The Startup Serial 2: The Redesign
It’s early in the morning, and MJ and I are on the first deck of a Megabus headed to Toronto. Personally, I hate coach buses. They make me dizzy, but train tickets were much too expensive that weekend, and flying wasn’t an option for our meagre budget.
Just a week after James had left Montreal, we were on our way to meet our new design team, a duo of graphic designers MJ had gotten in touch with. One of them was MJ’s old high school friend.
“She’s really tall,” he said in the bus.
Immediately after the reboot decision, we scrambled to come up with a new design. Before, MJ and I had tried to do the designs ourselves, trying to reference other websites, coming up with sketches and mockups of all kinds.
Eventually we had to throw up our hands. We needed professional eyes and hands on this thing, especially now that we were also going through a rebranding process. New logo, new style guide, new everything.
James and I quickly put together a budget for the redesign. Our savings accounts got instantly lighter, and I felt something sink in my chest. Until now, we had bootstrapped everything. We had spent no money except for our company incorporation fees.
After that we scattered messages across our social circles. Within a day or so MJ got us in touch with Mina, a high school friend of his who had just graduated from Sheridan. Mina took a look at our case, and further recommended her friend Chelsea for us.
So this was the plan: team of two. Mina and Chelsea. We would set up a timeline with them leading up to the re-launch date. This was our first big expense.
On the same day we finalized these details, we also booked two roundtrip bus tickets to Toronto. Then we checked Airbnb in Toronto, balked at the prices, and then booked ourselves on something cheap we found on Expedia.
Skype wasn’t going to cut it. Until now we had this illusion with remote work. Emails, Slack and Skype did connect us over our distances, but increasingly we experienced that it wasn’t enough. There were always details being missed, something was always left unchecked, only to be found later.
Instead, we decided to go to Toronto, meet with the new design team, make sure all the details were set in stone, nothing missed and nothing left to ‘later discussions’. Well, at least for now. There are always ‘later discussions’.
In the morning of departure we bought four breakfast wraps from Tim Horton’s. One for breakfast and one for lunch for the two of us, since the bus ride was going to be 6 hours.
The bus ride itself was pretty uneventful. Like I said, I don’t do well in buses, and MJ was sleeping pretty much the entire time. I tried to write a bit, since this was 6 goddamn hours, though not much was done. It’s hard to write when you have a screaming headache and a rhythmically shaking seat.
The first thing we did was meet with David, president of ECW Press. ECW had been in conversation with us for quite a time and I wanted to have the opportunity to talk to them in person, give them a firm understanding of what we were offering them.
I was fidgeting. I had been sending dozens of emails out to publishers and rarely the answer was positive. ECW had been one of the few that had shown genuine interest in what we were talking about. I was concerned about making a bad impression.
That turned out to be completely unfounded. Thirty minutes after David and we first shook hands, we were in full understanding with each other. He was excited about the idea. MJ and I left the ECW office feeling pretty up. If only this happened with every publisher we approached.
The place we booked ourselves for the night was one of the dormitories at University of Toronto. Our first reaction when we entered was: where the hell is the bathroom?
Turns out, this was one of those dorms where the bathroom is shared by everyone on the floor, and our room was situated at the opposite end from the bathroom. Basically we had to walk for 5 minutes to the bathroom just to take a piss (okay maybe not 5 minutes, but it sure felt like it).
At less than 70 dollars a night for the both of us though, we weren’t complaining. At least not outwardly.
We split for the rest of the day to meet our respective friends, then we met back at the dormitory.
The next morning we were feeling pretty excited. Mina and Chelsea were meeting us somewhere around Yonge and Finch. MJ and I had hoped to have breakfast before going, but we got up just in time to catch the subway and not be late. So we got to the meeting absolutely starving, that when we met them we had to ask: do you mind if we do this at a restaurant somewhere around here?
They didn’t mind.
I didn’t get the impression that Mina was tall as MJ mentioned. Perhaps that’s because my girlfriend is 5’ 11”, so no girl really ever feels tall to me, unless she’s essentially Brienne of Tarth.
“I was really tiny back in school,” MJ added when I mentioned this. “Like, over here.” He said pointing to his shoulder. “She was as tall as she is now.”
One thing about the both of them for certain was that they were sharp. They were both very lively, but they also had this ‘we’re not messing around’ attitude. They had an uncanny ability to steer the conversation straight to the point.
