Top 8 Practical Entrepreneurship Lessons I Learned (Hard Way)

This article aims to give you some insights about entrepreneurship from an inside perspective of an Information Systems and Computer Engineering student. I will conciliate my reading experience of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries with my participating experience in European Innovation Academy 2017 (EIA). My goal is to you to take the most out of the reading experience. Take advantage of the “Takeaways”. Useful resources are at the end of the article.

Full article on Medium.

Get comfortable and grab your popcorn, we are about to start our small journey into the student-entrepreneur world.

I like to think that big adventures start when you least expect them.

It all started with an e-mail at 17th June, from my university — Técnico Lisboa. They had scholarships to offer, concerning this event, thanks to a partnership with Santander Universidades. I applied. I had no idea of the big opportunity I just took.

I managed my time in order to conciliate my studies, my extracurricular activities, and preparation to EIA. Following the event in the early-stage allowed me to think about my own idea. If I didn’t prepare my participation on EIA, I couldn’t execute my vision.

Takeaway#1 — Manage your time wisely. If you do, you have time for everything.

So, before the event, I contacted some participants about my vision and my goals — the SmartHome idea. SmartHome is a solution in the area of domotics, that could learn how to take care of its inhabitants and maximize its efficiency, taking decisions of its own. My strategy was to unite emphatic people with different mindsets and experiences, passionate about technology.

Takeaway  #2 — Grab every single opportunity you have, it might lead you to an interesting place.

But, before going further, what is a startup?

An organization that is meant to create a new service or product, under conditions of extreme uncertainty — by Eric Ries, creator of the  LEAN startup movement

In my opinion, being an entrepreneur includes:

• Create connections
• Make a difference
• Get things done
• work hard and having fun in the process.

If all at the same time, better. Do you think you are an entrepreneur?

Back to EIA, I’m going to focus on the team. I had, at that time, two confirmed persons in my team. The purpose of the first day was to form teams. That was particularly challenging, because we had to share our vision and values, and, at the same time, “sell” our idea. Five members. In the meantime, one of the members dropped out. I think the decision of dropping out at such an early stage was responsible and transparent.

Takeaway  #3 — Don’t take things as granted. Like Shannon Wu said, “Commitment is often driven by everyone’s personal motivations. Understanding what drives each member is key to building a dedicated team”.  Motivation is absolutely crucial for the success of such an unstable environment such as a startup.

The team: Espen Hinsch, a successful entrepreneur, founder of HappyNorwegian. Andres Villanueva, outstanding student, and ambassador of Morning Brew. Radina Kraeva, Events Leader at StartItSmart, a startup accelerator. We stuck together from the beginning until the end.

We all shared the same passion for technology and changing the world to a better place — The so-called startup-vision.

From the very beginning I ensured everyone felt comfortable on the team — Even though I had come with the idea, I made clear the fact that everyone had the same responsibility. And this was great, because everyone contributed equally to the team, with no distinction.

Takeaway #4 — Empowering people may be an excellent way to motivate a team. Caring about their objectives, vision, and passions leads to a good team environment.

The first week — Customer Development

On this week we were taught about problem-solution fit, customer development, customer validation, and prototyping.

Throughout this week, helping each other — and also other groups — was important to gather feedback on our idea.

Although everyone was very motivated with the original idea, we began to realize it was not executable — at least not in such a small period like three weeks. So we’ve made the first difficult, brave decision: we had to change the idea — to pivot. Next step was to focus on problems people have at their homes. We brainstormed, but the conclusions were not relevant. Espen decided to interview some participants and we came to realized an interesting thing: all of them had sleeping or noise issues.

From SmartHome, a domotics solution to Zlipy — a smart earplug. Even though we were satisfied with the new idea, we lost a lot of time because we entered in what I call “The Zlipy cycle”.

After some iterations, we stuck to one idea that seemed the most reasonable: Zlipy is a smart earplug that helps you sleep better.

Takeaway  #5 — Fail fast, fail cheap. Execution is, ultimately, what the startup is about. The idea without execution is nearly nothing. Pivot can be difficult and frustrating, and the earlier you fail, the better: the fewer resources you are going to lose. In our case, we lost precious time.

Once we agreed on the product it was time to start study our customers thoroughly.

Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. — Eric Ries

On the customer validation day, we went to the streets of Lisbon asking people about their problems sleeping. We tried to approach them somewhat like this:

Good morning! We are conducting a study to verify if there are sleeping problems in…

It was difficult to reach people, because they thought we wanted to sell — in fact, we just wanted to listen to their problems. We tried another approach:

Good morning! We are students, and we would like to know if you struggle with sleeping. What do you do to solve your problem?

From there on, people were much more receptive to what we had to ask. And the feedback was valuable, — we actually thought we validated the problem — since people from every age suffered from sleeping issues. Some related to noise, others not really.

From 100 people we interviewed (directly and through questionnaires), 26% had noise problems in the area they lived, 36% had problems falling asleep and 28% used to wake up in the night, having difficulties to fall asleep again.

We had some data from which we could take conclusions. People were having a serious problem, which affected their lives. The question “Should this product be built?” seemed to have a positive answer. But we didn’t realize one thing at the moment: it wasn’t serious enough for people to do something about it or to change the methods they used.

Takeaway  #6 — Pay attention to the details. The big picture is not everything. Details are extremely important. We missed a detail: it seemed that some people would prefer to keep the problem rather than spending money on a solution.

