Looking back and thinking forward, analysing our planned journey for Alder Solutions
Three hours in the air, with no access to the internet or other disturbances, was a fantastic time. It allowed me to catch up on long-form reading and have much-needed moments of reflection.
The latest flight allowed me to look back and think forward, analysing our planned journey for Alder Solutions — and the project Perxify.
By the end of this process, I realised that almost everything I’ve been doing in the last 15 years has prepared me for this, making it the next logical step.
My next Great Work, as Paul Graham says.
So let me walk you through those years so you’d also see why so.
My entrepreneurial journey started from home, where my parents and everyone around them were entrepreneurs. People who had taken control over their lives while building solutions for problems they had encountered around them — or at least filling the market caps.
Such an upbringing didn’t leave a chance for me not to become a businessman myself.
But the question was — what business should I build, or what problem should I solve?
To be honest, this has been a difficult task. Especially when I’m built to be single-minded. I genuinely love taking one problem and working hard on creating a solution around it, not giving two shits about what happens around me while I’m focused on a task.
As a 14-year-old, my parents involved me in their e-commerce ventures. Their focus was helping other people set up their (sometimes first) businesses while getting paid only when they succeeded. That’s when I discovered my interest in helping others initiate and grow new ventures.
As a 15-year-old, I got involved with my first non-profits — from student councils to debate communities — learning about different viewpoints and politics, choosing the optimistic and capitalistic route.
As a 16-year-old, I discovered the startup world, initially studying the sharing economy concept by writing a few papers and later founding my first startup around this concept with developers I got to know through a university class.
This last period lasted a few years, and I kept being involved with family businesses and non-profits.
Then, as a 21-year-old, I went to Draper University and experienced the real Silicon Valley tech world in its full glory — getting even more inspired to continue on this path.
Returning from the US, I worked at an accelerator and co-founded our first proper startup with my dad, focused on the digitalisation of the Supply Chain industry. I didn’t know it yet, but this partially became my track for the upcoming nine years, where we built products, found clients, raised funds, sold a company and tried to fix the one buying us. This was an incredible journey!
In the middle of that process, I was also invited to help grow a local Robotics ecosystem and single-handedly helped to create a global network of events expanding across 25 countries until the birth of our first child and COVID made me take some time off.
As a 25-year-old still involved in the Supply Chain industry but starting to look for the next chapter, we initiated a CMO-as-a-service agency that got back to my roots of helping companies optimise processes and create new ones and use them to grow the businesses themselves. We were super lucky to get involved with some of the most innovative-minded teams and help get them going around that time.
Then, in 2020, the March crash happened, and I felt that although I had first heard and dismissed the idea of cryptocurrencies, it may have been the right moment to dig deeper, so I did. This led us to initially take what we knew (supply chain) and mix it with the latest technologies (web3).
Initially, we had some early success and even managed to build a community around the whole concept — but then got our focus sliced too thin between our main product and side projects (events, games, etc), eventually running out of cash and thus losing our team.
There I was, just having turned 29 and with more than a decade of experience in tech, but also realising that I did not want to continue to be involved with the supply chain industry, not even a bit.
Thankfully, one of our side projects had sustained — BananaConf events, which were first hosted in Estonia but now expand globally. So, at that point, I decided to focus on these events until I figured something bigger out.
At first, I thought setting up media and investing ventures around the events would make sense, but the changing markets made me look deep into myself, helping me realise that I’m best as a builder — so I had to figure out what to build.
Over the next 18 months, we tried some ideas, we hosted different events, and I realised what problem I was best equipped to solve; that is also the most interesting one for me in terms of novelty and seemed to have organic interest from the businesses around us.
How do we increase revenues for innovative companies?
Or rather, how to help unique brands find their one thousand true fans…
As a carry-on effect — help consumers find 10–20 brands they actually want to use and give them the motivation and tools to win along with those brands as these communities grow.
In simple terms, help brands build efficient loyalty and reward programs.
…although there is much more we have planned around the whole concept — much more!
The best part is that this concept brings together my interests while allowing me to use most of my past experiences:
- Helping to build and grow businesses (family business & agency)
- Being surrounded by emerging technologies (Robotex & general Web3)
- Creating and optimising systems (Supply Chain ventures)
Fortunately, along the way, I also found others attracted to this concept, and now we’re here, building the first product along with our initial customers.
In the coming weeks, we expect to launch our MVP with the first client and get busy with the next ones in line.
Soon, we’ll share more about the actual product and the roadmap publicly, but until then — claim your link via join.perxify.com and reach out directly if you want to learn more about the opportunities around becoming one of the first clients and/or investors.
