How I failed
Ever want to start a business, but the fear of failure has you frozen? This is what I’ve learned while creating hungrydev:
DECIDE to get started.
1 - List your skills, interests and past experience to find an idea that excites you
Get a piece of paper and a pen and start jotting down all the things you would love to do, what you’ve done in the past and what your skillset is. You’ll find that a lot of your skillset from past jobs is transferable to help you go after that business idea you’ve always wanted to.
Oz and I sat at the kitchen table in a quiet seaside town in Croatia and brainstormed ideas. We wanted to start our own business and have something that we could do while we were traveling. Pin to paper, we sketched out different options.
Oz has been a professional web developer for over 6 years in London. While there, he started a coding school to teach people how to code. He’d work his full-time job at a startup during the week and taught coding on the weekends to his students. He closed the school after he started traveling full-time, but always had it in the back of his mind to open it again one day.
I’ve worked as an intellectual property paralegal in the US for the past 6 years. After work and on weekends, I’d help my friends organize and run events at their start-ups and coworking spaces. I loved bringing people together and brainstorming ways to expand their marketing reach, create buzz and have a good time. I’d come out to Europe in July to co-found a coliving startup.
Together with Oz’s web developing/teaching skills and my coliving/coworking/marketing skills, we thought we could combine everything to create a viable business.
Enter first version of hungrydev: a 9 day coliving coding retreat in Thailand. We’d combine our love of travel with our love of teaching and showing people an amazing new city/country.
We picked Chiang Mai, Thailand because so many of our digital nomad friends were telling us it was an amazing city and had reliable wifi (something we found consistently hard to find in Europe).
Face the UNKNOWN
2- Do the research, look for friction points and STAY AWARE
You won’t find out if your business model is viable until you do the research and start taking action. Along the way, look for any friction points to your original business model. I can’t emphasis enough how important it is to keep asking yourself not “can I make this business model work?” but “should I make this business model work?”
Oz had a friend already in Chiang Mai that was nice enough to go in person to some gorgeous boutique hotels we wanted to rent out for the retreat. We picked the most beautiful (and most expensive) one. We negotiated the price with the hotel manager (Skype calls that were fuzzy and kept dropping out combined with language barriers: so frustrating).
We finally received confirmation on our booking, but were told that any cancellation of rooms needed to be at least 15 days before the booking or we had to pay full price for them. They took my credit card information for security; I broke out in sweat as I gave them the numbers on the phone and essentially put $10,000 on the line before our first booking.
We left Croatia for London with a business outline, our accommodation booked, and the website built for hungrydev. In the next couple of days we sent the website out to our friends and posted about the launch in some Facebook groups. We were excited. We got a lot of positive feedback and support.
Then, our email pinged. We got our first official applicant! I think I may have jumped up and down and did a little dance.
We quickly realized we had smacked into a big friction point: we didn’t know what to do with the applicant.
Initial client interaction - what do I do now?
We hadn’t set up a payment platform yet. Or an automatic email system. Oz started cracking away at setting up Stripe for payments and signed us up for a Mailchimp account. This took him a couple days in between client work and visiting family and friends (we were in his hometown of Camden, London).
In the meantime, I fussed about what to reply back to the applicant. Oz and I weren’t sure if we should require Skype interviews like I’d done for past coliving projects. It was used as a way to weed out weirdos, answer any lingering questions the applicant had and hopefully “close” the sale.
But what if they were just ready to sign up? Should we bother with the Skype call?
When Oz taught his coding course in London, people knew what they were buying and just sent the money. No Skype call needed. Our worry was that we were possibly creating a friction point by requiring the applicant to do a Skype call. So our solution at that point was to give the applicant all the options. They could email us any questions, do a Skype call with us or just click on the included link to make the payment for the course.
I was so nervous/excited as I wrote and I rewrote the email a thousand times before I made myself send it.
Marketing - do all the things that scare you
My next big focus was Facebook marketing. I have no experience or formal training on this and wasn’t really sure how people figured out this beast. It seemed like people just woke up one day and were geniuses at it (I hated them for this inexplicable knowledge).
I put off tackling this part for a couple days because I was nervous I would somehow “fail” at it. I’m really good at marketing in person, I can sell anything to anyone if I care enough about the product (I used to get paid for being a promotional model). But online marketing has always come off as very inauthentic to me. And yet it seems essential in our technological age. I knew I needed to learn it, and I also hated that I needed to learn it. I didn’t really know where to start.
