Why I Left My Startup : The Learnings (Part II)
“Learning is part of life. If you are not learning, you are not living” — Anonymous
Before I start, I just want to say that this story is the second part to my two-part writings about why I left a startup that I built with my friends. To see the overall context of this story, kindly check out the first one here. And if you notice, the second part is long overdue because of myself practicing the art of procrastinating (sorry for that though :’))
I solely believe that in everything we do in life, there will always something to be learned from. Especially from every slips or mistakes that we make. Instead of complaining and blaming other people for what I had experienced in the startup that I built, I am feeling blessed and grateful. The reason being I got to learn so many interesting yet mind opening things along the way.
This experience might just be considered a failure, but that does not stop me from learning anything because a wise man once said “if you never make mistakes, you will never learn anything”. So, without further ado, here are the top things that I learned from building my very first startup.
1. Research Your Target Market Very Thoroughly
This might just be one of the most mentioned reasons for startup failure, but believe me, it will happen most of the time. Our startup is simply an aggregator for intercity shuttle bus services in Indonesia and system provider for shuttle services company. In Indonesia’s transportation landscape, our target market is not as big as air transport, but still pretty promising since not so many players (at least that was what we thought).
We validated our market using Google’s own Design Sprint, a method that allows you to validate your targeted users’ acceptance of your idea. Which resulted in a pretty good overall acceptance since most of the people we interviewed were pretty excited with the idea. But that’s about it. We only validate our idea’s acceptance without validating the other side of the coin which is our market’s competitors.
Before knowing the hard truth about our market, we decided to just built the product right away which consume almost 3–4 months of development time. Then when it was time to sell it to our customer (which is the shuttle service company), we stumbled upon several other company which has identical business as we were and has been in the market for years. And so many of those shuttle service company has already used their system for many years too.
After that initial mistake, our journey as a company becoming harder and harder every single day, especially when it comes to fighting against those already established rival company. This failure of researching and recognising our competitors resulted in a very shocking, depressing, and confusing situation for us. And for me personally this was the sign that instead of thriving, as a company we were going to be striving (or even starving).
2. Know Who You are Working With
For me, this one is probably the dearest to my heart and ones that I would remember for the rest of my life. When I am talking about “know who you are working with”, it means that choose and get to know your co-founder(s) wisely.
We started our journey with 4 people which consisted of me, 2 of my close college friends, and one of my friend’s older brother. 3 of us were computer science graduates, and the other was a management graduate. Half of our journey went pretty good and smooth with little to no internal problems happening. But then, right after getting funded, I started to notice a character problem with one of our co-founders (which I personally not willing to share the details further). We started debating each other’s out until I was not feeling very enthusiastic coming to the office.
This problem reached its climax when he became our CEO and at one point wanted me to leave the team in order to (according to his defence) strengthen it. I was ready to leave the company until the other co-founders backed me up and instead wanted him to step out of the CEO position and leave our team. I was so thankful (even until now) that I had my friends to back me up and support me. And since that chaotic event, I made a promise that whenever I tried to build my next startup or any business for that matter, I would only choose the people I trust and already had close relationship with.
3. Have a Clear Vision
Vision is an idealistic condition, or an ultimate destination that one’s trying to achieve . One of the things that separate good company and the amazing one lies in its vision. A bigger company has a clear and bigger vision that is resonated in almost everything that they do. They have more engaging stories or what Simon Sinek called “WHY” that they continuously tell whenever and wherever they go.
During our reign as a company, I never felt that we had established our grand vision for the company. As result, we weren’t going as far as we would hope to be. And I learned this truth the hard way and pretty late in the process. I realized this problem near the end of my time as co-founder there and just right after I read “Start with WHY” by Simon Sinek
Those are basically what I’ve learned throughout the experience. I was and still am feeling very grateful for all things that had happened in my life since they shaped me into a better person both in and out of my professional life. They opened my mind to a whole new possibilities and things that I had never even thought before.
So, how do you handle things if you ever been in my shoes? Let’s share our experiences so that we may learn more from each other. :D
Last but not least, thanks for stopping by.
In case you guys are curious about me, kindly check my social media @diongeraldo on Twitter & Instagram
