Check out Phase 2, my podcast about quitting my job to find more fulfillment in my work life. You can find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Below is a transcript of the latest episode. If you haven’t heard episode 1 you may want to check that out first.
Last episode, I explored my past to find inspiration on what type of work to focus on next and I concluded that trying to build a business might give me the freedom and flexible lifestyle I’m looking for.
Startup Advice
I’ve read and heard all kinds of advice on entrepreneurship over the years. I’ve known a handful of people who have started successful companies, from people who boostrapped their own ecommerce businesses over a decade and others who raised a bunch of VC money and had successful exits.
There seem to be a few fundamental principles I keep hearing.
The first is to find something that solves a real problem, not something you imagine to be a problem. Y Combinator is probably the most prominent startup accelerator and investors in the world and they talk about this a lot: their slogan is “Build something people want”. CEO Michael Seibel strongly urges founders to focus on a problem they personally have so you at least know there’s an actual market rather than an imagined one. The trick is to find out if the market is bigger than just you. Also, focusing on your own problem helps founders iterate faster because they can intuitively prioritize what features to focus on and to test whether they are actually solving the problem or not.
The second principle is to have a concrete plan for acquiring customers and ideally build that into the core product flow in some way. If you need to pay to acquire customers from the get-go and you have a market of sufficient size, competition will quickly come and make that channel unprofitable. There are many great dead products that no one knows about because companies couldn’t cut through the noise to find customers.
I talked to a friend who launched 3 successful consumer apps over the past 10 years. He has built the ultimate lifestyle company of 2 people, generating tens of thousands of downloads a month with photo and video apps. He credits 3 main things to their success
- A high quality product
- Getting into the Android appstore as one of the most solid options in their category
- A naturally social product where the purpose is to generate video slideshows for friends on IG, which gives their product instant distribution. 97% of their customers are organic after many years in business which is astounding.
The final principal is to create a Minimum Viable Product as soon as possible to validate your hypothesis and start iterating. To do that, I’m going to need to build a team.
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Recruiting Co-founders
My plan with this company is to try and bootstrap the initial prototype to see if we can get traction before seriously considering investors. I’ve received advice from several people that the longer I can avoid raising money and the more traction I can show in the product, the better my terms are likely to be if I do attempt to find investors. Doing that is going to require me to convince 1 or 2 engineers to join me as cofounders to help build an initial prototype of the product.
I started to reach out to former engineers I’ve worked with over the years. I’m looking for someone who is obviously skilled, trustworthy and most importantly, interested in the area I’m focused on. This person also needs to have the free time and motivation to work on a sometime on evenings or weekends or is insane enough to quit their day job and join me.
Its pretty difficult to find someone that meets all these requirements. Skilled people are in demand already earn a comfortable income.
I did video calls with about 10 former coworkers to pitch them on my project. With each one, I shared my business plan, customer research and product vision. I find the best way to pitch developers – all of whom have unusually high BS detectors – is to stick to the facts and have a lot of humility about what I don’t know at this stage – which is a lot. Most of the people I pitched thought the customer problem I’m focused on was a real and significant one, which helped me build confidence.
One of the first people I pitched was my friend Jen who’s an experienced engineering manager that I worked with previously. She could relate very strongly to the problem, was excited about the product idea and was also interested in doing something different from her day job which she was being increasingly bored with. She agreed to join the project but planned to keep her day job which means I get maybe 8 hrs a week of her time.
Jen and I get along well. We’re both Canadian, she’s very logical, direct and we’re both pretty intense people so when we do something we go all the way. I was pretty excited to have landed my first partner after only a few weeks.
A few weeks later, I met with Viktor, who is an engineer I worked with 7 years ago. When we worked together back then, he was a 20 something digital nomad traveling with his girlfriend while working remotely. I remember being really impressed with him. Even though he was inexperienced, he delivered tons of code, was really enthusiastic about learning new stuff and unafraid to jump into any part of the codebase to make things happen, which seems like a good characteristic to have in a startup.
When I reached out to him over email, he got back to me quickly to say he was interested. Over a Zoom call I learned that he’s now married to that girlfriend and they have a 3 year old daughter. He works as a freelance engineer, has a flexible schedule and he’s the time for a side project. He was really excited about the idea and said he’s in too.
After Viktor signed on I was pretty much on Cloud 9. Within 3 weeks of starting this project, I had identified a meaningful problem, talked to a dozen potential customers to refine it, figured out a potential solution, recruited two cofounders who had the right tech skills to build it. I was crushing it!
