Mo’ Startups Mo’ Problems?

Studios are mostly run by real builders and operators. They’ve had success as founders themselves before or have a strong financial background. Whatever they are, they love to build, create, solve with others, and create new companies out of that passion.

Studios are able to build 1 or 2 companies each year at the start and ramp it up later. Within the studio space, after the 4th or 5th company, a studio is recognized as mature. The simple reason being you’ve repeated a process and have been able to finance the companies to get there, no simple feat.

But there’s a catch, focussing on 2 startups each year, one never gets there.

At Builders, we created a master plan of which one of the first bigger steps was to launch at least 2 companies a year. So whatever failure rate we had before launch, we needed to get to 2 per calendar year to prove that our way of working, eh.. works.

The failure rate was actually the thing that stopped us from reaching that goal. In the first few years you want to show success. You get great founders onboarded and you work with them until it works. Probably youre getting stuck in one idea longer than needed and trying another time with the same founder.

This is a good thing in many cases, but when you invalidate a business or 2 with each founder you won’t make the 2 per year deadline, ever. On top of that, there are also running companies that need your resources and attention as well. Doable but could be more fun.

The Cure?! Launch 4 startups each year

Wait, what? Yes, 4 per year. This guides the studio in way more strategic decisions and goals moving forward. Let me explain.

Whilst we still aim to be the best institutional cofounder ever and spend the time needed to build greatness, we’ve also looked at the operational model and got real, very real. To make the math work, we needed to work with more founders on real problems worth solving. So to build 4 companies, partnering with 8 to 10 sounds reasonable.

You see what just happend, thats seems like to much right? How big should the amount of incoming founders be to get to 8 good ones? Let me help you, big! And for that reason it doesnt even matter if you partner with founders to work on studio-led ideas or founder-led ideas. Getting the sheer numbers with good quality is now on top of the priority list.

How much does that hurt, i mean really!?

To get to these numbers, we now also partner with founders who bring their own idea’s to the table. Of course within our studio scope and with the same lens as normal. To make sure we’re partnering with motivated founders we;ll go deep in the origin story of the problem they want to solve. When theres no real pain, if it doesnt hurt enough for the customer, we’re out. This is also a very good founder filter to begin with, I’ll let you decide why that is.

Today, we’re on a trajectory to talk to 2.000 founders each year. With the right toggles the quality is there and we’re now able to have several founders in residence around the same time.

To make this workable for the founders, we’ve made our Playbooks into easy to read guides for each stage. It tells the story a venture builder at a studio normally would. It's the studio’s way of writing a roman to the founder. Our venture builder is still there to empower them, but theres a crystal clear story what one can do to validate any business case. This story now only takes 4 to 10 weeks.

The biggest win? When aiming to build 4 startups each year, you’ll battle-test your models way more, and the efficiency of the studio and its team members grows with spades. I might even dare to say it’s almost impossible to mature a studio when building just one company each year.

Get to know more about the inside story here. ??