Overview of 2018. - Year of learning

In late 2017. I came on a big crossroad in my life. I decided to quit my job in big corporate and move to entrepreneurship, to unknown.

In September 2017. I moved from ?ibenik to Zagreb with the intention to start a company, determined and highly motivated in startup's world.

To the end of the year, I gathered a team and we were focused on developing our web application for hiring a mystery shopper. The plan was to launch in January 2018. and we were on the track of it.

First Slap/Lesson (January-April)

January came and we were ready. Now, we needed to officially register the company. With all documentation, bureaucratic, fiscalisation and all other good staff, it took us one month to bring us alive. The company was registered in February but for providing services we were ready in March.

And finally, we had it, our first MVP (minimum viable product). We did it all by the lean startup books, market research, talking with potential customers, testing with them and validating the price. We formed a complementary team, nice website and functional MVP. That's it, let's go!

I remember that we were celebrating my birthday and betting when will the first customer come. Of course, I was the most optimistic and I confidently said: in three days.

Oh boy, I was wrong.

We got to the media, we get back to the users and we had a couple of beta users but after two months and around 500th mail to the potential customers we started to realize this is not working. As our target groups were restaurants and bars our assumption was that we are not getting to them so I had another brilliant idea.

Second Slap/Lesson (May)

From the side of employees, mystery shopping is perceived as something bad, negative and against them so we thought that that's the reason which is blocking us.

We made a concept that we called Reverse mystery shopping which will solve this problem. I wrote an article about it, Article - you can see how enthusiastic I was. The whole point was that now employees will recommend to their owners to use our service and if they pass our service quality check their owners committed to give a free day.

We did another research to back-up our assumptions and results were astonishing. Super fast we build a landing page, printed the brochures and headed to the streets. We gave a concept two weeks to survive. We presented it on the main square in Zagreb and we went to three shopping malls and talked with every employee we found.

We said that we need just one customer to keep pushing this concept from that event and three shopping malls. Nothing happened so we "killed" the concept.

Third Slap/Lesson (June-August)

We almost become desperate and then from nowhere, a message came to my LinkedIn inbox. One huge retailer spotted our activity on social media and they were just in the process of finding a new provider for mystery shopping services.

We sat at the meeting, presented our services and they were interested. But how interested, they wanted us to cover their shops in 4 countries on monthly basis. That was a huge deal for us, in just four months we would expand to 4 countries and revenue would be more than we projected for the whole year. We were thrilled and the only doubt from the client was can we handle that volume of services on monthly basis. Scheduled date of starting our contract was 1st September and we had a letter of intention.

Based on that we started developing internal software which would allow us to manage that volume of services and to back it up with fast service we started also to develop a mobile app for mystery shoppers. Combination of those two apps would allow us to be super fast and efficient.

As the deadline was tight and the amount of work was huge, we really pushed to the bare limits. I remember, one Sunday I worked 24 hours in a row like it was nothing.

Two months we were developing new software, expanding our base of mystery shoppers, hiring new people, solving bureaucratic issues to operate in four countries and we felt like finally, things are getting in our way. 

At the beginning of August one early morning a mail came. In the email, big retail stated that after long consultation, in the end, they decided to go with another big international company. We followed up with a call to check what happened but nothing changed. I was devastated. All the preparation we did and the investments are now for nothing. 

Like this wasn't enough, in the next 15 days, our technical team (three of them) which had minor ownership of the company started to question the future of the company. We were again at the crossroad, to continue we had to invest more money and take a risk going forward when is not looking good. We couldn't agree on certain terms, they didn't want to take additional risk and that was it. We split in mutual agreement and went separate ways.

And there was I, in the middle of the summer, after almost 6 months again at the very beginning, half of the team left, no clients and needed money.

This was definitely rock bottom and it wasn't a good time 
to be a CEO of Peekator.

Never give up! (September-December)

We got a couple of slaps and on the outside things didn't look good but there is one thing about me which stuck through my whole life and that is: 

I don't give up, never!

If they want to put me down, they need a lot more than a couple of slaps, they would actually need to kill me, that's the only way. So I continued, I collected the money and dug deep inside to figure out what to do next.

Through September I did a couple of moves which determined our year:

1. Got back to the cold sales

I just sat down and started calling everybody I knew personally and who could I found through social media.

2. Found new CTO

Mario Mucalo joined our team as new CTO. Mario has 10+ year in full stack development and has startup experience. But only that, Mario contributed to every other part of the company, his attitude and spirit really stick to us and he became a vital part of the team.

3. Finished mobile app for mystery shoppers

We didn't get that big client, but we finished the mobile app for mystery shopper which became our showcase and attraction for new clients.

4. Entered Startup Factory Zagreb 2018

Although, in the end we didn't win in the competition we got some huge benefits like great media coverage which lead us to become one of the startups to participate on four events held by HEP Opskrba. And that lead us to a couple of big clients and a lot of new leads.

I really love sales and our hard sales finally came back to us. After a whole year of trying a lot of different things, now we really knew exactly all the problems which our potential customers had, and best of all, we knew the solutions to them, cause we tried it all.

In one month we got clients and we got one really big client, a bank, in the size similar to that retail which cancelled at the end.

It was so good feeling achieving that, our team really deserved it and we were so happy providing services to our new clients. 

To the end of the year, we spent providing services to our clients, participating in Startup Factory Zagreb, developing internal software which is almost finished and preparing documentation for EU projects. 

We finished the year with 120.000 HRK in revenue, with new clients and a lot of them in making.

In December we did a really big analysis of everything we did, we defined all the process, the structure of the company and clear goals and activities for 2019. 

Everything we do, we do it to make it to our strategic goal and vision:

By 2025. we will be on the world market providing complete picture of customer experience.

Look@ - short episode

In August I was invited from Luka Vukovi? to join young perspective startup Look@ as COO to drive them to the world market. 

As my personal vision is to grow three different companies with different types of innovative products this invitation felt like it came in right time as they were early enough. 

It took two months for me to realize one particular thing. Despite I implemented some new principles, re-set the strategies for marketing and sales and pitched at one startup competition I just couldn't feel the passion and motivation I had at Peekator.

That was the reason why I had to leave Look@ in a friendly manner. Valuable lesson learned!

Self-improvement

One of my core values is learning, and I dedicate time every day for that purpose. Summary of 2018. is:

• around 20 books read in relative fields
• more than 50 meetups, conferences, workshops and etc.
• regularly watching video content, favourite youtube channel Valuetainment
• regularly listening to podcasts, this year emerged great Croatian podcast Surove Strasti
• finished first year of MBA on Cotrugli Business School

Also, I pitched (had public speeches) more than 10 times, appeared in various media more than 15 times and was nominated at CESA Awards in category "Founder of the year".

I'm so grateful for all the things which happened this year. It was an awesome year!

I learned more than ever, I improved more than ever and that's 
exactly how I want to spend every next year.