I called up a friend to vent and ask for help. He gave me a good pep talk about how no one really goes to school for online marketing, they usually teach themselves and learn by trial and error. Well, this was money out of my own pocket and I wasn’t too comfortable “trial and error-ing” my way through this one. He suggested trying a udemy course for Facebook marketing. I didn’t know this existed. I found a 17 hour course specifically on Facebook marketing for the special deal of $19 (it seemed like too good of a deal, but I thought what the heck). I would watch a couple 2 minute videos and then pause the course and practice what I just learned, tinkering around on Facebook’s ads manager. After about 7 hours of this, things started to make a little more sense.
The next thing I was scared of was creating my first Facebook ad on my own. I have friends whose whole jobs are to create these and it seemed like a big deal. I stayed up until 2am one morning creating my first one and Oz helped me brainstorm the content and also to keep me from being a perfectionist about it all. I had to keep telling myself done was better than perfect. Together we finished it and picked our first group to market (UK, 25-39, designers, marketers, entrepreneurs…). We set a 3 day budget of with a total cap of $30.
The next morning, we woke up to Trump winning the election in the US. This affected the whole globe and no one on Facebook cared about ads for the next few days. Our campaign got barely any clicks/conversions. I ended up stopping it early because it was going so horribly. I was heartbroken. I secretly thought it had something to do with my inadequacy with regards to Facebook marketing. It would be the saddest thing ever if we had a good product, good location and the only reason why no one came was because I couldn’t get the word out properly.
Be receptive to CHANGE
3 - Analyze your friction points, accept game-changers, and adapt your business model
You have to be analytical and flexible in this step. Take out the emotion and really look at your business model to see if you have too many frictions points.
The next week we flew to Thailand and were busy getting settled into our new place, exploring, getting SIM cards and all the usual setup of moving to a new country. It was now 2 months before the retreat and we were both getting panicky.
Up until this point, no one had officially signed up for the hungrydev retreat. Every time someone well-meaningly asked, “Are you guys all booked for the retreat?” it killed me a little inside.
Another thing we realized after getting to Chiang Mai is that it’s not a resort town. It’s got an amazing expat community and is great for digital nomads like us who travel full-time. I think it’s exotic and gorgeous, but if you are stuck in a office all year and you want to get away for a retreat, you probably want it to be on some island or beach. Chiang Mai has no beach. I was worried about trying to “sell” the location.
What should we do? Put off the retreat until we were in a better location? Or when we had more time to market it?
Be honest with yourself and your business partners
Early one morning when jet lag got the best of us, Oz and I sat down to revisit our business plan.
Were we starting too big with a retreat? It felt like a big weight over both our heads to fill the spaces and make sure every little thing was perfect for this retreat.
Oz was concerned because he felt our current business model was trying to cater to too many different types of people. I agreed with this and felt we needed to focus on a smaller market. Pretty much all the startups I’d been a part of (or knew what happened behind the scenes) that had failed were due to not starting off lean. They leveraged too much time/effort/money initially without really knowing what their customers wanted.
I wanted to, if at all possible, not repeat the same mistakes I’d seen played out over and over again.
Pivot, pivot, pivot!
Pivoting your model doesn’t equal failure. It’s actually the smartest thing you can do.
We decided we needed to pivot the business model. Our core model for hungrydev was teaching people the foundations of coding and having them walk away with the know-how and tools to create their own websites.
We knew this course was in demand because we’d seen it sell in London. We also knew that a lot of our friends who traveled full-time were always asking us to create websites for them or were taking online courses to learn to code. They wanted to have another opportunity for freelance work, have control of their own creative project, and save money by creating the websites they needed for their businesses.
What if we marketed to people already here in Chiang Mai or who were already planning to travel through Asia? That would take away from the need to “sell” the location.
We could cut the price and do multiple 4 day intensive coding courses at a local coworking space. We chose to lower the price because we need to gain traction, more organic publicity, and also market to people on the road with us who probably don’t have a training budget from their employers to spend.
Starting off small like this made it so we could plan multiple courses in the same time period we were going to have one retreat. We are now marketing to people in and around Thailand through Facebook ads, word of mouth and digital nomad Facebook groups… and it’s working!
We are proud of this new product; we know it’s valuable skill we are teaching and we are comfortable with the price we are asking.
Take these tips and run with them:
- List your skills, interests and past experience to find an idea that excites you
- Do the research, look for friction points and STAY AWARE
- Do ALL the things that scare you
- Analyze your friction points
- Accept game-changers
- Adapt your business model
- Be honest with yourself and your business partners
- Pivot, pivot, pivot!
My new business is merging all the things I’ve learned along the way. Check out my website here:
