The Beginnings
We spent our first two weeks in Manhattan on sleeping bags in a room the size of a college dorm. We weren’t building a lean startup. We were a living lean startup. We didn’t take jobs after graduation. We didn’t have significant revenue.
My dad thought I was crazy. So you have a backup plan to work on Wall Street right? No, we wanted to change the world.
I slept very little in the final 30 hours creating Pagevamp (previously SnapSite.me). Pagevamp was born out of Penn Apps 2012, where would-be Zuckerbergs turn ideas into apps in 48 hours, fueled off cans of Redbull and free pizza. We built a beautiful app that slaps a slick template on top of Facebook Pages to create websites for small businesses.
Hackathons can produce legitimate businesses. And for us, the journey was just beginning.
Adrenaline kept us going after graduation. We got some traction. We had some funds in the bank. We had our first paying customer and clients from our previous business. Building a company is something my cofounders and I passionately believe in.
But it hasn’t been all highs. I’m sure many founders would agree that building a company is one of the most challenging (and rewarding) things they’ve done.
What they didn’t tell us
It’s really, really hard
We look at other founders, their stories, their startup mojo and feel like it’s all been smooth sailing. But what we often see is a carefully crafted image that’s built up from tough experience. We haven’t looked behind the scenes and seen the struggle, à la Stanford Duck Syndrome.
I’m insecure about success.
In the past few months, there have been soul-crushing instances where I have doubted the rationality of my choice. Am I really fit for this? There’s a weird feeling of discomfort/relief knowing overnight successes take a long time.
The people who have been able to break from the pack work hard — very hard— through tough and easy times. Countless founder bios point to tenacity and resoluteness as the chief determinants of success. In retrospect, it’s not a complete surprise. But until we lived it, it was really hard to grasp. Before, we were in the college bubble where “working hard” meant hours locked away in a study room somewhere with a fixed set of tools. Here, working hard can mean figuring out what are the tools needed in the first place.
More than Hour, Hour Never
I’ve found myself doing tasks that, in the corporate world, may have been outsourced to another department. I’ve run payroll, pulled together term sheets for fundraising with our lawyers, hired (thankfully not fired yet), excel-monkeyed financial models, built internal apps, crafted core features, canceled dinners and dates because the company (and my cofounders) needed me. There weren’t three other coworkers who can cover my ass when the servers go down, especially when the company is running this lean.
I’ve had to learn on the go with skills I didn’t know I had, from textbooks that didn’t exist.
I’ve pulled many all-nighters in college, but the challenge of building a business is at a whole new level. Classes stop completely at the end of the semester. Businesses carry over quarter to quarter. There is no absolute “right” answer. Only some answers that may be more right than others.
I still feel guilty when I’m not at the office on weekends. There is no 9-5. There’s always more to do. Startup things eat into my “free” time.
Pressure Creates Diamonds
Success comes from blood, sweat, and tears. Ok maybe not that intense. But we have learned there is an incredible amount of grind that goes into a startup as well (just like being a dancer, artist, engineer, doctor, small business owner…) and all with the very real risk of being back at nothing if the company blows up.
The media tends to glorify startup culture as recent college grads playing foosball all day while their hot [social media, dating, web 2.0] apps rake in the dough by themselves. “VC-backed” means having a sick office in Soho with a two-story water slide.
We do have a fun company culture and don’t take ourselves too seriously. But we’re also aware that when shit needs to get done (which is often), we have to get it done, because there’s no one else.
Work isn’t always “fun” or “sexy”. Our customers depend on us, and there is real responsibility.
To maximize success it is important to stay positive and continue building. We don’t have it all figured out yet, but we’ll be iterating a lot over a long time. We’re not here to “get rich quick”.
Is it worth it?
I don’t know if I could recommend it to everyone. It really is challenging, and we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to pursue this. We don’t have families and other obligations that we would have ten to twenty years out of college. We have a small investment from people who believe in us, so we haven’t had to worry about starving — only maximizing learning.
Dedicating ourselves to one thing has paid dividends. We worked on Pagevamp as much as we could during college, but it was only when we started living it that we gained 120% focus. Rather than take jobs and work on the company “on the side”, we’ve decided to take the plunge.
Fred is a founder of Pagevamp, a web app that creates websites from Facebook Pages.
