Coordinate: The story of my first startup. What did I do wrong.
Coordinate was a project management software that helped and guided small companies to create and manage their projects easily in teamwork.
The story in numbers:
2 years dedicated. 6 business pitches. 8 student interns. 7 team startup. Investment 3,000 dollars. 10 clients. 1,000 dollars of sales. 42 Saturdays morning work. 20 books. 3 startup weekends. 1 Silicon Valley Trip. Tons and tons of learning. A life time career.
Truth is, I still believe that as an entrepreneur I did more things right than wrong. However, the end result is a failure. For me, great insights on great entrepreneurs´ experiences lied on their learning process and sharing what they did badly it´s what really matters. Basically, explaining the hard things of hard things. Definitely, I made a declaration to never repeat those mistakes again.
I´ve got to give you the whole context of my personal story, so that your insights of my learning experience be more interesting and the lessons blossom in other entrepreneur´s life.
Ever since I entered the best private university in my country (Mexico) in 2012.
One thing I knew for sure before I entry:
“I will use this knowledge I learn to start my own company. Mexico does not need single engineers to fulfill single jobs, there are a lot big ass problems to solve here, we need entrepreneurial engineers that changes things in this country. ”
That being said. My journey as an aspiring engineer begins as foreign student with 60% scholarship, choosing to enter a kickass major such as Chemical Engineering (one of the toughest engineering at my university) which at the time I though it was going to give me the tools I needed for my future company success.
However, my reality check woke up, and undertood that skills required to start and run a company were not in the classroom. I needed to learn tons of things that school doesn´t teach you. So, I began looking inside and outside of school. I visited every entrepreneurial conference available in town, devored book after book, talked to professors and elder entrepreneurs, and even join an leadership entrepreneurs club which later I will take the lead in 2014.
But there was a magical moment during a Chemical Engineering conference in 2012, at my university, where I saw a student entrepreneur called Daniel Gómez that succesfully developed a biodiesel technology company called Solben. That prove to me that, that my thought of starting my own company was indeed achievable, it was not nonsense. I could really have my company as a student. That day changed my life´s purpose career. I knew I wanted to create stuff and become an entrepreneur. My inmediate response from people close to me was: “ Finish school and you do anything you want.” “ When you have all the knowledge then you start.” “ Don´t run before you can walk” and all this noise always makes an appearance in any entrepreneur´s life.
Parallel to that, my socioeconomic status went slightly difficult and I decided to get a part time job to pay part of my tuition. I had the experience to work in a call center for 4 months, even though it pays the bills, is a damn awful experience I don´t recommend that to anybody. Some good friend advised me to look for jobs inside school and I found a really good one. So, I entered to a Project Management Training Center called Aegis PM Center at Monterrey Tech and worked for 6 months. I got to say that I learned many things as an intern, and acknowleged the value what applied Project Management really gives to the world.
That center is one of the best educational certificates for PM professionals in Mexico and Latin America. But that´s where I will find a boss, a mentor, PM guru and future business partner, Phd. Adan López Miranda.
I did my job correctly at the center, I sneaked my big nouse in other areas to see what elses I could improve. My relationship with him grew very fast and after I finished my internship, he showed me a software he had developed one year before called. Coordinate. (version 1.0). A software with a methodology that guides you step by step to create a project. Sounded really wonderful.
I asked myself: “How many people actually do not know how to create a project?” The naive answer for me at the time was: “Many people, and even many companies more oriented to projects!” …. (Not fuc** true!)
I made some research and found that there was no software in the world that offered something similar. It hit me like a great idea, it made all sense in the world.
So, one day I ran to his office and told him: “You know Adán, I checked Coordinate out, I think this can really make good money.” He replied: “Alright, what can you do about it?” and the challenge began.
Adán López is a Phd professor at Monterrey Tech, an intellectual and disciplined man, from Morelia, Michoacan, who came to Monterrey, Mexico at early 90s an developed a very successful career as an engineer, academic and expert on applying and teaching Project Management. He is a openminded and innovative person who constantly is looking to learn knew things and be a changemaker in society.
Adán López gave me “the”shot to manage the project Coordinate and “run” the company together from scratch. No employees. No sales. Just the product with a vision of what it can become.
I started on January 2014, at the Monterrey Tech business incubator with the very objective to get prospects interested in buying the software. People from the Incubator taught me a lot business fundamentals that I needed for the company. Thank you Victor Melgarejo and crew! But, I have to recognize that I didn´t really know who the ideal customer for the product was , so I spent 5 months getting sales and nothing exciting happened.
In the mean time, I was applying all the new entrepreneurship knowledge that I been reading from books like Lean Startup from Eric Ries, Startup Owner´s Manual from Steve Blank. So I began to listen to what clients where telling me. They wanted X feature, Y feature, and suddenly I “sort of knew” what the client wanted. One day I locked myself into a classroom and spent 5 hours doing very good benchmark analysing the best project management platforms in the world in order to find a pattern of what it´s in the market and that Coordinate should had to compete.
