Which way?

Have you ever found yourself in a position where your skillset in your role is so deep that you forget how to explain what you’re doing and just do it without any real thought given to it?

Have you ever felt that you’ve been round this wheel before and while you enjoyed the journey the first-time round, now it had gotten old and you couldn't remember when??

Disillusionment had properly set in for me around the time Covid hit. Truthfully, I’d been going round in circles for years and each time round the block I’d grown less and less until I was really just stagnating. But the last couple of contracts had tipped me over the edge. Both had been the most dispiriting experiences I’d ever endured. The first one, locked inside a cold crumbling soviet style building on the outskirts of London, 8 hours a day working on a project no one believed could be delivered while watching the company dying around us, for a boss who timed our toilet breaks. And the second where I got to travel into a nice swanky office in town to work in a company where a developer per sprint was walking out the door, the CEO suddenly “retired”, and no one wanted to listen to the 20 odd years of experience I’d built up to resolve the issues I’d been tasked with resolving.?

Then Covid hit and the government seemed to forget about the self-employed when they were handing out furlough money. And I watched as the high street was proclaimed dead while I ordered my toothpaste from Amazon and wondered if we’d ever use all the toilet paper we’d stored away in our “apocalypse box” along with the tinned food and booze.

Around this time I came up with the idea of building an app that could connect the local residents to their local shops and maybe help them earn some revenue while we were all locked in our homes waiting for a vaccine to set us free. Every street had suddenly created its own WhatsApp group and it was easy to do some research. It was a popular idea, so I set about working out how to build an app. First, I tried to teach myself to code, but quickly realised I’d rather skewer my eyeballs with two knitting needles than do that well enough to build anything. I’d heard of something called No Code, so I did some googling and picked a platform. I settled on something called Bubble . It was a revelation. Within a couple of months I’d built my app, with the addition of a Deliveroo type delivery service option built-in for good measure. I was pretty chuffed with myself.

Then came the first reality of business, call it Niall's first startup rule if you like: Just because you’ve got an app, doesn't mean you’ve got a business. That dawned on me pretty quickly as I tried to sell it to the local High Street traders. I’d assumed I’d be able to get to them through the local traders association, but it turned out they’d had a massive barney and no one was talking to each other anymore. The association existed in name only. Some had gone hard on the bounceback loans the government were throwing around and I’d heard cars were bought and holidays booked. Others were pretty contemptuous and waited for them to fail (they did). As lockdown ended and I watched a lot of private equity funded companies flood into the same space I was working in I realised I could never compete with them. My lack of sales ability was a definite problem. Niall’s startup rule number two states: If you can’t sell, your business is dead.??

At around that time someone I knew had an idea for a situation they’d found themselves in and asked if I wanted to help. After buying a new build flat in a nice part of south London, they’d discovered the building itself was full of flaws, and their builder had transferred the freehold of the building to another company they controlled. They were being fleeced for service charges while the building wasn’t being maintained and was breaking apart around them. After spending a lot of money with lawyers, they realised they couldn't get the freehold, but there was something called Right To Manage. You don’t get the freehold, but you do get control of the building away from the freeholder. The idea was that we build an application that streamlined the hugely overcomplicated process, removing the lawyers from the equation and making it cheaper and easier for people to get back some control of their homes.?

Anyway, we built the app, won acceptance to the SuperTech WM Seeds accelerator, and came pretty close to securing some money from someone with jaw dropping connections within central government. And then it all went very wrong. Co-founder fallouts resulted in the potential investor walking away, the team splitting and 4 months wasted dealing with the mess. Niall's third rule of startups is simple: Always have a founders agreement. If you don’t you’re leaving a live hand grenade waiting to go off in the middle of the business, and founder breakups are practically de rigueur these days.

We rebuilt out of the wreckage, but as we did, the government threw their oar into the mess by stating that they were going to reform leasehold and led everyone to believe they would soon own their building as well as their lease. That’s not what happened, and leasehold is still a mess, but our business was effectively dead. No one wanted to hear what we were offering and the market had effectively been dissolved overnight.?

And to top it all off I found myself at the doctors wondering how I managed to get my blood pressure to levels I’d never experienced before, and wondering if a stroke was on the horizon while the slightly panicked nurse legged it up the corridor to find a doctor. Took a few months to get everything back on an even keel, but I'm still on the pills.?

So here I am, with shed loads of experience wondering what to do with it. Do I go back onto the hamster wheel or do I find a way to use that to help people who actually want to listen and benefit from it? I hate to see startups fail so I got myself certified with the The Portfolio Collective as a mentor for startups and scale ups and have started talking to VCs and co-working spaces, anyone who has access to founders who may need support. It’s a bit scary to be making so big a change in my career but other people manage it so why can't I? People like Jof Walters from Million Labs and Ben Legg from the TPC have always been available to give unvarnished advice and help, and I've still got a couple of friends left who will buy me a drink occasionally.

I don’t know where I’ll end up from here and all advice and help is welcomed, but I’m not going backwards.