Day 60
Getting the first investment felt great and then too easy, loving the life of the entrepenuer.
Wow 10 months ago I decided I wanted to build a startup. I had just killed the idea I was working on, I effectively had nothing.
But for years I wanted to build my company, I wanted to work for myself, shape the vision and execute relentlessly.
I gave myself time to figure something out, eight months. By then I had a team, 3 customers and a product. At that point I had to answer the next big question. Is this financially viable? There were two options: raise or get enough customers to bootstrap.
The news and some thoughts
The time is up and… we received our first investment!! We were selected with 10 other startups for Berkley SkyDeck. As I type this I am on a flight to California, probably my dream since watching the Social Network 15 years ago. My co-founder Moritz and I will be in the valley for 5 weeks and I could not be more excited.
Everything is great, my first funded startup, 5 weeks in SF, what could I ask more? I should be happy, but a thought doesn’t leave my mind: this is not enough. SkyDeck is nice, but it’s not YC also I could have raised a VC round out of the gate, what a looser. I haven’t even celebrated our win properly and I was already questioning if it was a win at all.
I want to dig deeper on this feeling, of never being enough and always jumping to the next goal. Even if I think this feeling is common to all great entrepreneurs (Not defining myself as one just yet), there is a difference between not recognising what you achieved and thinking to the next milestone. Why do I feel this way and how can I celebrate my wins and but stay ambitious?
Going back
Since high school I thought people around me were better than me, higher grades, more popular or simply better human beings. I would admire them and sometime envy them. But I had kind of forgot about this feeling, until in the last two years I have met and got to be friend with some of the most impressive people I know.
They are building crazy startups, leading companies or simply have the courage to risk it all to find their real passions. They have done great things: raised 500k in a month, got into YC or reached 1M of ARR or learned to code in less than year. And the list goes on, I even know two olympians, one made it to the 200M in Paris as an amateur athlete.
Looking at them most things feel small, basic or easy. If this is the benchmark making it to Sky Deck is a meh achievement, so I thought to myself: should I only hang out with people less “successful”? Then I remembered two of the seven rules I live by: never compare my success to the success of others and always turn envy into motivation.
Looking back at the last months I think my friends and my beloved rules (Becoming a bit German here) were instrumental to achieve what I achieved!
When I felt my wins were not wins I stopped comparing myself to others. After ever investors’ rejection I cheered my friend’s successful raises and found to strength to keep at it. When I was looking for excuses, like I can’t raise because my CV is not good enough, I thought about my friend Diego training after work beating professional athletes and making it to the olympics.
After writing this piece I understand better myself and especially how to balance ambition and appreciation. So here I am, savouring a great achievement for few hours and then back to work because after every finish line there is another one waiting!
Business update
So, down to business, I started this Substack for accountability and to have moments of reflection. So let’s get to it:
What did we do last month?
Filled the pipeline: Spoke with tons of interested companies ready to train their salespeople, also got requests for different use cases like training insurance agents or even psychologists (Depressed AI is next level).
Closed another paying customer: After a great post from one of our test customers we got many inbound requests, one of which was from a sales training agency. I believe working with them will allow us to drastically improve the quality of our training.
Got our first investment: not much to say, just that at current burn it gives us 18 months of runway.
What we didn’t do
Reach out to 100+ angels: probably not a great goal to start with, still spoke with around 10 and learned a lot, also that at this stage raising from angels takes too much energy and focus.
Got usage at 30 minutes per user a month: it turned out to be harder than expected, I ultimately underestimated how hard it is to find PMF.
What keeps me up at night
What if our competitors are too good: our main competitor built crazy good simulations, I am now afraid to admit that. They are also crashing it on social and frankly I really admire them. Are we going head to head with someone simply better or at least more ahead? Maybe we are, but the market is big and few games are decided after the first quarter.
What if we can’t raise with this idea: a investor I admire told me: “You picked the reddest ocean there is, to raise you either need a crazy team or crazy traction, but hard to get crazy traction without money”. Funny enough a competitor with a stellar team raised an oversubscribed pre-seed. But then I got back to sleep, because I realised we have time to become so good they can ignore us.
What if we can’t build a product people love: our idea relies on one thing, people must love practicing with our tool, this is the difference between us and all the other training tools out there, if we don’t figure this out we don’t have a business. So what can we control? Talk to users, ship fast and put fun at the front”
What’s next?
Onboard 3 paying customers: thinking runway getting 2K of MRR asap would give us more breathing room and especially get real usage and tons of feedback.
Figure out our ICP and fire the rest: PMF and ICP go hand into hand can we build the perfect product for the customer that feels the pain the most and then spread like fire.
Design a 10 out 10 experience: following the AirBnb framework we will design the best training experience a salesperson could wish for, helping them sell better and earn more. Making training fun, making sales fun!
If you are in SF and want to grab a coffee to talk AI voice agents or know someone we should meet reach out!!