Startups appeared on my radar in 2017.
It was that idea of creating something that would grow exponentially, impacting millions of people, that was fascinating. It offered a whole new perspective: Rather than complaining about how bad things are, you could do something about it and fix that problem for yourself and others by building a startup (and you might even get paid for it!).
While I started pursuing a Ph.D. in physics in 2017, I attended at the same time every startup event I could find. And after a brief and wild ideation phase, I fell for the first and most obvious problem I had encountered: my struggles in finding startup events.
Maybe others have that problem as well? Maybe they are looking for gardening or yoga events? Maybe I could solve that problem once and for all? I came up with a phenomenal startup idea: Why not start an event platform that would gather all events in one place and match people with events using machine learning? Spoiler ahead: We never got to the point that we trained a machine learning model.
I called a former school friend of mine, who was now studying computer science, found another computer science student at a local startup event, and together the three of us set out to take on Facebook events and build the platform “What’s On Today.”
In the following months, we started coding up what we deemed the core functionality of an event platform: storing, retrieving, and displaying events. Or, I should better say my two co-founders started coding, while I could just as well have made coffee – I had never dealt with web development before, and I quickly had to learn that knowing how to solve differential equations in physics with Python wouldn’t magically enable me to program web applications.
Since learning new programming languages and frameworks takes time – you simply need to put in the hours – I was practically useless on the technical side. My co-founders picked our tech stack to their liking – ReactJS for frontend and Scala for backend – and I realized only later what a fancy and niche choice Scala was.
While my co-founders were coding up our prototype, I had the pleasure of gathering event data manually and attending some of the startup events myself, like the Business Idea Slam Dresden 2017. There I was, standing in front of the audience, pitching our glorious project, and only by then reflecting on why the heck I, a physicist, was working on an event platform rather than some deep tech project that would have been closer to my expertise and identity.
After my pitch, several people approached me, inquiring about What’s On Today. And even stranger, some went on to join us as co-founders! A resounding success that led our team to grow from three to five to seven – at its peak, more than ten students were working on this project for free.
Then the intricacies of managing a large team became quickly evident: lots of opinions, lots of overhead, and too many people around the table who were promised shares without the proper motivation or mindset to found a startup.
In the following months, our tech team did a marvelous job coding up a highly engineered version of our platform. Not that we couldn’t have built a prototype using WordPress within a matter of days and tested it with users. But we didn’t even think of it! Our team took it as a personal challenge and learning opportunity to code up a full-fledged event platform where users could log in, contribute new events or save them for later.
Unfortunately, event dates tend to expire at some point – when the event is over – and we soon reached the point where our capacity to add new events to replace outdated ones reached a limit. The remedy was clear: we had to raise some money to employ students that should gather more event data!
With hardly anyone other than friends, family, and fools visiting our website, we decided it was an excellent time to pitch to investors – and approached some at a local startup conference in spring 2018. It was the point where the matrix started to crack, and we realized we were as far from building a startup as an ostrich is from flying in the sky.
Yes, we had beautifully engineered a web application – but we haven’t spoken with a single potential customer, nor was anyone interested in our platform. We haven’t had the slightest idea about how to monetize it.
The investors looked at us with pity. Due to endless distractions, it took until the end of the summer to process their feedback, but we got the point: that’s not how it works.
When the fall came, the best people were the first to leave our team since they had the greatest opportunity cost. And the remaining team members got stuck in endless debates about who should take over shares from the leaving co-founders – dividing the pie when there was no pie to eat.
In 2019, I moved away from Dresden, and What’s On Today faded away. In retrospect, I did everything wrong that you can do wrong:
- Jumping at the very first problem that came my way – in a space where I had no previous experience (event platforms and web development) and no “unfair advantage” for building a startup.
- Not asking myself, has anyone tried this before? How come it didn’t work?
- Having no clear target customer group and business model in mind, and even worse: not talking to customers.
- Not taking distribution, monetization, scalability, and anything other than product into account.
- Choosing an exotic tech stack (i.e., Scala) and coding up what could have been built, e.g., with WordPress a lot easier and quicker.
- Scaling up the team prematurely and getting stuck with too many opinions.
Here are some more things I learned that way:
- I learned to pitch any bullshit to any audience.
- I learned to inspire and gather people and deal with team dynamics.
- I learned yet again that you need to put in the hours to learn a new skill.
- Any idea of the form “A platform for all X” is hazardous as it shows a severe lack of focus.
- The best people are the first to leave the sinking ship – and saying goodbye is hard.
Here are a few things one should keep in mind when building a startup:
1) Align the startup with your values and identity: You can do this exercise yourself by thinking about what you’d like to work on and what you would be comfortable pitching on stage or to other people.
2) Find a target market you are excited about – I can highly recommend the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship.
3) Talk to customers – a lot! Build something ten people want; I can highly recommend the book The Mom Test.
4) Build a minimum loveable product, start lean, keep the number of founders as low as reasonable, and fail cheaply – you get the idea.
5) Choose a project in a domain where you got an edge over other people – I learned this through Entrepreneur First.