January 6th, 2018 | Incubator

My experience in a startup incubator.

While studying computer science I started to fantasize about running a huge startup with hundreds of employees somewhere is San Fransisco, you know, the startup dream. You can read how that came about here.

Well, after I started what I believed could be the next unicorn (haha), a mobile app where you could see what is happening in the bars, clubs and cafes in your area, in real time, I applied to join an incubator as I had hit a wall. I had content being uploaded on the app but if I didn’t personally push my customers to upload again, they would stop.

I got accepted into the incubator with my app, City Vibes, in June 2017. I was very, very happy. 

I felt that I would be in a very exciting environment, full of ambitious people striving to grow our ideas into reality. And it was like that, well…kinda.

What I mean is that I saw something different to a degree. Heavy emphasis on VC funding, raising money for your startup. From the first day I went there, before we even had the fundamentals of our idea set, we where advised to try and follow a investors point of view.  The thought in my mind are described in detail here.

Initially I was disappointed that my progress with City Vibes ‘felt’ slower inside the accelerator than before I join. I was hoping I would jump in and start coding features  and hope for the best, but it was nothing like that.

They gave me a book called ’The Mom Test’ to read, fucking fantastic and I also read the ‘Lean Startup’.

I learnt valuable lessons in there. You must not think like a programmer: “Oh this feature sounds cool, let me build it and see what happens. And also, over engineer everything.” Be as frugal as possible with your lines of code, never code unless you are certain it is needed and start small and super simple.

	MONTH ONE

So fast forward on month into the three month program that was the incubator, I ditch City Vibes, I reached my goal that was to see where City Vibes could go without writing a single line of code.

Before joining, I was ready to start to tackle the ‘Chicken and Egg’ problem I had in hand. On the one hand, you need end users for business owners to start uploading photographs to the platform and on the other, you need uploaded content on the app for users to keep the app and open it when they are looking to go out.

I tried many things, first I offered to the business owner that uploaded the most photographs between Monday and Thursday a free photographer on Friday and Saturday, did nothing really they were not impressed.

Then I tried something a little unethical. I added a view counter on their profile with a text “Views today: X” and then I would open the app and see their photos something many times so it would seem to them that some people saw the photograph they uploaded, but again, nothing really changed.

Last but not least, I wanted to take a page out of Uber’s and AirBnb’s book and using their own terms “hack the chicken and egg problem”.

Hacking it means to visualize the best case scenario you could think and then go and replicate it. For example, Uber paid for drivers to start using Uber when they moved in a new city. AirBnb employees became hosts to hack the problem.

In my case the perfect case scenario would be the most popular clubs of my area to join City Vibes and upload photos every single day. That would truly be the best case scenario. So I thought I should do that. Grab a mobile phone, get a few friends and act like photographers for a month. Business owners would most probably allow us to take photographs and advertise them for free, and in the mean time we would advertise it to end users. Once the month would be over, the assumption that end users would want to see what is happening in their area would be validated ( or we would ditch City Vibes) and then we would go on to see if end users where on the platform, if business owners would upload content on their own (the second assumption).

But fortunately they stopped me in my tracks. Before I start validating assumption you should always see the bigger picture. What if you are right about both assumptions, then what?

I realized that City Vibes lacked MANY things. First of all, it was location based, meaning that content at some moments was severely under represented. On top of that, it was time based, even more under represented content. In order to keep up with it’s value proposition, meaning that you are able to decide easier where to go out by opening the app and checking out what is happening in the most popular places in your area, content had to be uploaded IN YOUR AREA and THAT SAME DAY. Super hard to do. On top of that, it was a free app, I couldn’t make a dime out of it, unless I filled it with ads, but ad revenue would be peanuts.

Generally speaking, in my mind there are two types of products.
a) Products that are not location based so they expand on their own, eg Reddit.
b) Products that are location based but make money. You pick up that money and throw it into scaling it elsewhere, another city/country, eg Uber and AirBnB.

City Vibes was a location based app, with no revenue model, and on top of that it was time based also.

There was no way for it to work. I tried pivoting a few times in order to fit in one of the 2 above categories but I am too bored to write about it now. It wasn’t anything great to be honest.


	MONTH 2

So now I am 1 month in with a fresh, clean slate and a clear mind, as City Vibes was something itching me for a very long time.

The next month I went though the entire process of coming up with an idea, going on to validate it without writing code and focusing or ditching it in one month. For City Vibes the journey was one year. For this one it was 1200% less.

Again, it was a product that would definitely require funding.

	MONTH 3

The last month at the incubator I felt like I had learnt a lot but I started getting burnt out with the investment approach.

The big moment was when I saw a speech of Pieter Levels at Growth Tribe on YouTube.

I saw a kid, roasting the organization that was paying him. It was very funny but at the same time very serious. Making feel like others know what’s up and that you should follow or attend their course in order to feel confident to even start is something very real in this world.

That was how I changed my approach to products, you can read about it here.

	THE END

After three months, the taste left in mouth is both good and bad.
One the one hand, I learnt a low about assumptions, validating before coding and taking smaller steps.

On the other hand, trying to come up with a system to be the next Zucks, an anomaly, is fucking stupid. How can you come up with a formula for an outlier?! Anyway, I realized that there are many stages in between being Zuckerberg and being Alex at age 22. And that is where I am heading, somewhere in between.

The incubator in my hometown

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