Feeling like a loser, searching for answers & staying up all night to get lucky

My Startup.

Here I am.

1.5 years ago my startup was going to die. I was more afraid than ever.

I owed my father around 15k, had convinced my sister and best friend to join and they were about to loose 15k each.

I was going to fuck them all up. They trusted me.

I had previously failed with my rock-band and ended up owing my family around 10k plus endless nights of not letting them sleep with all the noise.

It couldn’t happen again. Even though failing doesn’t make you a loser, I sure was feeling like one.

I am not made of stone but still I will always try to hit you with a smile, don’t matter what. This is just a story to tell you, your not alone.

I didn’t give up; I did not cave into fear. I studied; I sat down, placed goals on my wall and didn’t loose focus.

This is not a story of a company success, I have not made millions. This is not a story about happiness, if you are still breathing, you are the lucky one.

It all started to change by just starting to start. Testing was everything for us. Forget the color of the buttons, forget if your registration is in the middle, left or right. Forget if it’s doable or not. We did not focus on things that would lift conversion 2-5% but for the ones that would lift to 50%-100%. There was nothing to loose and everything to gain. Didn’t matter if we had to do it all manually at the back end, we just went for it.

We hit our first home run on May 2012 one month after it was all going to die and after 5 months of trying small things.

We started to grow fast and people wanted to really use our product, we had found something but our product sucked.

Our product is a Marketplace we had just figured out the chicken and egg, still our revenue model was going to kill us.

I searched for help. I was following many “startu­p-guys” & had noticed “Cesar Salazar” was kind of the guy to go talk to for help. He seemed open, so I messaged him.

He did not reply.

I messaged him again and sent an email.

He did not reply.

I tried several times more. Then he wrote a blog. I blurted on the comment section of the blog “You always trying to teach but never available . He answered me in less than a minute. (cesars­alazar.mx/o­bservacione­s/.. that is the blog — he changed it, and now it has no comments.)

We talked for about two hours, turns out he had an accelerator program in Mexico and invited us to apply.

I did not understand completely why they wanted to take % of our company so I talked with him again. After trying to make it on the music industry you just feel everyone wants to rip you off. He convinced me and we went for it.

To tell you the truth 60% was about the money they invest and the other 40% just because Cesar seemed nice. We took a leap of faith.

First day at the acceleration program. “ Hi everybody this is Mexican.vc and we have just been acquired by 500 Startups so you just became the first 500 batch in Mexico.”

Ha! Fuckn great deal.

We started to learn allot, iterated faster and “Santiago Zavala” general partner in 500 Mexico is the best mentor we have had. Our goals became KPI’s , we started to measure everything daily, weekly and monthly. We also had to fire our CTO, downgrade one of the founders and I had to move back to Monterrey where our company was based since I had failed on managing the team from far away.

It seemed at the beginning I wanted to do everything and couldn’t trust anyone else to do it. This was slowing everything up. I had to let go of my baby and teach everyone in the team how to do his or her specific roles.

We managed.

We grew 35% mo-mo for the full 6 months of acceler­ation program. Still we did not reach break-even and our revenue sucked. We were bootstr­apping with a product that was totally un-scal­able at that moment.

Finding investment in Mexico without revenue, I failed. Our growth was amazing but couldn’t transmit that to the 5 investors I met. I was sucking at fundrai­sing.

We still had money to survive one more month. It was Friday night and I did not go out, I saw a tweet of Dave MC of 500 Mountain View “Last day for applying for our 6th batch”.

Fuuuuck, doing 2 acceleration programs, in my head, it meant I had failed at fundraising, but that was the facts and I went for it and applied.

They accepted us : ).

I had again one more opportunity Maaaan who gives you all this opportunities I felt so lucky. I already new what I needed to do better. Manage the team now from farther away, for more months, make revenue and focus on fundraising full time once I got close to my break even.

The 500 mentor team is great but from whom you really learn of is all the 100 different people that are with you day and night having the same struggles. I could keep on going but you will find why to join 500 on Quora and many other blogs. The truth is that if it wasn’t for 500, my road to where I am right know would have taken more time and we would have probably died without their money, support/teaching and caring.

In 4 months we took the company from 1 country to 3. From 5 people to 22 and we were 6k away from breaking even.

We raised $500,000.

This is a great milestone for our company.

Seems like just yesterday I was in my living room just writing in a .doc sheet everything I was going to do and how I was going to do it.

I know everything I done till know doesn’t mean I will succeed; only the input, hard work and focus will lead to that. Not even all the money in the world can save the worst product ever.

You will loose touch with friends, your girlfriend might leave you, you will have to look your father in your eyes and tell him you failed him once again. You might have to tell your best friend and brother you lost it all.

All of this will happen if you don’t plan correctly. Everything is achievable you just have to start, fail and learn faster.

Optimism, hard work and patience will open just the perfect amount of doors needed.

Be strong, be stupid, be afraid of not starting at all.

@tavowzg