2020 has been an enormous challenge for all humanity and while I could write a Covid-focused post and focus on the New Year as a way to put 2020 behind us that is not the focus of this post. The challenge I refer to in the title is the new business that had the seeds planted a few years ago when I sold Cadimage Group and embarked on the next step of my life journey here in Hungary.
From my point of view life and business are both journeys and each run through various cycles of ups and downs, joy and pain. 2020 – while unprecedented in my lifetime – can be seen as another one of these cycles which brought change to all our lives in a number of ways.
At the start of the year I was very much in the frame of mind to build a new business. I’d always expected that at some point I would give it a crack and had always been searching for ideas.
January saw me, along with a couple of others, exploring a BIG idea, in fact it was probably a little too big! While having big goals is important, the main trouble we saw with our idea was it was very difficult to start with a small piece and add to it over time. For our solution to be accepted by the market it really needed to be close to 100%. I realise this simplifies things and could be seen as running from a challenge but being bold also requires confidence and whichever way we looked at things it was hard to be totally confident about the idea. (We still keep it in mind though 🙂 )
Confidence is a core value I have always felt strongly about in business. Confidence sets businesses apart and confidence builds confidence. If you project confidence to your customers, they become confident in working with you and your product.
Anyway, Covid came along and I saw my consulting business dry up so I started focussing more and more on ideas and opportunities. Prior to air travel being restricted I attended a conference which was very stimulating. Covid obviously saw a huge move to working from home, however even before Covid I knew any new business I would create would be based on a remote team.
As have many people, I used the opportunity to learn new things and taught myself the basics of iOS, Swift and SwiftUI. I started building some prototypes and exploring ideas and further refining them.
I continued to engage with my co-founders and the idea started to crystallise and we started to put the foundations in place for a new business. We established the business and set about building the first version of our product. We put in a small amount of money to help us get things moving and within a couple of months had made sufficient progress to do a very early pre-seed round to give us some runway to double down on our development. In parallel with development I started some Lean Marketing.
Building a business can be viewed like building a house, with the ground work and foundations being the first part and critical to creating a strong platform on which the rest is built. To a large extent this applies, however the actual process is probably more like building an entire town of houses. As a startup we build foundations for what we need to achieve, doing just enough of some things in order to keep going. In some cases we know what we build today, we need to rebuild (or replace entirely) down the track.
I have been involved with owning and managing businesses for almost 20 years. I’ve been involved in all aspects across building and growing businesses, developing, selling and supporting software and all the marketing, service and admin that surrounds these activities. However, this time instead of joining a well established and profitable business we’re starting from zero.
This is a new, exciting and at times scary challenge. I am confident in the abilities and experience of my team and while a huge challenge lies ahead by the end of 2020 we have begun our journey and have enough pieces in place to start 2021 with confidence.