The struggles of a startup.
The first six months since pili has been founded are over and while it was to be expected, we are still stunned by the constant ups and downs that we as a startup encounter on an almost daily basis. Today, we would like to tell you a bit more about how we as a team look back at those first months.
A fine line between doubt and believe.
Early on, we identified the obvious problem of not being able to find a good service professional quickly and easily. Consequently, our solution was a two-sided marketplace to connect customers with professionals such as painters, photographers or tutors. Sounds pretty reasonable right? That’s what we thought as well. However, after reading a bit more about the business model of a two-sided platform, we quickly realized that it is not as easy as we initially thought. Almost on a daily basis we faced problems with our initial solution such as the chicken and egg problem, there was no company that offered a whitelabel platform like the one we envisioned, and legal barriers that we just found out about. At this stage of our business, it was more than normal to end the work day on Tuesday thinking we could be the next unicorn and on Wednesday that we won’t even get to the stage of having customers. While this probably sounds familiar to people that already started a business, to us it was a mix between excitement and pure disappointment. To be honest, we just got to know that as a startup the highs are very high and the lows are pretty low.
Is change the only constant?
I think around two months in, we had a moment where we as a team realized that our approach had changed so much from our initial solution — We made the decision to develop our tech from scratch, we decided to focus only on the supply side (service professionals) to overcome the chicken and egg problem and we were super focussed on providing those professionals with some value even without access to customers. At the same time, it was extremely important for us to take a step back and reevaluate what our vision actually is. Afterwards, we took a moment to reflect on the time that had passed and concluded that as our knowledge about the business model and industry increased, the number of iterations on our solution also increased significantly. However, we believe that the most important thing is to hold on to the long-term vision while changing the short-term goals according to the new insights gained along the way.
Why we keep going.
Besides the obvious reason that building a business takes time and continuous effort, we get up every morning with excitement and enthusiasm for the day and the challenges we might encounter. And isn’t that what our lives should be like? Waking up on a Monday morning and not dreading going to work, just to make it until 5pm to finally be able to go home? We truly think so and that’s why we can’t stop and won’t stop working on turning our vision into a reality.
Looking forward to telling you more soon…
