How I failed at my first start-up (And Why)

In the beginning, I was curious, young man.

All the time I was thinking about getting rich, successful.

So I started an application that works on food service.

I thought that any person who is working hard, can get succes but is it?

It all started while chatting with a few friends about new technologies. Some said we should avoid using new untested libraries. My friends with whom we shared the same opinion were advocating the idea of ​​how it would develop if we did not try.

We got into a heated argument during dinner. I suppose we talked nearly five hours. Most of them had already forgotten these conversations by the time we left. But I did not sleep that night.

What if I market a project where I use something new?

I set out to test myself. I knew in which field I should start a project.

Food service was in the hands of a single company in Turkey. There were no competitors. For this reason, the company was imposing what it wanted on both customers and restaurants.

First, I started making a project plan. It took about 1 week. Everything was right before my eyes. Need items, marketing strategies, software languages ​​to be used, on which platform it will be published.

But I noticed something. I could not have done such a comprehensive application alone. I talked to a few friends who I knew were competent with these thoughts. I explained the idea in detail. They accepted to join.

#1 Don’t start a company with your friends unless they’ve tested and grown their professional relationship by collaborating first.

This was my first mistake.

Then we started the project with 3 people who were excited.

It took us 3 months to bring the project to the MVP version. During this time, I got to know my friends better and problems that I had not anticipated arose.

In my opinion, the most important problem was that my friends’ excitement faded very quickly. After the 6th week, they were writing very slow code. There was even one who found a new excuse every day.

While they were just writing code, I was working on project promotion planning, visual studies and finding possible investment. Of course, I was writing more code than them.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” — Henry Ford

I was just now understanding this word. It was really hard to keep people together and motivated.

After 3 months, we had a newborn mobile application with a website. We worked hard, tested, added test data. It was working great.

Now it was time to promote the application and increase the number of users. Guess what? We did not know anything about it. We were all engineers. We just knew how to improve.But what about marketing?

As the project owner, I said we could do this ourselves. How hard could it be?

#2 Never try to do everything alone

This is the second mistake.

I left coding and focused entirely on promotion.I was trying new things and spending money every day. However, I could not achieve the results I wanted.After trying this way for 2 months, I realized the hard way that I was doing something wrong.

I immediately set out to find a marketer. It was more meaningful than the ad and it had to be young. Otherwise, it would be difficult for us to communicate.

I placed an ad on a few famous sites. After 10 interviews, I found what I was looking for. That person was skilled and extrovert. Of course, he was excited about the project.

He wanted to quickly start promoting the project. There was a big problem again. Money! Everything was starting to come together, and this was the beginning.

Until now, we had little need for money, but now serious budgets were required. Now I understood why start-ups hire partners for projects.

I had some savings. So I decided to use it. We started advertising on social media and the internet. Of course, this time with someone who knows.

We were increasing our number of users every day. But we could not receive applications from restaurants.If there were no restaurants, users would not matter.

So I talked to a few restaurant owners. I needed to find out what was causing this. After a few meetings, it was not difficult to find the reason.

Restaurant owners are generally elderly and middle-aged people. They were not as knowledgeable about technology as young people.

Their advice to me was to form a field team and record face to face. Over time, word of mouth spread and they said more restaurants would come.

Don’t take advice from people who haven’t gotten to where you want to be.

#3 Don’t decide in a hurry

As a young man hungry to try new things, I jumped in.

I hired a few field workers. Now I was actually spending money. Of course, I acted a little wisely here and worked with a bonus. I was paying a fee for each restaurant registered.

I had clothes and business cards made for them. After all, they were representing the company. Actually It was successful. They made 400 restaurants members.

Now we had both restaurants and users. We even started taking orders. Unfortunately, the problems did not stop. We’re starting to run out of money. We quickly started looking for investors.

We continued searching for a while, but it was very difficult to convince investors. Some of them wanted high shares for low money. Most of them said we wouldn’t succeed. As if these were not enough, the country’s largest marketplace application has entered the food ordering industry.

While we were trying to deal with one giant, we now had 2 giants. Of course, above all, the Covid-19 epidemic broke out.

After about a year of effort, we had an application, more or less users, and a depleted capital.We did our best, but we could not achieve success. Many factors led us to this, such as competitors with unlimited capital, our inexperience, and our inability to find investors.

I can say this with peace of mind. We, a group of 20-year-olds, failed a big project.

Conclusion

This was my first failed startup attempt. I was immature, inexperienced, ambitious. I started looking for a quick solution to every error. I received almost no support from those around me. It might have been different if I had consulted people with experience in the business world. But I have no regrets. I tried and it didn’t work. There is a very favorite word.

Defeat is a victory that grows in defeat.

I hope this experience was useful to you. Never stop trying.

Best regards.