One year on
A year ago today I quit my job to pursue a long-held dream of starting a company that had the potential to make a truly global impact. Twelve months later, Yield Pop is still very much a work in progress. I often get asked: "are you happy with your choice?" and "what have you learned?". The answer to the first question is "absolutely, yes!" but that's a very personal choice. Startups are not for everyone. An answer to the second question requires a bit more elaboration … Here are a few observations.
Team
There are very few successful solo entrepreneurs. And let's face it, even if you fancy yourself as the next Mark Zuckerberg, it probably ain't gonna happen. Besides, even good ol' Zuck didn't do everything on his own. Starting a company is lonely and hard. So why make it lonelier and harder by going it alone? You need people who are as vested in the idea as you are, who will challenge your half-baked thoughts and improve the concept. Most importantly, you need people with drive, determination and resilience to share the good moments and the low points. At Yield Pop, I'm fortunate enough to have found Alex and Leo - two awesome guys who are equally crazy about this idea - to work with.
Multipliers
Every day we are reminded that the odds are stacked against us. Building an awesome product and making some money out of it, turns out to be just really damn hard. We can easily be derailed by distractions, rabbit holes, competitors, and worrying about all the unknowns. (We've even created a box where we put all the "good to have problems" that we agree not to worry about until they happen). So whether it's the right team, savvy investors, or a bright and cheery office space, I'm always looking for the big and little things which make life easier and propel us forwards. We need all the help we can get in multiplying our chances of success.
Bring key resources in-house
When I started out, I thought I could find a cheap enough outsourcing partner who would build the technology platform for me so that I could focus on marketing and customers. But, I quickly realised that this approach is not a multiplier but rather a detractor that can easily sink your startup dreams. Outsourcing doesn't work for a startup not because it's expensive or because the work is shoddy - though those things can be issues. Outsourcing doesn't work for one simple reason: your startup idea is just that - an idea.
Dave McClure defines a startup as: "a company that is confused about (i) what its product is, (ii) who its customers are, (iii) how to make money." In other words, your startup is a myriad of hypotheses carefully arranged into a house-of-cards. Your challenge is to try to test these hypotheses as rapidly as possible. But no matter how careful you are, many of these sensible sounding ideas will turn out to be wrong, and you're house of cards will collapse.
And that's where having an outsourcing partner doesn't help. If you have 100s of hypotheses in your card house, each one requiring you to build something which takes 3-4 weeks to specify, build and deploy, you're just not going to iterate fast enough to find product / market fit before you run out of energy or money, or both. So, get some technical guys on your team and if all else fails, learn to code yourself. It's not that hard. We did it. Which brings me to funding…
Funding
For most web startups at the idea stage, money really is not the issue. Many "idea" / business guys spend weeks writing an whizz-bang business plan full of grand projections and market-conquering jargon (don't worry ours was equally awesome and we've junked it so many times that we we gave up having one). They then go out and pitch it to 100s of potential investors. This is a full-time, soul destroying job. But I know plenty of guys who have done it and managed to scrape together $1m. Hats off to them right? Well, yes. However, the truth is even if you raise money your idea is still just an idea. You still have a collection of hypotheses to prove, most of which will be wrong. And when your idea needs to change you have to convince all your investors to follow you in a new direction. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to work for free forever either. But I would rather take a smaller amount of capital from smart investors who are multipliers and who want to come on the journey. It seems like a better strategy to focus on trying to make something work before asking people to trust in me and help me make it be bigger, faster, and better.
Just do it
One of the biggest differences between startup and corporate life is that there is no one else to do stuff for you. You want to go to the UK and visit potential customers, book your own flight. You need a tech guy on your team, go and find one. The only thing which matters each day is to answer the question: how do I move forward 1 step today. And if you don't turn on your laptop and get down to work, nothing happens. No one is going to do it for you. Working on a startup requires discipline, determination, and endurance. And it's impossible to truly switch off. Every day is a work day, but if you work everyday your mind / body / sprit will be toast in 3 months. Which means you need balance …
Balance
A refrain I hear a lot from friends is: "Facebook tells me you have moved Yield Pop HQ to the mountains". Or "Do you do anything but ski??" Of course, snapshots of me and my laptop in my empty kitchen late a night are about as exciting as the that picture of what your dog ate for breakfast. But I won't deny that including a good amount of downtime is an explicit part of my survival strategy. And it's been surprisingly useful. I've had some of my most productive and useful thoughts whilst hammering my bike along the trails of the Üetliberg.
Don't take it personally
It's incredibly hard not to take negative feedback personally when you commit so much time and emotional energy to an idea. But if you don't get any traction, if customers won't pay for you product, and your startup fails, you have to remember it's not because of your personal shortcomings. Maybe the idea wasn't any good. Or maybe the timing wasn't right. Or maybe you didn't have the right combinations of things to execute effectively. Just remember this: you tried. That's what counts.
