Not knowing this caused my startup to fail

At the beginning of my startup journey, I had no idea how to pick the right idea for my company.

Even worse, I jumped on the first idea somebody mentioned.

Before I explain what I did wrong and what I'm doing this time, let me tell you why I'm writing this:

I created a startup almost 2 years ago. It failed. I failed. My dream went up in flames. The bright side is that I learned A LOT. My failed dream will be a complete failure if nothing good comes out of it. So I'm writing this.

I'm live-streaming my journey on how I'm starting my next thing. Everything will be out in the open: every decision, every assumption every bit of progress I made. I will also talk about all the mistakes I made in the past and what I learned from them.

Sharing this helps me and might help you avoid making the same mistakes. Please learn from my failures.

Now back to the main topic: picking an idea.

The unfortunate, sad part about my story is that it all happened so quickly. I didn't know anything about anything, I only knew how to code.

So I decided to start a company. Some will say that this was already a mistake. Deciding to start a company without having a clue about what to do is a terrible idea. For me was a little different. I needed to push myself out of my bubble and start something of my own.

Now I can say it was worth it, but unlike a movie, I wasn't the hero who decided to embark on a transformative journey.

I was a regular idiot putting his life's savings on the line.

If you are in a similar situation know this: I have worked incredibly hard all my life to enable me to start this journey. I had enough money to cover me for a while. I had some emergency savings set aside for rainy days.

I was not irresponsible. I was not careless.

My very first mistake was looking for an idea.

Because of this, my startup was doomed to fail.

It wasn't until 7 months later, when I came across the phrase "A solution in search of a problem", that I realized my mistake.

My thinking was: I want to help people lose weight, what mobile app I can build to help them achieve that goal?

I can already feel 97% of you yelling at me from the screen! That is the WORST thing I could've done.

Now remember, I didn't know any better. I hadn't done any research, I hadn't read books, and I didn't even google "how to create a startup".

If you didn't believe I was an idiot, you sure believe it now.

But it gets worse!

After having a chat with a close friend, they suggested an idea for an app.

I was so desperate to get something moving that I convinced myself that the idea was perfect.

I ended up spending 6 months building an app that allows people to create and join step challenges.

I took the round peg (making people move more) and shoved it in the square hole (helping people lose weight)

A week into my journey I was going full steam towards failure.

Now the question you might be asking is: "How do you pick a startup idea?" That is a great question, you're already better than me as you asked that question.

The answer is incredibly simple.

How do you pick a startup idea? You don't.

You do not start with an idea. You start with a problem.

A fellow Redditor yesterday reminded me of this (thank you so much BTW, I'll try to give you credit for this).

Your startup should sell a solution to a problem. Ideally a solution to a problem that hurts people enough that they are willing to pay for it.

- That's how you monetize your product.

- That's how you pay yourself a salary.

- That's how you don't end up 1.5 years later telling everybody about your failures.

With this precious information, what am I doing this time?

Before I get to that, I want to cover something really important to me.

As I said I will be sharing EVERYTHING. And I intend to. But this is scary. There is part of me thinking that sharing the problem I have identified and the ideas I have is a mistake.

People can take it and beat me to market, steal my job, and make me fail again.

This is an irrational fear. Ideas a cheap, execution is everything. Writing about it makes me get over this silly fear. And might help you get over the same problem I have.

If you're reading this and you want to rip off my idea you totally can, or we can join forces! DM me, let's chat!

So what I'm doing differently? This time I'm starting with a problem.

Writing about my journey forced me to re-live some unpleasant memories.

To my shame, I realized that the thing that took the most time, effort, energy, and money was creating a landing page.

I am an engineer. I build scalable systems to handle thousands of concurrent requests on highly scalable microservice environments. How can it be that the most time was spent on the simple landing page?

Is not that I can't create a landing page, from a technical point of view is easy to do.

Is knowing what to put on the landing page. How to quickly set it up and learn what works and what doesn't.

The process of launching a new feature was always the same:

- invest time energy and effort in a new feature

- when ready I wanted a simple page to market it to people

- I would spend 3/4 days building the landing page

- then launch ads

- let it run for a few days

- nothing would happen

- shut down the ads

- start back from the beginning

- blame the ads platform for sending me terrible traffic

The hard part wasn't creating the landing page. It was having the lading page converting.

It all became clear a few months down the line:

One of the topics that fascinated me was copywriting. I went down the rabbit hole of what makes a landing page work and the science behind it.

Learning about it made me realize why I failed all those times and what to do differently.

This was again a skill issue as I didn't know:

- how to structure my page

- how to speak to a reader

- what is the purpose of a landing page

I wish I could go into detail about each of them but this post will become a book. If you want to know more let me know and I'll talk about it.

If there is only one thing that I want you to know about landing pages is this:

They have ONE purpose. Convert. Conversion can be a direct sale or a lead (a way to contact people). If a landing page doesn't enable that, is a waste of money and time.

Believe it or not, I'm about to talk about one thing that worked!

After learning all of that, I launched 3 different landing pages and created a bunch of ads to send traffic to them. The most successful had 347 email sign-ups.

And it gets better! I had my first paying customer for the app by re-creating an old sucky landing page adding the things I learned.

Success!! Not enough to save my company but success

So we have our problem:

People like me don't know how to create a high-converting landing page.

Is this enough to get started?

Absolutely picking a problem that you experienced and trying to figure out a solution is a great way to start, we now need to do some validation.

I have spoken with 4 tech founders and I was blown away by how we all had the same problem.

Every time the story was very similar with the same outcome.

The reason why I'm writing about it now is because of what happened yesterday.

After talking with a friend (another founder), he casually mentioned his struggle with the creation of a decent landing page.

I have enough to start exploring this problem so tomorrow we'll talk about how to dig into this further.

If you made it all the way here, hopefully, you're somewhat invested in what I'm trying to do, so I would love your help:

If you're a tech founder, solopreneur or someone who had to make a landing page in the past, would you like to participate in a customer interview?

I would like very much to share as many insights from customer interviews in my next posts. We can all learn something by sharing.

I would even love to record them and post them for free somewhere, obviously if you're on board with the idea. If not, totally fine!

I would love to talk with as many people as possible, any way I can: call, email, DM, text anything goes. if you're in London I'll come meet you in person!

If you know of anybody who might be a good candidate please let me know or ask them to get in touch with me! I would appreciate that

I'll sign off with some progress update

✅ We have a problem to work on.

We do not have a product.

We have talked with 0 potential customers.

We made 0$ in revenue.