What I learnt from my first year as a start-up? Raw edition!

Start-ups are hard. Founding and building my start-up is bar far the hardest thing I have ever done. I have been in my start-up full time since August last year, therefore 2018 was a big year for me, so I wanted to document and share all the lessons I have learnt from my first year as a start-up!

You need a support network!

Unless you happen to be born in wealth, won the lottery or got $2M in seed funding its going to be rough. So rough that having a solid support network all around you will be important to keep you going and keep you hungry. For me my family and my partner Tanya are my support network. When I made the call to go into Preezie full time, I sat with them to understand how they would feel (knowing I would need both their emotional and financial support). Even now more then 12 months later their support is one of the reasons I am still full time working on the dream. Having support is key.

Focus, focus and focus

You need focus. Whether its sales, raising capital or product development you need to focus on the most important tasks at hand and spend your effort solely on that. I noticed this as capital raising and product development have really killed my focus on sales. Sometimes you need to choose between the lesser of two evils. I have now started to pre-arrange my time, so I focus on specific tasks, one at a time rather then being pulled between a few. It may be split into days or weeks. Example; this week is sales. Next week is product development, etc. Try to keep your time focused as well as you can. 

Network like your life depends on it

I cannot stress the importance of networking. Preezie is well into our capital raise and most of the interested parties came from warm intros and networking. Yeah sure cold calling and Linkedin messaging and emailing can work, but it’s much harder and the chances are slim. Just network, go to events, shake hands, introduce yourself, buy coffees. Currently most of our capital raise prospects and half our sales prospects have come purely from networking. 

Be a sponge

I always use the term, I like “being a sponge”. Meaning just absorb everything you can because guess what? You don’t learn much from talking! Every single person I meet I can learn from I listen. I tell them our story, our weaknesses and just listen. Even if I have heard what they have said 100 times, just listen and absorb like a sponge. Don’t worry about looking confident or feel like a shiny shoe salesman/woman, if you truly care and believe in what you are doing you wont worry about what people think, you will simply listen and absorb. Then later you can take that information (information you did not have before), process it and make better choices with it. Even if it turns out the info was pointless, it doesn’t matter, your brain isn’t a computer with 100BG of memory, you can hold the information and decide later to forget it or not use it, I say this because you never know where a genius idea can come from.

Hustle life

Our current sales are a result of (network yes), but more so hustle. You need to hustle hard and work hard for every sale. When you’re a start-up, you don’t have 20 case studies. You don’t have 10 testimonials, you don’t have a full marketing department and sales team. You literally have yourself, a laptop and a mobile phone. So, use them; make cold calls, LinkedIn message prospects, don’t be shy, don’t be scared. You need to work hard and hustle for everything. No-one will give you anything, you need to fight for every scrap and take it for yourself.

Revenue is important, but customers are key

This is straight forward. When your as early as us, a true start-up getting MRR is important but getting customers is key. For example, 12 months ago if I had a choice between 1 x $20,000 MRR customer or 20 x $500 MRR customers I would have chosen the 1 x $20k one. However now I am the opposite. Getting customers even if they are free or have a very low MRR gives you the ability to access users of your technology. Which means you now have access to a huge source of feedback. Ask your 20 customers 20 questions each. Make a matrix cross referencing your customers problems and the problems your technology solves. Just learn from your customers and ensure what you do from product development point of view matches the demand of the market.

Find the right partners

I know my strengths, I am strong with vision, product, customer feedback and sales. However, I am not a coder, nor am I a finance guru or a marketing genius. I can easily think of several moments in our first year of business where if I didn’t have a CFO and CTO as co-founders on Preezie we may not have survived. It not just skills you need partners for, in start-up life you need partners who can lift you when your down and that will let you lift them when they are down. Start-ups are brutal and part of your internal support network needs to be your co-founders. 

Raising capital takes twice as long as you think

I always knew raising capital would be hard. But did I think it would take this long? No. I naturally assumed after we won a few customers, built some strong MRR, got our CTO, capital would be a little easier to source (based on what the investors told me 12 months ago). What I have now come to realise is that getting capital takes twice as long as I assumed. It’s not that’s its hard, but its slow. I would say if your raising seed capital like we are from angel investors and HNW you need to allow 6-9 months of time for your full raise. 

Beware of the pretenders

This is the most disappoint part of being a start-up. What I have noticed is that there are a lot of pretenders out there. Now I am not that na?ve, I have worked in corporate positions before and understand everyone looks out for “oneself”, however what I found interesting is that as soon as you start to look a little shinny the pretenders come out to play. For example, these can be partners, investors, customers and even potential co-founders. These pretenders are all about telling you everything you want to hear, you spend a lot of time on these guys or girls. Meetings, proposals, negotiate terms, coffees and more. Only get let down last minute, often without any explanation at all. These are hard to spot, however try your best. I only say this because it’s easy to spend days of your precious focused time on pipe-dreams that are made to feel real. And when these come your way and they will, don’t be knocked down when they turn out to be smoke and mirrors, your better then they are.

Learning from your customers

Before our CTO joined our team, Preezie was a result of ideas I had for many years working in retail. We were implementing our ideas or what made sense to us, sometimes without validation from the customer or learning from mistakes of our competitors. Once we had a technical co-founder on-board, we learned how to make product road-map, examine and analyse all the features we wanted to implement and validate these with our customers. Handling custom requests would sometimes keep us off track with our major features, but we weighted options carefully and then decided on prioritisation. Theme here; learn from your customers and validate your product.