The startup legend
A few years ago, I started a small marketplace project together with one of my friends in school. People were finishing their last exams and trying to get rid of school books they had used for preparation. We thought of ways to connect them with those younger students looking for exactly these kind of books and founded a small online marketplace for students in Kassel. As it grew, we realised the concept was transferable to other schools in that same city and after about a year, out of 120k people living in Kassel, around 10k were using our marketplace to sell and buy all kinds of stuff. We were growing advertisement customers and revenue very fast and were enlarging the development team very quickly.
But no: We never sold it to Ebay or had an IPO. In fact, we had to stop working on the project two and a half years after we had started because we did not have the money and menpower to keep the development workflow up and running in a time were people used Facebook und Twitter every day and when they were used to high-end website and app solutions. We just could not cope with what users were expecting from a cool marketplace website.
This project, even though most people called it a “startup”, would nowadays not even considered to be startup. We were not successful in the long run, we were not getting a ton of investment money and we did not have a huge office in San Francisco or Berlin with 100 developers coding day and night. We had around 10.000 users in a small german town called Kassel selling and buying stuff and a small web page connecting those people. We were working with three people in the office of a small swim club around my hometown Baunatal which kind of looked like the exact opposite of what we would imagine the perfect office to be:
When I hear people talk about startups on conferences the majority of them seem to see something very different in a startup than what I do. They see the first priority when founding a startup is getting an investment from some business angel or VC and growing as rapidly as those VC-founded “startups” in Berlin or San Francisco do. They visit conferences and hear talks from those kind of people on how to grow with a lot of money and eventually sell the whole thing to one of the even larger companies. I belive that this kind of thinking is strengthened by what we see and read about IT startups and companies every day. Only very occasionally, people talk about failed projects or mid-size companies; what we read about every day are those huge investments deals in Berlin or San Francisco that involve millions of venture capital.
Sure, if you have a clear business model and a proof-of-concept on what you want to do, an investment will help you focus on your product and market and not worry about the money to pay the bills. This is great and will help you growing your business in a very competitive environment. But the most important thing to remember is your own motivation behind what you are doing.
I believe that reading and learning about more companies than Facebook, Twitter and Rocket Internet reveals, that there is so much more to an IT startup than what it seems like when reading the news. This is why I am sharing the story of a very small marketplace project from Kassel. In my eyes, reading those kind of stories involving failure and very different motivations will broaden your horizon on what a startup can do and will give those people interested a sense on what more could be in for everyone when the very key motivation is building an awesome product.
Let me give you a few examples on what motivated me to work on this marketplace project even though we never even had the plan to grow as rapidly and as fast as you would have expected.
- People: To me, there is nothing more motivating than working with a group of people who deeply care about the product they are building. You will never get this feeling of potential in the air and enthusiasm for a vision if you choose to work with people motivated by something different than to build something that really matters.
- Skills: Working in a startup driven by its people and vision will force you to w0rk on tasks you have never done before. Not only did I learn programming and how software development workflows function, I had to cope with legal issues, design questions, marketing strategies, user feedback, operations tasks and lots of other things. You will grow as a person if you are working in an environment that is driven by people who share your passion and motivation.
- Experience: I believe that working on this exact marketplace project has given me the majority of valuable experience I have today. By having to deal with difficult and new situations every single day, you will never experience any day comparable to the day before. You will continue to learn so many things in a very short period of time you find it hard to believe when looking back.
- Finding your way: Lets be honest: Most of us do not know exactly what they would like to work on their whole life and every single day. A startup working environment is your chance to find your passion. As soon as you will be confronted with different tasks every single day, you will be able to find those that you are best at.
- Fun: Even though this is true for many jobs and working environments, let us not forget the fun you will have when working with enthusiastic and passionate people.
In the end, most people would probably speak of a failed marketplace startup. And yes, maybe this is what it was. We did not have the menpower and money to keep going even though we had a working product and users that loved to use it.
But the most important thing to remember is that there are other things you can learn and take away from working on a startup project. And you can profit from them even though you have a small uncool office, no money and no article on business insider. You will learn more about how businesses work and ideas can be accomplished than in hardly any other business environment. You will grow as a person and learn to do things you have never done before.
This is, what a startup should be about. This is what your key motivation should be.
And if then comes the day you get a ton of investment money, this is perfectly fine as long as your motivation stays the same.
Best,
Patrick
PS: My team and I kept going anyways. Today we are a growing nine people development team working from Bremen, Hamburg and Kassel called wunderfactory.
