To Those Sitting in Their Cubicle Dreaming of Starting Up: Here's My 15-Year "Truth".

There is no deep meaningful growth without deep meaningful suffering.

Incubating a startup (part-time, only weekends, or ALL-IN) is the ultimate form of suffering and... supreme ephemeral joy. It's the ultimate drug.

Why? Because it's your baby. It's you versus the world. You live and die on that hill every day. Because your life depends on it. If it grows or dies - lives will be affected.

This is my 5th startup. Each one was radically different, with varying degrees of failure and success.

To start on this journey, I had to leave my beloved NYC where I grew up, my family, dear friends, and a plethora of opportunities in tech that you can't even imagine (in 2006)... to move to a 2nd world country (Buenos Aires).

Why?

1. To significantly lower my cost of living
2. To afford the cost of developers I would need to staff
3. To find hyper-focus in a quieter, non-toxic environment

My first startup: Mybooq

A SaaS that created bespoke Flash Portfolios for Creatives - never even launched after 1.5 years of working on it part-time. (Lesson: it was perfectionism at its worst, plus choosing the wrong business model... apparently Creatives preferred sharing their portfolios on Behance instead of hosting their own privately with competition one click away... who would have thought?)

The second one, ConvertMyFlash (a short success capitalizing on my deep FLASH tech experience and the mass extinction wave it left behind)

The third, JuicyCanvas, a social-commerce marketplace for Artists/Remixers redefining mass-consumption. It had even patent-pending tech to empower non-creative consumers to remix copyrighted designs and print them onto lifestyle products, all drop-shipped in days. Coincidentally, Canva.com launched the same year (huge funding) with the same core concept but applied it to SMB use-cases. Apparently, getting traction and changing basic consumer shopping behavior is hard as fuck when you have no marketing budget.

A last-minute pivot to a new service that hand-makes artwork for your team/offices was much, much easier. This would not have been possible if we hadn't ground through JuicyCanvas and figured out print-on-demand vendors.

And a few years after, as I got older and became a more responsible dad, something practical to solve my lazy pain points as a UI/UX designer: A SaaS that Automates Visual Site Mapping Visualsitemaps.com , and VisualFlows.

Now in its 7th year and growing with a tiny, steadfast team.

Ok, enough about me. This is about you... all of you.

• All the failures are priceless learnings, better than an MBA.
• With every startup idea I chose, I made sure it was aligned with my beliefs and I deeply enjoyed who the end-user and industry I was catering to. ( This is important on many levels ).
• Try not to multi-task. It's a myth. Your focus is your competitive advantage.
• Provide live-chat support to all your customers every day. Your competition won't, and it will inform your product 100x more than any survey you send out.
• You will get advice from everyone... use your gut in the end. It may end up wrong, that's fine (see point #1). Don't beat yourself up over it. Tell yourself or your partner "here's what I learned..."
• Be generous with your v1.0 beta in exchange for deep product feedback. The users are rooting for you and want to feel like they are helping you get there. They will advocate for you if you invest time in them and LISTEN. Don't be stingy.
• You have assumptions and some biased insights. Not any sense of overall "Truth" because that's a moving target. Luckily, you can scientifically stress test most of them. The results won't be perfect, but they will guide your hunches. In the end, there may not be a great choice to make... don't wait, just do it and course-correct along the way.

You can do it alone, but find a monthly advisor for check-in support and accountability. Time flies when you're riding the dragon.

And remember, you can always go back to 'normal' mode, and maybe have a nice little story to tell your kids

May the Shwartz be with you.??

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