How I took a gap year from university to start a company

When COVID hit and we were all in lock-down my university decided to adopt online lessons almost immediately. By this point I had been working during weekends on a side-project (an events social media) with my sister, but it required web development and due to class time constraints I wasn’t learning to code as fast as I’d love to. So when the opportunity came to spend the days at home coding and working full time on the project, I didn’t look back.
Getting funded

The first step was get some funding to hire an extra developer. We talked with our parents and family members that could help and raised a total of 17,000€.
Building a team

Now that we had the seed money, it was time to build a team. We started by posting job ads on LinkedIn and Glassdoor but didn’t get any responses from qualified developers in our area, so after two weeks we decided to try a talent agency. Now here was our first big mistake.Talent agencies tend to be expensive and the best talent almost never goes through them. The best way to recruit is through referrals by asking friends and colleagues you’ve worked with about people who are talented and might be interested in joining your project. This is how Google, Facebook or Microsoft work. Most of their hires come from current employee referrals.

We ended up hiring a candidate from this talent agency but she was inexperienced (as much as we were) and spent 3,500€ on the deal. Looking back, this was an enormous waste of money. It represented around 5% of our seed money and at the beginning you are not on a position to make this unnecessary expenses. We did it because we wanted to move quickly and were already in talks with other investors, so we expected more funding to come in, which never did (more on that later). It was a hail Mary for sure and nobody should operate like this.
Building a product

By the time we founded the company we had already built a shitty MVP, but since we were on consumer social, shitty won’t get you anywhere. For consumer social the “V” has much more weight than on most scenarios, you’re demanded a minimum level of quality which we didn’t deliver.

Well that MVP (let’s call it v0) was ready when we founded the company and the day we launched we got around 18 signups, all from friends. After signing up people would take a look around the website and never come back. Our reaction was to start from scratch with another website, this time built in a completely different framework. So we put our heads down and started hacking some more.

Three months in we had yet another product ready. This time we worried WAY more about quality and user experience, it wasn’t Harvard-dorm-room-good but it worked. Here was our second big mistake. You can’t ever spend five months working on and MVP. MVP’s are supposed to be built during, at most, a month. Even though we were taking user feedback through, user’s weren’t really using it so you never know how good is this feedback. The best feedback you can get from a user is whether they are using your product or not and how they are using it.

The first week there was some activity on the website, a couple of posts and profile’s created and shared but not enough to make us feel confident about it. We decided we should ditch the website and focus on a mobile app instead. Since we were building a social media, this made since.

This time it took us two months to build, but yet again quality was not assured because of our inexperience. We didn’t even got over the App Store’s review process. So another failure to the mix.
Loosing the team

After our three attempts to build a product that users liked and failing to get any traction, my co-founder left and I had to let go of our employee because we were running out of funding. Keeping the morale up during the first days is harder than you can imagine. By the very nature of startups, every day is a challenge and when all you stack are bad products and unsuccessful launches it’s only logical that some team members may leave.
What’s next

After going solo I’ve kept working on the company. The most difficult part was learning how to code. Since day one I had spend my days coding, but I was focused on back-end and now I had to go full-stack. I’ve kept working on the mobile app and have been slowly improving it as I learn. Me and some friends have been using it, but getting a lot of people to use it has been difficult, and the value of a social media platform comes from that. I’ll keep working on it.

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