On the Startup ship

It’s been a year since I started the startup voyage and oh boy I can say it was a wild ride. 2017 March 15th I decided to quit my day job and work on few ideas that were in my mind. I didn’t really fathom the seriousness of the decision I took and most probably I didn’t want to think too much about the decision either.

I was working on a couple of ideas at the time, an audio platform, a company that built startup products and an online chat product. Fast forward a couple of months and I realized that I have found an interesting problem. A problem that I want to dedicate good 10 years of my life.

Why do people buy Products and Services?

If you really look back at your 10 last purchasing decisions, you can start to unravel quite a bit of mysteries about why you bought that particular brand. How human psychology is affected by internal and external factors contributing to purchasing decisions fascinated me. Once I started to look at the world through this lens, you can start to see how media, advertising, marketing and sales functions.

To give an example, how many of you that’s reading this blog has purchased a product by a series of actions that have happened online and offline. You’d see an advertisement on Facebook about this chic hotel down south and you decide to click the link and see what they got. You browse the pictures for a while and get distracted by a real world interaction. You’ll end up seeing about this hotel multiple times through various channels, Instagram, websites and even again on Facebook couple of days later. You’d remember about this hotel when you are planing your next vacation to Galle, Viola 👏

If we know the why, we can engineer the how 🛠

What I wanted to do was to build a product that was capable of understanding why people buy products/services and have the capability to engineer the buying experience. Predicting the revenue you’d get the cost of marketing your product is super powerful but the biggest advantage of unlocking this problem is not just that. Imagine a system that can orchestrate the whole process coordinating with software, people and customers diligently working to reach the predicted outputs.

Moonshots ☄️🤞

We haphazardly named it alakazam 🔮, paying odes to the saying “Abra Kadabra Alakazam”. The biggest challenge we had was to figure out what this product we envisioned looked like. Was it going to be a web app? A mobile app? A chatbot?

We looked at few competing products and started building prototypes and testing things with customers. Occasionally we’d delete a production database (whoops) and discover bugs on the Facebook Platform itself but the days we spent coding to the dawn of the morning were always interesting.

We moved offices 4 times during the 12 months period and learned a lot about the practical matters of running a business, cashflow and shipping products.

I have had many conversations with close friends, strangers, partners, customers and they have all asked me this question whether what I am trying to do is possible. Whether you could actually build a machine that builds the sales machine. My answer to that was this quote regarding the moon landing

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard;” — John F. Kennedy

Conferences & Roadshows

We honed in the key idea of alakazam after multiple iterations and by December we had a working product, a plan to build the next stage of the product. What we now needed was to get an outside investment to accelerate our process. After attending multiple conferences and talking to pretty much all Angels/VCs in the country, I started to understand more about how venture capital worked.

Back in February this year, I took a trip to Singapore to meet a couple of potential investors and what I realized from this experience was that the product we were building, alakazam had a real value proposition. The only problem was, it wasn’t possible to raise capital for small ticket sizes in Singapore.

We have a couple of announcements to make in the next couple of weeks but all in due course of time 😉

Serendipity

Looking back at the past whole year, I am gracious for the experiences I have had. The experiences that have been painful, have been very much useful. Experiences that were downright fearful, have been very much insightful. But all in all, I have learned to accept the serendipity in our lives. From waking up in the morning and sipping the first cup of coffee to going back to sleep. Aren’t I the luckiest person alive right now to work on the problem that I most care about.

Stoicism

To finish off this note, I’d like to appreciate the stoic philosophy that has helped me to go through with the tough times as well as the good times with equal mental fortitude. I got myself a tattoo last year December of my favourite phrase stoic latin phrase, ‘Amor fati’. It means to love one’s fate. Sometimes you’d question why you’d go through much of pain when you could do something else with your life. Sometimes you’d have to get into conversations with people that you don’t want to deal with. But at the end of the day, you got to love your fate. Otherwise, you’d not appreciate life.

Cruising ahead

As I mentioned before, we got a couple of interesting updates coming up in the next couple of weeks. One of the personal efforts I want to head this year is a movement, a movement where businesses will strive for goals to push themselves and become better than they were. A movement where they’ll track their stats from impressions to revenue and work to push them up every week. I call this movement, the Growth Movement 🚀.

To learn more, follow our Instagram page

I’ll be writing another post regarding the Growth Movement to discuss the origins of this.