Before entering the summer of 2014, I reach a friend who was studying Computer science, whom I met at the entrepreneurship club, and he was a terrific UX designer, with very creative work. His name is Diego Villa. I convinced him to design an new web interface for Coordinate.si, we work together remotely, from Oaxaca, Mexico, and we spent nights pulling together the sketched pretotype with features that’s my clients wanted and what my competidors had already. Diego is going to be a great visionary software builder it´s a matter of time.
During the summer, I enrolled just one course probability and statistics, with a professor director of the Math department, he is an insanely brilliant man but a homework terrorist. I dropped out the course, because of the time consuming homework, and I really wanted to push my startup forward. That summer I got my first intern, a mechatronic engineer from Panama, Roberto Barrios. He was a student who obtained full support from his government with a 100% scholarship to study at Monterrey Tech, in order to achieve a better degree for better job opportunity and right now he is working on the expansion of the Panama Canal. Super cool. He helped me with extensive research and the logic of the new software prototype. We spend summer weeks arguing and crafting ideas for a better software.
Startup Weekend Experience
There was another kickstart event my career in that summer of 2014 called Startup Weekend Monterrey, which later I will organize next year with my friend Paul Zavalza and many great people in 2015. But in 2014, I got the awesome oportunity to win 2nd place out of 13 teams developing a soccer pools platform for enhancing the experience within sports restaurants called Aquetegano.mx (Crappy english translation: IbetIwinyou.com) . We validated the business model obtaining purchase orders from restaurants like Wings Army, Buffalo Wild Wings and Costeñito (sea food restaurant). The great team was conformed by a great UX/UI designer Pablo Coronado, backend developer Ceferino Torres, frontend developer Homero Marin and marketing strategist Soren Campos. Some of the will join Coordinate as the time passed.
Startup Weekend is 54-hour weekend event, in which groups of developers, business managers, designers pitch ideas to form new startup company, form a team around those idea, and work for a weekend to develop a working prototype, demo, or present at Sunday evening to judges. Wikipedia.
It´s a hell of an experience!
After I validated more my skills and desires as an entrepreneur at Startup Weekend. I convinced my partner Adan López that we had to do a full remasterization of the older version. The main arguments where: clients were not buying because the plataform lacks great design and X feature and Y feature. He argued that we should hire professionals so that the development was really serious. But I was reluctant to hire someone because there was no money. That was kind of the first main challenge.
However, I applied something was called in the entrepreneurial world as “bootstrapping”. Which the formal definition is to finance your company’s startup and growth with the assistance of or input from others at almost no money. We prepared some of the software prototype requirements, and we were ready to recruit more interns oriented to software development to fulfill new vision of Coordinate 2.0.
So, on August 2014, I enrolled Business major Mayela Ontiveros, Computer Science gamer engineer Mario Castellanos, Graphic designer Ceci Roco, Robotics Engineer Erika Carlos to become part of Coordinate.
A really good and varied team that will carried out the vision of the project. One of the things I most enjoyed with the team, was the weekly meetings in which we discuss requirements from different angles. My teammate Mario Castellanos and I got into very dense discussions fights which each of us wanted to rip our head´s off respectively. We were not agreeing with the same things to do. Always different points of view. However, we went a long respected ourselves but those discussions provoke marvelous enhancements to the product because every time we did that, the project was more logical and with better arguments for development.
We did very good work in terms of analysing every aspect of the functionality, software and design requirements. Then, I convinced UX designer Pablo Coronado and backend developer Ceferino Torres from Startup Weekend to worked me Saturday mornings and evenings at Coordinate around October 2014. We had some clients from Coordinate 1.0 , a prototype going on and we needed to have something ready to program on December. We wanted to proof to my partner that we could achieved that prototype with all the requirements, even though we were bunch of student interns, 2 professionals and myself. We did it. We show something interesting enought to begin the development.
On January 2015, we were determined to build this new thing. We had all this work done and the very optimistic idea that we could change how people create and manage projects in their organizations.
One saturday morning at the incubator, I asked Ceferino a.k.a “Chefes”: “Hey, we need more programmers to get this done, do you know somebody?” He said: “Yes I do, but what are you going to give them in return ? I mean if you could bring coffee, cookies and something cool to code they will come for free.” My next thought was: “ That´s it, lets go for coffee and cookies.
Assembling a highly motivated team.
Soon enough we got on board Richard Vega and Pablo Lozano, software developers from 2 big local companies to work less than part time (Saturdays and week evenings) who wanted to develop something new. Then, I kept looking until I found Marcos Galeana through a conversation in a FB group. I posted that I was going to build the next big thing in project management and that I needed a front developer that knew X and Y software technologies that was eager to be part of. Fortunately for us, Marcos was starting software development company called Futurence, and we got big support from him and all of his crew.
