Back to Business
It’s business time.
I’ve been embarking on various entrepreneurial adventures since the age of 21 when I got my first ‘professional’ job. As a new graduate I knew that the 9 - 5 (or midnight as it was in my case) life was not for me. After learning the industry standards and the company standards it was just a matter of churning out the same projects, the same designs and working with similar clients - this was not exciting!
Some of these business ventures were slightly successful and others less so. Around 2 years ago I found myself interested and encouraged to join my partner in a technology startup. A startup.
2 years on we were still starting-up.
During these 2 years I have gone through many iterations of my relationship with the term startup. I actually didn’t know what a startup was when I first embarked on one but I knew it was something special for sure, it even deserved it’s own special explanatory word - startup. For a while I was naively and happily telling friends and family that I am working on a startup when asked the ‘what (strange) thing are you up to these days?’ question. It was particularly comforting that lots of other people were working on startups, there was a community to belong to, meetups to attend and conferences to go to. A safe startup place for me to exist in.
Of course, I also had some times of doubt, especially as my background was not in technology, I would ask my technical co-founder how we would make money and he would confidently reply we get lots of users and get investment. This answer didn’t always sit comfortably with me but I put that down to my lack of experience in the field. In conversations with my father, a shrewd business man, I would explain the users and investment phenomena and he would look at me with a confused expression. The further I got into my explanation I would also start losing confidence. There was a basic question that I couldn’t answer - what are you selling?
The peak of this startup confusion came when I was in a hypnotherapy session (to gain more clarity on the whole matter) and I couldn’t answer the question, how will you know your business is a success? Two things made me uncomfortable during this session; firstly the hypnotherapist was calling my startup a business and secondly he couldn’t understand the ‘lots of users’ answer. In the end, he helped me out and said ‘how about if you see your monthly revenue increasing?’ Yikes!… increasing?… I didn’t have one to begin with!!
Things were beginning to annoy me; the safe startup community along with it’s self-importance, the focus on users rather than revenue, the constant pitching to gain potential investment. Getting an investor on board was the thing that sat most uncomfortably with my thoughts on why I wanted to start a business in the first place. The last thing I wanted was to embark on the excitement, opportunity and risk only to have a boss in another guise.
It transpired that my co-founder and I had spent the last 2 years on a very creative technology project, not a startup (whatever that is) and definitely not a business. We took the decision to shelve the project. I learnt a hell of a lot about the industry and about myself. The learning is still going on.
I am now working on another business and I will never call it a startup. Calling it a startup adds a layer of abstraction that I don’t want. Calling it a business forces me to think about all the factors that require a business to function from the start.
Of course there’s a place for research projects that go on to become financially successful without having the clarity of what kind of business it is from the beginning. I do suspect that this is a rarer occurrence than starting a business that could go on to be sustainable and profitable.
Lastly, in closing, these are merely my thoughts and experiences and in no way intended to be advice. If some of my business adventures resonate with you or help you along your path then great, if you disagree then that’s great too.