They were super prepared. They had already done some concept sketches over the last two or three days since we first talked. They showed us some conceptual layouts that they thought would be ideal for the site and the app.
MJ and I found ourselves constantly nodding heads and saying some variation of ‘wow’. I guess, having tried to do design on our own, and having failed miserably at it, we were quite at awe of how freshly and how well they were approaching this.
We worked out the timeline of the project. Despite having readjusted our own plans, the schedule was aggressive. Everything was to be completed by August 15th, the new logo, the website designs, and the app designs. On any standards this was a maniacal deadline.
Well, we did begin a startup. A startup with a prototype that basically crash-landed back to the surface, and no immediate or even remote prospect of funding on the horizon. Anything probably sounded maniacal at this point.
Mina and Chelsea were optimistic though. Perhaps even more than us. They were really excited about Tabulit. It looked like they really believed that this could work. I suppose they were also readers of Korean webtoons like us, being Koreans and all. This hadn’t happened in a while. I mean, the only other person that had been really excited lately about Tabulit was MJ, and that had been for some months.
To me, startup feels like mentally wringing myself to squeeze out every ounce of optimism and grit to stay the course. Sometimes it feels like we can totally do this, and there are times when it just feels like I’m wasting my life away. No amount of motivational quotes can guarantee that this is all going to be worth it.
My girlfriend Sarah once told me: “Maybe you should have a backup plan. Like, what do you want to do if this fails?”
My answer was simple. “I have no backup plan. This is the only plan. There’s nothing else in my head right now. This is what’s on my mind and what’s going to be on my mind for a very long time. I love stories. This is a startup for stories. This is my life and future as much as I can imagine.”
“If this fails, I’ll probably just sit at home and just contemplate my life slowly while going through self-therapy via video game to prevent myself from jumping from a very high place.”
Not the best answer to my girlfriend of 4 years, who, by the way, has been immensely supportive of the venture. She’s been amazing to me through all of my struggles.
And people have told me that such conviction is a good thing, but I don’t know what it is. For me it just seems like a curse. Sometimes I think to myself, why the hell am I putting myself through this torture? Why? Then I remind myself that I do it because I want to. I believe in it. It’s not even a matter of whether the company works or not. For me, stories are what I feed on. I can starve myself but I can’t live without reading or watching something interesting or intriguing. If everyone told me that it wouldn’t work, I would still get my fists up and charge right in.
So it’s just this cycle that I get into whenever I think about it. Why do I do it? -> because I believe it in -> Fuck it I’m doing it -> But damn it’s so hard -> So why do I do it?
I try not to think about it. Just keep going. Don’t think about it. Do this thing. Do the next thing. Do the next thing after that. So on and so forth.
Unfortunately, lately I had been thinking about it, and it was debilitating. I even thought about finally going to see that psychologist Sarah had been recommending.
So seeing how Mina and Chelsea really taking the idea on as if it was also their own, really made my heart jump a notch. As if someone put nitro fuel into my optimism engine.
After saying goodbye to them, MJ and I headed back to the bus station for our return trip to Montreal.
“Hey man,” I said. “Thanks for making that happen.”
“Nah,” he said. “We would’ve figured something out anyway.”
To me, startup is like trying to navigate out of a maze of tunnels only with a tiny candle in my hand. At first you start with your meager candle, feeling your way one stuttering step at a time. Then other people come along with their own candles, and that tiny light becomes bigger and stronger. One step becomes two, two becomes three until we lose count of how far we’ve come.
When we got back to Montreal, we were pretty much dead. We each went our way from there. We needed sleep for the next day.
I got home and I couldn’t sleep. I kept on thinking about our way forward. After the failed prototype I guess I was feeling nervous about launching a second version of Tabulit. It was the anxiety of putting out something subpar again.
But then again, we were on the verge of death so many times. Somehow James, MJ and I managed to keep ourselves above the water, keep it going.
Besides, people were still rallying behind us. Writers, publishers, and now artists. We had decided to add comics to our content list and already we were getting interest from a few artists.
I guess sometimes you just have to accept that the only solution is to see what happens. Take that step forward no matter how many obstacles there are in your way, whether they are real or imaginary.
“You worry too much Alex,” Sarah once told me. “Don’t spend your energy worrying. Spend your energy on doing things.”
Like I said, she’s been very supportive.
