Today is the end of my adventure as a co-CEO of Hovy.earth ?? (link)
It has been a roller-coaster journey since May 2022 when we started discussing about the start-up ideas until today ??
Here is all I have been through & what I learned:
- Brainstorming ideas: Research striving businesses matching our preferences
- Define our services: Bundling different proven services together so our business has differentiators
- Business plan: Learn how to create a business plan & build our
- Finding unique name: It’s important for marketing & SEO reasons, I did a lot of research & attempts to find our name, Hovy, which means Blue & Green in Guarani (one of the official languages of Paraguay)
- Designing the logo: Leverage my Photoshop skills to design our logo defining our spirit & our visual branding?
- Legal company creation: Deal with the challenging legal processes to create a company in France
- Website blueprint: Design a detailed blueprint of the website in order to show it to the different web agencies
- Web agency selection: Select the right agency based on their skills, their experiences, their proposal & the feeling
- Web project management: Follow-up the web development on a weekly basis
- Crisis management: Deal with web agency on a challenging project timeframe (from 6 weeks planned to 7 months achieved) & make sure the web agency matched our requirements/requests
- Web development: Learn about Webflow & Bubble web technologies in order to improve our website & web app
- Launch the start-up: Think & prepare our communication for an impacting launch
- SEO: Research & apply SEO best-practices to get more visibility on search engines
- Community management: Learn the best social strategies & optimize the content creation & the scheduling with Notion & Canva
- First clients: Leverage our personal network to get our first references
- Networking: Attend on-site & online sustainability events, connect with relevant people on LinkedIn & join discussions on sustainability LinkedIn groups
- Prospection: Contact relevant decision makers in our targeted regions through LinkedIn & websites. Try to reach new audiences through LinkedIn Ads. Adapt our strategy from 1-to-1 to 1-to-n with sustainability webinars
- Time management: Manage time & priorities traveling in South America, doing 2 remotes jobs & dealing with different continents time zones
After several months of doubts & totally different results than our expectations (European market quite mature & Middle-East markets not ready yet), I made a self-assessment of the potential vs. the challenges & took the tough decision to stop this adventure. One of my amazing mentors once told me: “Either we win or we learn from all our experiences” so I'm grateful for this amazing journey & I’m sure I will leverage everything I learned in my future experiences.
#alwayslearning #selfdriven #tryingnewthings
Driving Growth & Innovation in Experience Analytics | Head of Solution Engineering, South Europe & MENAT at Contentsquare
1 年Definitely not an easy decision after 12+ months of personal investment and dedication but I am sure you learned a lot! And taking a tough decision is a success in itself. Looking forward to your next adventure!