Learnings from twelve months of trying to launch a startup
This post is part of the Why Cyrius Failed series.
Entrepreneurship is hard.
This is because no one will tell you what to do in any of the dozens of decisions you have to make every day - although many people are advising you about what you should do.
This is clearly different from any other job where you follow your boss' instructions to reach some goal. When you are in command, it is up to you to guess what product people might need, how to build it, how to distribute it, and even how to get people to use it.
Without prior experience, not in startups nor in any other job, figuring all this out is, well, tough.
On the other hand, what you get to experience is full ownership of a project you can shape as you please, or at least towards the vision you have. This feeling of holding your destiny in your hands cannot be compared to another activity. It becomes your mission.
Here are 3 things I have learned from one year of managing my startup.
1 - No one cares about your stuff.
I keep being constantly surprised by how much what you have to offer matters less than who you are showing it to or even how you present it. What truly counts is solving your customers' pain points. The "how" is secondary.
For instance, at the beginning of our project, what we had to offer was really basic. Yet we had basically the same number of people interested in our product as now because of the way we are presenting it. We are selling features yet to be developed and results (improvement in the cybersecurity posture) yet to be proven.
But since our first customers were aligned with our vision, they cared more about what we would become than where we were at the moment. That means honing the perfect product is absolutely useless until you run out of early adopters. Then, and only at that moment, you can make slight improvements to seduce the rest of the market. But before that, your MVP has a long way to go - as soon as it solves your first customers' needs. What you want at the beginning is to find the simplest way to do that.
Another story that amazes me is how little your customers care about the insides of your product. One year after we started, we still operate with a low-tech product for practicality - and ok, a bit of a lack of skills, too. No one ever asked us to take a closer look under the hood. They do not care - as long as they are happy with the outcome. So for all the people thinking that they cannot launch their startup because they don't have the skills: you are the only one to care.
Takeaway: The "how" has no importance. Just solve the needs of the people you want to help.
2 - Distribution is everything.
What I wrote before does not mean that crafting a shitty useful MVP will be enough. Now that you have a product mixing your customers' desires and your vision, you still have to show it to them.
At the beginning, no one will come just because you have that wonderful product. What you will have to do now is put it in the many hands as possible to understand if and how it solves your prospects' problems. The thing is, as mentioned before, no one cares about your shiny new revolutionary thing. Except for your parents maybe, who don't even understand what you are doing.
What is key here is finding the right way to reach the right people at the right time. That is tremendously hard. No one is waiting for you to go on with life. So it requires plenty of energy to reach out to people and simply say, "Hi, I've done my homework and I think that my stuff could help you".
Of course, you don't say that out loud because, even if it's true, no one trusts a guy magically solving their problems. What you want is for people to figure out by themselves that you are the right person to give them a hand.
Takeaway: Show (don't tell) people how you are solving their problems.
3 - Money is how you judge success.
I often talk to fellow entrepreneurs, and I keep being amazed by how much success metrics vary depending on who you are talking to. Sometimes, you will hear that they have been building a product for months, and now it is "almost finished". Or that the retention rate is increasing, even if the pricing is not live yet.
The thing is, your company as a whole will not progress without money from your customers. Only people paying for what you have to offer is a reasonable sign that you are doing it right. And even so, a few thousand euros of monthly revenue is not even enough to talk about a product-market fit. Improving your product is great, keeping users on it is even better, but is someone actually paying for it?
In our own example, we have worked for two months to improve gamification features so that end users keep going back and using our platform. However, in our case, they do not pay for the product - security managers do. So, instead of focusing on pleasing people who won't spend a nickel for my stuff anyway, we now mainly focus on the one that holds the purse strings. And if these people pay for my product, I will be able to put money into my features to improve the UX. Not the other way around. Side note: Improving the end user's experience can be worth it if that is a criterion for the economic buyer.
Takeaway: Keep being laser-focused on your revenue metrics.