So here I was on February 2015, with a a group of professionals programmers that I couldn´t afford but I got them excited to work towards this new Coordinate 2.0. The spirit and motivation of all really kept me going. We launched a rockstar landingpage so that future clients knew we were on and even presented the project in a big entrepreneurship event called INC Monterrey.
We got to say that in the mean time we developed the product we tried everything in terms of marketing and sales strategies like:
1 . Paid emailing to 10,000 people in the city. 2. Facebook ads. 3. Google ads. 4. Four Workshops to teach PM through the software. 5. Send presentations to prospects. 6. Inbound marketing content. 7. Direct sales.
At the same time, Pablo Lozano, Softtek developer, suggested we build Coordinate 2.0 with Angular Material Design, which Google uses for android apps to develop faster products. So we created the core functions first. It took us much time to develop the core functions(4–5 months) because we work at limited time, only one meeting during the business week and 5 hours on Saturday. So the whole thing was slow but with a good pace.
Silicon Valley Experience.
So, I received an very good opportunity on summer of 2015 thanks to my parents support to live a 4 week startup work experience with Coordinate in Silicon Valley, California.
There are many things Silicon Valley can teach you. I learn many stuff from the biggest entrepreneurial hub in the world. It´s ruthless, you have to come up with some great innovation, an atractive product, attractive team, get sufficient traction (sales) or you are not in the game. However, my main objetive was to learn a global startup mindset and transmit that to my team.
Regarding Coordinate´s feedback, Jackie Hernandez Operations Manager at Plug and Play, she manages 300 startups, and watches hundreds of startups pitches every year she knows what every innovative startup is doing, and she asked me: “What is different from your project management software? There are dozens of them, what do you have new? That was part of the tought part. I replied: “I have an agile 4 step process that allows people ot create better projects.” She said: “That is not attractive”
Today I thanked Jackie that ruthless feedback, entrepreneurs need a good dose of that from time to time. Silicon Valley is an experience that tecnology entrepreneurs should encounter.
So,finally, connecting the things that I did badly:
1) Build a part time team means no full startup.
It is all or nothing, or you will get mediocre results. You will die slowly in progress and achieve “partial” results. I happened to have a great team that develop a 60% product design and funcionality but I underestimatde my team members´ time and expectations. Something that really killed the animic state was that we tested tremendously late with our clients. The user tests resulted that our core functionality was not enough to a company to buy it. I learned a lot about team dinamics and how to transmit a vision of the project in each team member. The most important I surpass barrier that differenciate someone who starts and someone who doesn´t. My suggestion will be: GET ENOUGH CASH TO ASSEMBLE A FULL FOCUSED TEAM SO THAT THE IMPACT BE HIGHER.
2) Work everything based upon untested assumptions.
That thing really, killed us. Assume the market will buy any thing you can produce. Assuming that you know you client fully. Assuming that because from you first product you had 10 paid clients, if you enhance it you will have more. The real thing is that I should tested early and talk with users that didn´t sympathize with me. My learning here is this: STOP ASSUMING, GO AND GET FIRST HAND INFORMATION WITH YOUR CLIENT.
3) Not having a core skill for the product.
I happen to have two skills that allowed me move my team forward. Leadership and autodidacting skills. There was a huge learning curve in all aspects. I needed to dominated Project Management for sure, but read about design fundamentals and some logic of programming. Once, you have a professional team you have to be able to communicate in their same language. I assisted to lots of programming meetups, design meetups and normal meetups to obtain knowledge from others. GET A GROUP OF CORE SKILLS TOGETHER AND PREPARE YOURSELF.
In the last month of Coordinate,we iterate and found an unattended market with Project Portafolio Manager with companies that manage 100+ projects and don´t have a good looking software that simplifies their management., and I built a prototype that allowed me to get 5 promise of trial for December 2015 from big companies. The team was stand by, I got serious talks with 2 investors which didn´t backed me on time, we where going to use Coordinate 2.0 code, because the logic was almost the same.
However, the reality is that the passion for solving that specific problem of companies´s projects disapeared. Gone. I spent 2 years in that industry but I was tired. I learned from a friend, Paul Zavalza that any startup founder should dedicated at least 5 years of their life if he wants to pull it off greatly. Passion is a key player because when the things get hard any rational person would give up. Steve Jobs. Finally, at the last meeting when my team and I were going to start all over, I couldn´t transmit all that desire and passion to do things more intelligently. That´s when I realized I failed.
I gotta thank my family, friends, university peers, and anyone who gave a “ You can do it” as well for the misleading “ That product is awesome”
I would like to promise something to everyone who belonged Coordinate team. I am going to give more sweat, blood and tears for my next startup becaused you guy initiated me.
You guys worth it.
We will get on this amazing road soon enough.
Fail fast, succeed faster.
