building part (building an MVP).

But on the other hand, these challenges can be potentially problematic:

1. As I mentioned above, building a startup in 24 hours is not realistic and not possible. You can certainly lay a foundation, but a startup is based on more than one pillar which is an MVP being built in 24 hours.
2. Thus, they are giving a wrong impression. New founders only see these 24 hours, but not what happens after this time, and often times the real challenges start then. Also, people who are not building themselves, but hiring other people or a team to build something, can get a wrong impression. Which freelancer doesn’t know this guy: “Hey, I have seen this guy making a startup in 24 hours. So please, can you make me a facebook but with feature X, Y and Z. It really shouldn’t be really that much work then.”
3. These challenges hide many of the facades of a startup, which are not being considered: marketing, gaining traction, growing, designing, UX, testing, validating and so on.

I think every decent programmer can hack around some idea in 24 hours. This is in my opinion really not the hard part. It’s one of the first things we should do. But the process certainly doesn’t stop at this point, and everything after this can be really difficult and can make startups fail. And these things are not being shown in such 24 hour challenges.

I actually have done such a challenge in a startup competition back in 2014 which was a challenge over 30 days / 1 month. We had experienced mentors and sponsored tools to do what we needed to do, but we really focussed on staying lean in the way we were working. We iterated through the whole process: We started with nothing, not even with an idea, and were then going through ideation, building the business model(s), validating, building an MVP, measuring, learning, improving and pitching.

In the end we reached the second place, a corporate was interested in this idea, so they hired us to build it, and eventually, the startup got an investment in the six-digit range.

But let me tell you something, these 30 days were maybe the most fun of this story, hacking around prototypes, brainstorming wild ideas and all that stuff. But the real work started after that: You have your filled business model canvas, all your customer interviews and feedback, a wild mind map with full of ideas and your beautiful CRUD app that’s living somewhere on a virtual server not being designed for scale and could be hacked probably during a couple of hours.

So what are you doing now? This is not a sustainable business yet! It is a good foundation, but the line is not finished yet!

It’s not enough to stop after such a challenge, the real work is just starting! If you don’t go this path, your product will stay an MVP or resulting in a me-too product. And this is really neither changing nor helping the world.

Certainly, it’s the goal of the whole “lean movement” to work leaner instead of putting in the effort over one year hiding in the basement, building something and then going out with your product hoping that someone will buy it.

Working lean is a philosophy, but the focus will shift depending on where you are in the process: first, you are lean because you need to find a problem or a solution for a problem, building prototypes and validating your hypotheses in a very lean way. But eventually, you will have your product, existing customers, making revenue, legal stuff and so on. So you will have different challenges. You are actually not a startup anymore, because you have found your business model. As Eric Ries says, “A startup is a temporary organisation designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” — Yes, a startup is TEMPORARY.

🤨 My background

Originally I studied Information Systems which basically contains the topics business, IT and the intersection of these (fun fact: first I wanted to study arts). So while being a student, I participated in a Startup Challenge back in 2014 and have been working since then with several startups together, whether it was startups receiving investments in six-digit range or bootstrapped startups without investors making a couple of thousands of euros per month or not making revenues at all.

After graduating in 2016, I have started freelancing professionally in full stack web & mobile development.

During that time, I have developed many skills and methods besides my professional skills in full stack web & mobile development: innovations method, lean startup, design thinking, different tools such as business model canvas, creativity techniques for ideation, (rapid) prototyping for MVPs, identifying critical hypotheses, designing experiments for these hypotheses and validating/testing them, personas, etc.

I have worked together with small companies, startups, agencies and large corporates, but I have never realised my own ideas, even though it was always my motivation and my dream. Recently I had many, many great opportunities to work together with startups, but I rejected them for a couple of reasons:

1. I want to stay independent: I want to bootstrap my own company by myself, have the freedom and independence and not rely on investors (basically what Pieter Levels has achieved)
2. I don’t need a unicorn making millions of revenue: Actually making a couple of thousands of euros so that my fixed costs would be covered + some amount for spending is all that I am aiming for.
3. I am interested in all the different areas that belong to creating a startup and want to go through them: ideating, creating a business model, validating this, designing, building, marketing, monetising, etc.

🚀 The case study

I think there are enough 24-hour startup challenges. What I want to do is a case study which shows all facades of the process, going from ideation to launching a fully functional product (not a hacked together CRUD MVP).

Here’s the goal: From zero to profitable business within 3 months without a team and investors. For this, I have cancelled my freelance contracts so I am free for the next 3 months and can fully focus on this case study. My main motivation is to build the foundation for a profitable business and learn about all the many interesting facades, whether it’s marketing or design. I want to understand the reciprocities and overlaps between the different pillars of a startup/company (marketing, design, business, development, …).

Here is what I will document during the case study:

• ⚙️ The whole process: Ideation, research, building a business model, prototyping / MVP, validating & testing, design & UX, developing, deploying, marketing, launching, monetising
• 🏋️‍ All the pains and gains, ups and downs
• 👨‍🏫 Applying of my existing knowledge, mainly in full stack web & mobile development
• 📚 New learnings gained while building a profitable business
• 🛠 All the tools that I will use in order to create such a business
• 📈 Raw numbers such as sign-ups, conversion rates, revenue etc.

Format:

• 🏁 Start / End: 01.10.2018 (Today) — 31.12.2018 (end of the year)
• 🌀 Working cycle: I will work in weekly sprints
• ✍️ Content types: In order to give you a clear picture of what is happening every single day, I will choose different channels in order to provide different information:
  - Sprint Planning (beginning of the week) and Sprint Retrospective (end of the week; what went well, what didn’t go well, action item), as well as larger blog posts, will be distributed through Medium and website (coming soon).
  - Posts with less content, short-term updates, thoughts, images/photos, videos and spontaneous updates will be distributed through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (coming soon).
  - Maybe: Weekly live streaming where you can watch live what I am doing and can ask me questions

By being transparent, I want to draw a very clear, honest and realistic picture what it takes to do such a project.

🙌 How can you support me?

For me, this is a huge project and takes a lot of discipline. I hope this case study will help people to build their own businesses.

It would help me a lot if you could support me with some things:

• Give me feedback: What do you expect of such a case study? Do you have any feedback? Tell me your opinion!
• Spread the word: Share this anywhere if you like it or think it could be relevant to some people.
• Follow me: If you want to get all updates, thoughts and content, follow me on Medium, Twitter and Facebook which also helps me to reach out a larger audience
• Sign up for the newsletter: Here you can sign up for the newsletter so that you don’t miss any post of the case study.

Thanks in advance!

👉 Next steps

So far, everything to the announcement. In the next post, we will go straight into work and start with the ideation! Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter and follow on social media so that you don’t miss the post.

Best,

Tobias Scharikow