The first time I developed my start up, I was thinking to give up at least 10 times in a day
– Craig Groeschel

Let me tell you a little about my struggle in developing my startup, and I hope you might learn some value from my experience. And if you think that I’ve solved the struggle in my business completely, you are wrong! Instead, I want you to be part of my startup development, and give wonderful advice for me, especially I believe there are a lot people in this forum that have won the early struggle of developing a startup! Here we go.

My Team

So my team consist of people who don't have any business knowledge. We were just some college students who played badminton and futsal once in a week. We were from the same major and that made us become close friend in the sport team.
If you had ever joined sport group, you would have realized that the members who comes routinely are mostly decreasing several moment after the first time the group was initiated. Especially if the group is just for fun and have no intention to be professional group or join any competitions. This condition also happen to our sport club. The first time we start the club, there could be three to four teams playing in the field. It was very easy to get people joining our club. But several month later, we barely made two teams to compete in the field. We sadly stop the routine, but we learn the struggle to make people work out routinely.

Several times later, we discussed to make another group since we were very lack of physical activity. But this time, one of my friend said that we should make sure that the member should not decrease. You see, an idea of business can come anytime regardless the place and activity. after he state the pain problem, I said that we might could program an application where random people with the similar behavior and skill to play in one field. From here I learned, when an idea is very helpful to someone and solve their core pain problem, their faces would change as if their world have been enlightened (I think this is why it is very important to do market interview prior launching a product and see if their face change or not). The discussion become very spirited and that day, we spent hours discussing about the application features, how to market the app, how to get people invest into the idea, start up competitions to join, and even the pricing of the products! It is very fun, you know, to make a strategy, skip the hard work, and predict the result. Unfortunately, the most important factor is not in the strategy, but in the execution.

The Ups

After the discussion, we looked for any available business competition. We had just known that the term for a competition to get investors was called "pitching", and there are still way many things to be learned. We were very excited to know more. we registered in private pitching competition, public competition, any competition. The thing is, in those competitions, they want a pitch deck with certain information, such as market analysis, marketing strategy, etc. It led us to learn more about those terminologies and how to deliver them perfectly. We did our survey, create business model, and do anything to prove that it is a beneficial idea. Honestly, now I realized that what we do was very basic compare to what many start up do, but the idea itself was very helping people and it made the respond become promising even with a simple survey.

We made a pitch deck and modified it according the term of each competition. The idea was very promising and some event organizer gave us a booth to pitch the idea in an investor summit. We also won the pitching competition and get the opportunity to experience the startup environment in Singapore. It was very pleasing to know that people love our idea. Yes, they love our idea, but they don't like the fact that we only deliver them the idea of the application. They were also pessimistic and won't invest in term of money since we've just started working on it in 2 months, they thought the risk was too high. Knowing the condition, then we looked for seminars, talk show and incubators to gain people trust, since the incubator might indicate that our team have a dependable mentor. With such idea, we can easily get an incubator that would like to mentor us with aspects of initiating a product. We got opportunity to learn from seminars and workshop freely from this incubator.

The Downs

After we got office from the incubator, the real struggle started. I made the MVP (wait for next posts, I'll share as many experiences as possible to you guys, I promise!) and show them how we prove the incubator that a lot of people will use our system. Before we invest too many on app development, I had an idea to simply share google form link to the potential market, They simply fill in the form with their detail, and our VBA will make the match based on everyone's preferences and behavior. Those who has been matched will be contacted through Whatsapp. This method is very promising to prove that the system can solve the problem in the society.

It turns out that everyone agree with the idea, but don't have passion to execute it. First, we made the timeline and share the tasks for the launching, and everyone are expected to do their tasks based on timeline so everything can be done on time. It turns out that nobody do the task routinely. A member who were very on fire and said would give all his life to develop this startup, turn out to have almost no progress in that week! So I made an initiative to make a standard minimum of working hour in a day and Key Productivity Index, but this member threaten all other member that he will left from the idea because It is against his vision of working in a startup. So, as I know something is not right here, I made an internal survey, a survey that should have been done first before even we try to do any competition. So I made the survey about their vision for the app, how they want to work in this start up, and what are their personal problems. Guess what, I found that nobody has the capability and intention to grow up this business!!! (I lost power, please follow for next post)