In my Get Ready For The Year of the Entrepreneur (2021) I set one of my goals is to start a failing business in 2021. And I’ve been hard at work ‘failing’.
In order to fail, you have to start and for me that means making at least $1 USD in the business. This is what we are pushing for this quarter. $1 dollar separated from a company by July 1 2021.
In this two-part post I’ll cover our journey so far from the the initial MVP, to the latest ‘pivot’, and lessons learned on the way to our first dollar.
Why did I start this journey:
Personal freedom is very important to me and a key aspect of that is multiple sources of income so you’re not reliant on someone else to pay your bills. By building a business it enables me to generate that additional income on the side. The other major benefit and why I would suggest anyone to go through this exercise is just the amount you learn. Most people join companies that are already off the ground and market fit is solved. They take for granted the what goes into getting that first dollar. There are so many valuable lessons to be learned by trying this on your own from prospecting, to marketing, sales, and development, etc. It’s a micro-MBA (I assume – I don’t have one and don’t plan on getting one) with the potential to turn into something real long term.
Where we started:
I started this journey December 2020 with real effort input in January 2021. This timeline is important for the context of the initial product. With return to work looming and vaccines rolling out, lots of companies are struggling to figure out their return to office plans and how to manage a hybrid office moving forward.
So our initial product helped HR professionals, office managers, and workplace experience managers safely bring employees back into the office and beyond. Over 3 months, we built an MVP of our product that allows employees to schedule their time in office and complete health and wellness survey while providing office managers the ability to approve and deny access for ‘failed’ surveys. The system dynamically adjusts available capacity based on overall office capacity and team members with approved days in office.
Happy to provide a demonstration for you and get you into a trial.
Building the Team:
Some people are swiss army knives and can do everything. I am not. I know I need a strong team around me to succeed. Starting this journey I intentionally sought out key team members to bridge gaps in my weaknesses. Our team is made up of the following roles: Developer, Product Manager, and Sales.
I tried bringing on an additional developer but he got busy with his other work – no hard feelings there. I also attempted to bring on a marketing resource but she also couldn’t commit the time. For marketing this really consisted of Hubspot landing pages and LinkedIn ads, I asked a friend to teach me the basics so I just ran with that on my own with varying results.
Everyone is part-time and really just part of this journey because it’s fun. Fun to learn. Fun to apply their day job skills to a new project. Fun to be around like minded individuals.
Tools we use:
(not tech stack) HubSpot, Google Suite, LinkedIn, LeadIQ, ClickUp (not any more)
We initially started using ClickUp to manage tasks and documentation but I found it a little too confusing and too generalist. It also lacked any sort of real time Chat components so we moved away from it.
I am in love with Hubspot. Not only for running our startup but also to copy it’s easy of use for my real job. They make the sign up process seamless, lots of templates available, provide a ton of value with their free tool, and easily transition the user into a free trial all without ever having to speak to a sales rep. Will gladly pay for their features if/when we gain more traction.
Google Suite is pretty decent. We went with Google to start because Microsoft Teams doesn’t manage multiple accounts very well on the same device. As we grow, will probably move over to Microsoft products to take advantage of OneNote, Teams, and the rest of the Office Suite.
We use LinkedIn and LeadIQ for prospecting and outreach. These are existing subscriptions that we are using in the evening for this. LinkedIn gets pretty good reply rates out of InMail and LeadIQ helps us source emails for direct outreach.
Blunders were made
It’s not all gum drops and rainbows. Mistakes will be made and that’s just part of the game. My big mistake was building before really validating the idea. Like really validating it. I thought I was validating it but I wasn’t anywhere close. The validation step can be broken down into to parters.
Not speaking to enough professionals in the space before developing. I made the classic startup mistake. It’s like rule number one in any book about building a business. The problem is – I thought we were speaking to enough professionals. Had spoken to 3-5 by the time we decided to build. That’s not nearly enough.
Not pushing enough to get commitment/sale – lots of nice people but few will actually give you money. This is the second classic mistake in pursuing an idea. Everyone likes to give feedback on a product when they have no skin in the game. But will they commitment their budget the product they’ve been advising you on. That’s the real validation point we should all be looking for. ‘Great – it cost $x/mo. How should we bill you?’ That will tell you a lot about your idea.
This post became entirely too long. In the next post I talk about what we did right, the big realization we came to which caused us to pivot, and where we are at today. Continue reading Part 2 here. (link to come)
Have you tried starting a SaaS company? What has your experience been like? Leave a comment below if you like this type of content.
Sounds like a great process to work your way through, though I have no what you are talking about!