Storytime & Lessons learned: Entrepreneurship after 3 years: ups, downs and the discovery of the true vision

This is my story as an entrepreneur. Nowadays I know one thing: I don’t know anything. A little over three years ago I knew even less, but I didn’t consider it as important. Now I know that almost nothing is as important as knowing what you don’t know.

My company was founded when I found myself lingering in a void of meaningless work. Not in a way that my job or the company I worked at was meaningless – but I couldn’t just think that it would be something I’d look back as an old man and would think it as something that had an impact in the world.

My father had been an entrepreneur, consultant, for all my life. I had seen all the ups and downs it had offered, from the struggle and joy of getting new customers, all the way to a stroke caused by stress. My mother had given me one career advise: don’t be an entrepreneur. Despite and maybe because of this all I had only one choice. To take control of my whole life and start my own company. Do something meaningful for me.

Looking back now to those times, I think my strengths at the beginning was my never-ending enthusiasm and lack of negative thoughts. I keep myself as a very optimistic person and thinker, which has helped me to keep afloat during all the hard times of my life. My optimism and smile help me to be a creative doer.

I founded my company with a good friend. We had a bunch of good and great ideas, great networks and decent skills of storytelling, which all helped us to get a pretty good start for the company. From the early beginning, we had a dream of helping people around the world to be more creative. To burst into creativity, actually. But we realized soon that we didn’t know anything about creativity – so we had to ask for a consultation from the pioneers and brilliant minds of different fields. We had long talks with movie directors, academic masterminds, artists, writers, fashion designers, business people, musicians, activists, priests, travelers, even politicians. We asked from them all about creativity.

Eventually, the stories told were published as a book, four months after our company was founded. The stories and the book really changed the way I look at creativity and the world. I’ve also heard a lot of stories about how they’ve changed so many other people’s lives as well. You could say the book has been a success here in the home country, but I haven’t felt any sensation of accomplishment, yet.

During the writing and interviews, we also founded a co-working-space in our hometown. It was a beautiful and harmonious little red cottage in the middle of the marketplace. We had no running water or heating, which are usually the bare necessities, at least here where during the winters the weather can be quite brutal sometimes. It had a total of 40 square meters in two stories. We filled that cottage with people, love, inspiration, ideas, networking, and magic. Eventually, space started to feel too small, so we upgraded a little. We leased a total of about 300 square meters from the rooftop on one building in the middle of the center. The rent of that space itself was cheap, but as naive idealists, we decided to use the leftover money on our budget to lease some furniture. A lot of furniture. A lot of expensive furniture. We also hired a person to run all things related to the new co-working space. Needless to say: we ran totally out of money in less than a year.

During this first two years now, when we closed the co-working-space because we had no money left to run it, we had written also another book on entrepreneurship for people aged between 12 to 20. We had arranged over 50 events, developed two different products: an online hub designed to connect all the co-working spaces around the world and a mobile game. We had raised funding for those projects and at the same time, we had calendars full of more and more projects and meetings on new projects.

At this two-year milestone, I counted that we had pivoted our whole business at least 20 times and we had been involved in over 250 different projects and ventures. Some were successes, some were not. The important thing was to learn the whole time.

The company was now in a very weird place. It felt like some kind of purgatory. We had closed unsuccessful business, we had our third book idea bubbling under, we had big events coming up and a large consulting project ongoing. This meant that there was also time to think what did we really want to do if we would for once concentrate on something with a 100%.

Eventually, the answer came. We loved to tell stories. People seemed to like to read and listen to those stories. This combination gave birth to an idea to become a media on creativity. We would start to write stuff and just see if people would see it as something useful. Everything started maybe a little too well, our first month of being a media brought us tens of thousands of readers. The second month even more. Then we implemented a paywall to the site since we also had to make money someway without jumping between tens of projects at the same time again.

Paywall made some financial progress, but not enough to pay all the bills. Well, not at least after the first month. It meant we had to make up something else to sell at the same time.

We decided to take one of our previous workshops and produce it as an online course. In January 2018 we launched an online course on creative writing. It was an instant success. There were more buyers we could have ever imagined. Enough to pay bills, but still not enough to have a buffer for the future. At the same time, our media had seen a steady growth but not enough to keep us afloat by itself. We had to scale everything. For scaling the business we needed money. More money we had at that moment.

We decided to try to find funding, seed investors. During the summer of 2018, we arranged a successful funding round. Successful but not as successful as we had hoped it would be. It would be enough to keep us alive and to start the development, but not as fast as with more money. At this moment the other founder realized that she couldn’t keep on going any more in the company. All the juices were drained and every day was a struggle. We agreed that it would be best if I keep on going by myself, at least for a while.

At the same time, I talked with a few friends about our funding round and ideas of the future. I told them also about the side-project of online learning, which had been a success. As my surprise, all these conversations ended up with this enthusiastic agreement, that we should make online classes together. We should help people with all the knowledge we have in business, life, creative skills, and everything else. I started to realize that the real product of our company is not only stories and “being a media” but telling captivating and insightful stories, which help people to be more creative and active in their lives. We would offer world-class online learning content, tools, and entertainment. We would help people to accomplish more, to be more creative.

Now, about three months after that idea and realization, as we just have launched our new website, learning portal and the first course, I truly get that one simple Steve Jobs’ quote. You can’t combine the dots by looking forward, but only by looking back.

This adventure in the world of entrepreneurship has been the craziest rollercoaster there could ever be imagined. There have been very high ups and gruesome drops that make me still a little sick. I look back on all these events now and just keep on thinking that the process of getting out of that awful void a little over three years ago has been very hard. I didn’t know who I was back then. I just knew that I had to be someone else than the person I presented to be.

Now I know almost nothing, but what I know, is that this is a good place. I’ve connected my dots from these years now and the result is our global launch. We are a home for all the people around the world interested in creativity and developing their skills in some way. We will have a lot of tools, courses and other content coming up on the platform. Now we have launched our first course and our MVP of the platform. The future will tell if this is a hit or miss, but at least I feel like we would now be on the right path.

At the end here I have to misquote Neil Armstrong a little. This is only a small step for a humankind for now, but a massive leap for me. Let’s make the world to burst into creativity.

Thank you for getting all the way down here. I don't know if this story helps anyone or if it's useful, but I think the sharing feels like a necessary therapy :D now I would love to hear your feelings after reading :)

TL;DR: My lessons learned

1. Always be an optimist, stop worrying.
2. Ask for help and advice.
3. Learn from every misstep, mistake and even from every success.
4. When you stop going forward, you'll start to die.
5. If your experience is nothing else, it will at least be a good story to tell and maybe it'll help others :)
6. Just start now – what's the worst thing that could happen?
7. Trust the progress. Every step will not make sense right away, but the dots will connect later.

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