After months and months of starting a company, I’ve learned a lot, from development to MVPs, from Product-Market Fit to growth, from startups to myself generally. As I started this at a young age, it’s hard to learn things and had those fear that what if no one would believe in us because the CEO was just a 16 years old boy. But I believe in myself that I could do it.
Experience is definitely not the best teacher, other people experience is.
So, my team and I have tried to learn more about building a startup and running it. But we didn’t start from scratch. We are also learning about how we should run the company from other people's experiences. As Chinkee Tan says, experience is not the best teacher other people experience is. I get it because why would start from scratch when you can just copy a template of other people's successes. You don’t have to get through mistakes, learn them in the first place and avoid it. From the start, I knew nothing about startups - I mean nothing. I don’t know about the MVP or even the “startup” thing. But still came into the industry unarmed, the only thing I had was determination.
How it started.
I was just 16 years old and haven't gone to college yet. No idea and knowledge about how to start my own thing. From that time, I started to watch YouTube videos about starting a startup, read books about businesses like The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Zero To One by Peter Thiel, and watched all the Y-Combinator’s videos about starting a startup. I also started to invite my friends to join the startup, they joined and started to work on the product. The first thing I tried was looking for my Co-Founder who is technical and reliable and I found one. That time working was really hard because of the pandemic so we worked remotely. I remember the time that we started to work on our business plan instead of the product itself - that was a mistake. Before working on the actual product, we had to learn about the tech stack we’re going to use and it took almost 3 months.
Ideas are important, don’t waste your time building something no one would use everyday.
The first idea of Koowentu was a social platform where users can share stories, quotes, poems, etc. Time by time we pivot and saw the real problem in the market and saw the potential that Koowentu will thrive.
As Gary Vee says, ideas are shit, execution is the game. I believe that without a good idea, no matter how good you execute it, it will fail because of being a poor product. Ideas are still the parent of “the game.” 9 out of 10 startups fail horribly because sometimes a poor idea or maybe there is no need in the market or so redundant. I saw so many startups with an idea like Facebook and want to compete with Facebook but failed. Think about this, this time Facebook had 2 stars in the app stores but still had so many users because their friends are on Facebook. Why would anyone switch to the product when they had already one. No matter how good the product is, you can’t still compete with the Monopolies. The Facebook idea was easy to replicate. So many startups had a Feed or the News Feed feature on the platform but still failed to compete with the “F” in FAANG (Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix and Google.)
Ideas are still very important when starting a startup company. But don’t overthink it, when you have a great idea but don’t care about the market and you’re not passionate about the idea, you'll probably procrastinate until suddenly you will eventually stop.
Be a good founder.
The most successful startups are founded by people who are passionate about what they do. When starting a startup company, you need to solve your specific problem. Not just start a company because you want it, you need to be passionate about what you’re doing to succeed. And build relationships with customers.
"Good companies listen to their customers. Good Founders have a direct connection (without a middleman) to their customers."
Problems are not stop signs, they’re guidelines.
I can’t tell how many problems we already encounter, from the product to the operation, and the company generally. Just a few months ago, we stopped doing the product because we thought it’s quite finished, we just let the current users of it use the product. To be honest, I had procrastination and I had no motivation to continue. But when I ask myself, “Why did I start this?“ My morale boosts once again. We already got so many problems along the process but because of it, we learned a lot. For us, mistakes are helpful because it teaches us and makes us hungry for new knowledge.
When problems come along your way, don’t say why me, say try me. It’s not saying you should stop because it’s just telling you what you should do. Look for problems and solve them. But remember, as Chinkee says, “In every problem, there is a solution. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.“
That’s it for now, I appreciate you for reading this and reached here. If you like this, please leave a like or subscribe to my Substack for more of this. Thank you :)