The next day, I setup a project kickoff to introduce Jen and Viktor to each other. We talked about our personal goals on the project, key risks, requirements for an MVP and sketched out a rough plan of responsibilities. We talked about how much time each of us could commit to the project. I’m in it full time, and we agreed that Jen and Viktor would each dedicated 8-10 hrs per week in evenings and weekends. We agreed that Viktor would drive the server development and Jen would do app development, while I would work on product strategy, design and growth. We agreed that before setting up a formalized corporate structure, we needed a trial period of working together so we could get to know each other. I setup a Slack team room, GitHub and all the latest software tools – we were rolling!
That night I stayed up way too late – I was buzzing with excitement about us getting off the ground. Browsing Netflix, I stumbled upon a show called Halt and Catch Fire.
It takes place in Dallas Texas in 1983 – the start of the PC industry. Its about 3 people who start a company to reverse engineer the IBM PC in the race to build the first laptop. That was Joe MacMillan, the eccentric and unstable product manager who comes up with the crazy idea and convinces two engineers and investors to join him. He sells them with a bold vision and salesmanship but throughout the show you can’t tell if he knows what he’s talking about or is just another flimsy hack. Is the universe trying to tell me something?
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A Rocky Start
Within the first few days, Jen quickly started checking code and the app was starting to take shape with visible progress daily.
However, the backend pieces were going pretty slowly. Viktor promised the first version of the service by end of the week, which came and went without any updates. On Monday I checked in on the status and he mentioned it was going to deliver a few days later than expected. When it was ready on Tuesday, he wasn’t able to deploy because of some permissions issue. After that was resolved, his delivery wasn’t quite what we were expecting and needed to be reworked. Then we fell into a pattern: each day, Victor promised things were ‘nearly ready’ but they didn’t end up materializing. Since he’s based in eastern Europe, we only had an hour or two of overlapping time online which made a miscommunication or missed milestone doubly painful.
Finally after a couple weeks of failed milestones Jen shared her frustration to me about Victor. She was concerned about his broken promises and whether he was actually committed to the project. I assured her that he had delivered results when I worked with him previously and that we needed to give him some time to get settled. I told her I’d have a talk with him to find out what was going on.
I asked Viktor to do a zoom call with me the next day. When we met, I asked him how he thought things were going. He thought they were going fine. I shared my thoughts: that things weren’t going well, that I was hoping we would be moving faster and that Jen had some concerns about the quality of the deliverables so far. He was pretty defensive during the conversation and thought it was an unfair assessment. When we started going to into details about what had gone awry the last few weeks, he agreed it wasn’t ideal. I asked him if he actually had the time to work on this project – he assured me he did but hadn’t realized the urgency that Jen and I felt. He also requested that in the future, we should bring up concerns earlier rather than waiting weeks before raising them. I agreed.
Another 4 days passed and Viktor was supposed to deliver a significant update to the service. When it was delivered, it didn’t work as expected. Viktor was offline and out of communication much of the following day. Jen and I met up the next day and agreed that this was not working: we needed to make a change
Working in the corporate world, I’ve had to deal with employee performance issues several times, both as a manager and with peers. Usually, it’s a slow process starts with clear feedback on deliverables, followed by 1:1s, managers and after a period of time to turn things around, a formal HR process. Evidence is compiled. Timing is carefully weighed. This process can take months.
In this company, we don’t have the luxury of months to make a decision. I have a few months to get this thing off the ground and we need to be kicking ass from the start, not limping along. I need two partners who are as committed as me and it was clear to me that Viktor wasn’t in that space. My options were to either have another 1:1 to share feedback and give more time to improve or to cut our losses and move on immediately.
We made the painful decision to part ways with Viktor after only 3 weeks of working together. This was difficult for several reasons. I had brought Viktor into the project, considered him a friend and knew that he the skills to help us be successful. On the other hand, he wasn’t delivering after 3 weeks, without signs of improvement. He was starting to frustrate Jen and I couldn’t afford to have her lose motivation in the project. I didn’t quite understand what was the root cause of the problem, but in some ways it didn’t matter. I setup a Zoom meeting with him the next day.
I rehersed the conversation before we met. I wanted to phrase things in a way that was clear but also kept us on positive terms. I had flashbacks to people I’ve had to let go in the corporate world. Of course in those cases, I had an HR rep and manager coaching me on what to say and what not to say. This time, I’m on my own.
When we finally met, his video wasn’t working due to a poor connection, which made it easier I guess – I didn’t actually have to look him in the eye. I began by thanking him for agreeing to work with us for the past few weeks and for his contributions so far. But that things aren’t working well as far as delivery of his part and that since I had urgency on this project, I don’t’ think we can work together going forward. Any software he wrote is his to own and that we will not use any of it going forward.
He told me he was disappointed but not that surprised with my decision. He thanked me for the opportunity and to keep him updated on progress. He made it super easy on me, which, in some ways makes it more painful to end it. He was a respectful person to the very end, which, I guess is one of the reasons I wanted to work with him in the first place.
1 month in and shit is getting real.
Samir Lakhani 