How 2 entrepreneurs launched a business 6 weeks after meeting online
With a similar vision, complimentary skills and a happy startup mindset, there’s no reason you can’t go into business with someone oceans apart
By Fiona Duffy
Chief Happiness Officer at The Happy Startup School
Interview with Mike Harmer & Jeff Kubarych
Meet Mike Harmer (left) A web designer & developer based in York, UK.
And Jeff Kubarych (right) A former Marketing Director at Indeed, currently working at a non-profit in NYC, USA.
Earlier this year, fed up with the frustration of wanting to start their own business, and getting nowhere with their ideas, they individually enrolled on a 6 week program to become part of a tribe that starts doing.
Unknown to them, the course was about to change their lives in ways they didn’t expect.
The day enrolment opened, they dived into the course with very different business ideas than the business they found themselves pioneering.
In those fateful 6 weeks they met a co-founder with all the complimentary skills, vision and mentality to found a business with (each other), they launched Propeller.io, they tested and validated their ideas, they set up a landing page, and started to collect emails, building a tribe of users who loved the problem Propeller solves for them.
Here, Mike explains how fast their lives and business ideas have moved in the those 6 weeks.
Their business is still in its infancy, but it just goes to show, an ocean can’t come between two people’s passion for change.
Words from Mike (one half of Propeller.io)
“Jeff & I met serendipitously through the Happy Startup Home School community, and found we have similar goals based around helping people create things.
Jeff’s background is in business naming and domain names, mine is in web design and development. We were both looking for a new project so we decided to team up — now we’re busy creating Propeller.
Soaking up the ‘happy startup’ mentality and things we learnt during the course, we’ve set out with a bold mission — to help 10,000 entrepreneurs create online businesses by 2025.
We’re trying to reduce the friction, effort, and cost around creating a new business so that you can quickly test and validate your ideas. We want to help you take action on your ideas, rather than dwelling or spending too much time thinking about them.
What this manifests as is a website and newsletter where we’ll be curating great ideas for new businesses and sharing them with our community. You’ll be able to purchase a ‘business pack’ that includes a great domain name and a one-page website with a sign-up form. We also register matching social media and email accounts and include them at no extra cost. Basically you get everything you need to go from nothing to getting your first customers straight away.
We’re ‘tasting our own medicine’ at the moment by going through the same process to build Propeller itself. In those few weeks we launched a basic home page that explains more, and lets you sign up for early access.
The home school was a game changer for us.
It provided us with the framework for exploring our purpose, values and mission and it’s down to the Home School that we’ve met and are working hard to achieve our goals.
The course really helped open our minds to putting happiness at the centre of our business and aligning our work with our passions.
Our goal right now is to connect with other entrepreneurs in the early stages of their business idea whilst we’re building our platform.
You may have a solid idea already, but no name for it. Or maybe you just have an idea of the sector you want to operate in, but no specific business idea yet.
We want to help you get a new business idea off the ground.
You can find out more about our mission on our website, and if you’d like to know more about Propeller you can sign up for early access.”
Hope you enjoyed this post. If you’re in need of confidence, tools and a community of people to make your business ideas happen, how about joining us. Visit thehappystartupschool.com/homeschool for more info on the course structure.