We sought advice from one of the speakers, Teemu Arina, a bio-hacker expert. The feedback was not clear: there was no easy way of telling if the product could work — it was a shot in the dark. We received a 5th team member, Jo?o Silva, which was also from Técnico Lisboa.

So, after a fairly long team talk, we realized that we had the problem validated, but not our solution. Our strategy was based on risky assumptions. It’s all right, it is common in the startup world. Every business starts with assumptions.

Nonetheless, it is important to validate the assumptions as quickly as possible. Our value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis were not validated. We didn’t know if we were able to deliver meaningful value to the customer. We were even more uncertain if we could grow — sell the product. Although the best thing would be pivoting right away, it was too late.

With no other path than keep going, I created the mockup of the app which would connect Zlipy with smartphones.

Here is the summary of the first week of the event:

The second week — Marketing Campaign / Product Sprint

This week was focused on marketing, growth, and validation.

We constructed the revenue model, marketing strategy, and marketing campaign for Zlipy.

We were taught techniques of growth and how to launch the business. Since we didn’t have a product — not even an MVP — we focused on pre-subscription campaigns and dissemination of the product. The ideal situation would be applying the Build-Measure-Learn cycle. According to the LEAN Startup, the cycle means to evaluate hypothesis (some based on assumptions).

I would like to put some emphasis on the Measure phase. A startup has to know exactly where it is right now, confronting the hard truths and customers negative feedback. We can establish some steps that allows you to grow your company faster:

1. Using an MVP to establish real data on where the company is at the moment.
2. Make adjustments towards the ideal state.
3. When a pivoting happens, the process is started over again.

Measuring helps a team being focused on producing such an outcome that the customers perceive as valuable. Unfortunately, we couldn’t apply this cycle.

We made a commercial, stated our vision, mission, values, and presented the physical prototypes developed by Espen on the exposition day.

We presented Zlipy to other teams, investors and mentors. We received feedback.

Third week — Funding & Pitching

We learned about Intellectual Property (IP), basic Financials, funding and Pitch Preparation.

Concerning IP, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to protect our product with a patent. A trademark would have to be registered if we were determined to work on the idea.

Andres worked on the financials. Our Hardware mentor, Indrek Rebane said that we needed about half a million dollars to develop the piece. Zlipy would cost about $80.

After that, we worked on the pitch. This is an important task that requires a lot of focus: your pitch is your sales pitch. You could have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t execute it (present it to the audience, in this case), you might end up putting the whole team in check.

An idea without execution is an hallucination — Thomas Edison

We prepared our story and discussed the attitude we were supposed to have.

After everything was set up, we pitched our idea, with the nice-looking presentation made by Radina.

We pitched to Pedro Falc?o, from LC Ventures, and he appointed some critiques to our product: the high-cost of production, low margins, and difficulty to reach the potential customers. After defending the product like there was no tomorrow, the overall feedback was actually good, but:

Takeaway #7 — “Anyone will tell you that your idea is great if you annoy them long enough”. Hilarious. True.

We dreamed big and worked hard. And we also failed. It was a great experience. We all learned a lot. Give yourself time and availability to fail. Fail is not necessarily bad, as long as you don’t fail when you shouldn’t fail.

Takeaway #8 — Be tolerant of all mistakes in the first time. But you shouldn’t ever allow the same mistake to be made twice.

Entrepreneurship movements are happening and becoming the status quo. I would like to end this article with one of my favorite quotes:

You dreamt big — now dream  even bigger! — EIA

When you are surrounded by inspiring people, you feel the need of improving yourself and go further. I couldn’t be prouder of this team.

If you are dreaming about something, JUST DO IT. End the reading and go for it. Life is too short to throw away opportunities, or not fulfilling our dreams. It might be difficult to start but bear in mind that it gets easier.

Dear reader, “just do it”.

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Acknowledgements

Concerning resources: my friend Gapur, made an incredible work assembly all presentations, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles of the speakers. Check his work here.

Following the steps of my friend Charlie, I’ve started to read books (one book a week challenge). The kick-something entrepreneurs from Técnico. Tomás Marques, a high-school student. Has a company and he is the national champion of powerlifting. Radina and Espen, successful entrepreneurs. Andres, future big boss, for sure.

I would like to thank all mentors for their guidance and teachings. Some of them really distinguish themselves. Special thanks to Danielle D’Agostaro, Shannon Wu, Dagmar Eisenbach, Tiffine Wang, Andrea Frahm, Vania Mendon?a and Tomás Alves for helping me review this article. They are awesome human beings willing to help a friend.

Thanks to my team mentors, Indrek Reban, Jana Kukk, Roman Vasjoho, Jesse Leimgruber, Filipe Fernandes and Sérgio Vieira. Your advice was unique and very precious. Thank you, Daniel Vila Boa, and Teemu Arina. Anand Kulkarniand Shannon Wu presented brilliantly. Duncan Davidson presented like a boss. Pedro Falc?o and Pedro Ferreira thanks for your feedback on my initial idea, SmartHome. Thanks to Aneesh Zutshi for the coaching and support. Thanks to Ed Quinones and On Lu for the brilliant advice on IP (great presentations, also!). Thanks to Ross Kingsland for the tips on growth hacking.

All volunteers were super friendly and competent. Without them, the event couldn’t be possible. It was a pleasure to meet them. Thank you, awesome volunteers. And, of course, thanks to Instituto Superior Técnico, Banco Santander (Santander Universidades) and European Innovation Academy, for providing such an incredible experience.

Thank you!