August-2021 - The founder journey
Last week, I was talking to my team on a Friday, and for the first time in a while, I stopped to think of everything we had achieved and I was baffled. In a mere 4 months since our last investment round, we had:
- Pivoted 2 times
- Found a new niche market
- Prototyped our product
- Gotten more than 700 people interested in using it.
And those are just a few of the highlights. I bring this up not to brag but to explain my realization that this journey of founding a company, it's gonna many challenges but at the same time, a LOT of learnings.
When you stop to think of the books and articles you've read on successful founders, it's always "I had this idea since the start, we executed, it was perfect, I'm successful " while very seldomly do they talk about the many steps they actually had to take, the struggles, the doubts and very commonly, the fears. (The exception being Hard thing by hard things, my favourite book)
On the other hand, in more practical terms, even books considered "bibles" of startups, don't manage to even touch the surface. For example "Lean Startup" did a great job of introducing a lot of the terms we use today, and showcasing the learn-test-pivot methodology. But the reality is quite different from the way the method was presented, with a lot of uncertainty, how to actually test and many other issues that come up.
That's why I decided to write this series of articles. Every month, I will highlight my main struggles, learnings and highlights. My main point here is to write from the heart with no filters, focusing on emotions, rational thoughts and more. If I impact at least one person, that's what matters :)
The content will always be delivered as small "pills" of learnings, sometimes longer but most of the time direct to the point. Let's go on then!
Don't be afraid to take your time
In the startup world, you are always being pushed to rush, test fast, learn fast, and so on. And when you compare it to the corporate world, it makes sense. But I noticed I was pushing myself to do things so fast that I threw any actual quality down the drain.
The biggest learning I've had is that taking the extra week to deliver something 10x better is worth it. Especially when you are talking about customer-facing launches. People want high-quality stuff, this doesn't mean you spend months on it, but pick one specific niche and feature and do that well.
A tangible example of this is one of the free tools we released at Nobe. We really took our time to understand our customer, their needs and how they solve them today. And then delivered a quite good experience with the limited resources we had.
Be careful when listening to others
Apart from people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, our ideas are quite fragile. There are many vulnerabilities and weaknesses in them, that we haven't quite ironed out. When we received feedback at the start of our journey, we would pivot or change paths very quickly, based only on the opinion of 1 or 2 people. This caused us to go crazy and never give enough time to something.
No code is the best thing that's happened
We built WAY too fucking early. We had no idea what we were building, yet we were doing it. I would change that initially in so many ways and probably a lot of lessons came from there, but I want to share that, please look into no code. There are many products, like Bubble (which we use), which allow you to deliver a decent experience in no time. If you are testing ideas, please, don't build stuff in code, just a simple tool to do it faster.
