Starting a Company: Lessons Learned Part 2

After my first attempt, I was not ready to jump back into making a new startup. Obviously, I made a ton of mistakes and needed more experience and knowledge. I went back to what I knew working in the hotel industry. I spent some time in the film industry after that. I learned a great deal during those times and had followed the tech startup scene so when it came time to try and make my next great idea I felt ready.

This time I had my lessons learned from my first startup failure, so at least I wouldn't make the same mistakes. However, I would still make plenty of new ones.

Make sure your needs are met. In my first venture, I had a fallback by living with my parents. My basic needs were met and I could afford to quit my job. For this venture I was newly employed just coming off of unemployment. My wife and I weren't behind in our bills yet, but we were on the cusp. I was fortunate to be working, but I still wanted to pursue my venture. I couldn't afford to put any money into it, so after developing my idea I went to the SBA to see how they could help. They introduced me to someone who had experience with technology products and they thought could help. He was a great mentor and taught me a great deal about angel investing and venture capital. Unfortunately, angel investment did not come and I got too involved in making sure my wife and I still had a place to live and food to eat that I eventually just let the idea go.
There truly is a forest behind the trees. There are plenty of nocode tools that help non-developers build things on the web today. When I was working on this, most of these tools didn't exist. I didn't know enough about coding to make my dream happen, but if I would have scaled the dream down just a little bit, I could have hacked together an MVP. I even paid a developer $200 for a prototype which he delivered, but again my sights were set on something bigger. I couldn't see the prototype making money itself. The idea was to use the prototype as a demo to help get some angel investment. Looking back, it could have been released and started gaining some traction. The trees clouded my vision.
Owning 100% of nothing is nothing. During this venture my mentor and I were discussing NDAs and how much information to give out to the world about what we were building. He said that most investors aren't going to sign an NDA and that it would be up to me to decide how much information I was willing to give out to pitch the product. He said that he owned 100% of a lot of great ideas, but none of them are a reality. In other words, if you need help making something a reality, you have to risk it and hope things go your way.
Golf course food isn't so bad. I had never eaten at a golf course before, but one day my mentor invited me to meet a friend of his that had some experience in funding a company. We met for lunch at a local golf course. It was his treat so I didn't care that the prices were a bit hire than what I would normally pay. I didn't order up though. I just had a simple lunch. I believe it was a club sandwich which was really tasty. Our lunch and conversation was great. Nothing really came from the meeting, but it was a good lunch. Sometimes that's all you can expect.
Make sure your investor knows you are pitching them. During my time working on this we did pitch one investor. I spoke to him and thought I was clear that I would be pitching him for investment money. Apparently, he misunderstood or I communicated poorly. Either way the result was less than desirable. The day of the meeting, we met in the conference room at his offices. I had a presentation planned and began my pitch. After a couple of minutes, he stopped me and made it clear that he wasn't there to consider investing. He thought I just wanted some advice. He said he would be glad to hear the rest of the presentation, but he was definitely not going to be investing. This took the wind out of my sails for the rest of the presentation. I honestly didn't expect him to invest. I seriously was looking for advice and to get my feet wet. But, I did still feel that there was a chance of money being on the table until then. Once that was off the table, my presentation went a little downhill.

Over the course of about eight months, I made a great friend and mentor. We developed an idea together and it was a great collaboration. Even though it was a failure to launch, it was a great time in my life. We truly felt we were going to create something amazing and at least on paper, we did. Even though the product never launched, we still own 100% of that great idea.