Why My Startup Flopped

The Design Startup Show

Hello. Hello, design starters. Today. Today's, um, lesson is a lot more on my journey in my startup and mainly why it failed initially. So it's not going to be a long story, but I just want to let you know. Some of my mistakes and maybe you can learn from them before you make that same mistakes as well. Right.

So quickly starting off to let you know more about it is when I, so I started this graphic design startup in 2015, and why I call it a startup is because I would like it to grow faster than just. You know, like a freelancer bringing in clients as, and when I won and, and bringing in clients and kind of offering them higher ticket items as a, when I won.

So it wouldn't, it wasn't that case anymore. In 2015, I wanted to really focus on growth. In the initial stages. So that's why I call it a startup as what Paul Graham has defined it as startup as equals to growth. So I would have labeled it as a field startup because it flopped miserably. It wasn't a startup at all because I had no growth for two years.

And those days I didn't even know what growth means. I didn't even really know what startup. Is in fact, you know, is it, is it more customers, more profit, more staff? What does it mean by a startup? What does he mean by growth? So those in those days, all I knew was I wanted to make more money. Yes. I wanted to build an asset to have a free control or flexibility with my schedule and not having to worry about client work while I am with my kids while I'm having.

My downtime non-work times and things like that. So I agree ambitions and purposeful desires, but it, those days I have zero execution to grow my startup. And it wasn't because I was lazy, but there are things that I didn't know that I should have known. So here goes with why I want to do this is because it would be the same for some of you.

It would be this, it may not be the same. Maybe you are already growing well, but, but these are just things I would like to share. If you come across such situation, these are things you may want to know. Right. So I hope they help you. And, um, to get started, I'd just like to. Starts with marketing and sales, right?

Which is to make them a priority. When you first start, when you are building processes, creating the design work for your clients, these are also important. It's not that they are not, but you need to prioritize certain areas of your business. And when it comes to up, which is growth is always marketing and sales from start to finish.

And, and not that you're giving up on building your processes and, and providing great delivery. Right? All those are a must, but marketing and sales are priority, which, which brings me to my mistake in back in. Six years ago, I spent too much time being the dessert designer, refining quality of the service because I wanted to deliver the best I can to each customer at a time.

So it's not that you shouldn't give your best, right? This is not what I'm trying to say. It's just that for me, I was always operating on freelancer mode and I was still trading hours for dollars. Even when I was running and trying to grow this business. So my time, if I were to, you know, take it back again, it would have been best spent chatting with people who are looking for such a service, giving them something of value, like creating relevant content.

That solves their problems and offering them things like free trials, coupon codes for discounted rates. So always there is always that conversation between, uh, prospective customers in those days, which I didn't, I didn't at all because, because I got my clients from a lot of referrals. So those days.

Business side of things was still new to me. And I was very comfortable doing the design work itself because having been a freelancer for more than 10 years before 2015, there was this habit, right. That I had to kind of break moving out of my comfort zone and shift. My focus from work design work means the technical side of things to the marketing and the sales.

To growth. So that's the difference. And those days I really didn't enjoy marketing and sales and never thought those were important businesses there. Those were important things for businesses to thrive. I used to think if I enjoy design, then that isn't the best job for me because who wouldn't like to do what one likes to do.

Isn't it. And that was what I thought. But. I wasn't planning. I wasn't strategizing. Hence I only, I only lived by the moment at the time, which wasn't helping to grow the company. So in short, zero marketing is equals to poor business. Right? What I, what I have done in marketing was just absolute zero before, before, you know, How I grew it to this point now, um, then you may be asking, how did I survive?

So as mentioned, I was so lucky that a lot of people came to me via referral. And also because, you know, when I didn't have work to do, then I had to kind of figure out something else or even just wait right. And go hungry. And that's when I talked up a lot of debts as well. Right. And referrals are great.

I mean, they came to me without me having to do anything. I, I managed to earn great income, you know, up to even five figures a month in those days. But with, even with that, they didn't teach me how to start a conversation with strangers and to get more people to buy. So always be marketing as what Scott by water set.

And what I did was I didn't, I didn't do that before the end. And that was the worst way to run a business, to stay profitable if you, if you ever want to. And I'm sure you would. So in order to make this a priority and set myself up for success, I changed my. Daily and weekly schedule. What I did was I made sure those were the first to do task of the day, every day.

So in this way, I know that at least I've done my part to speak to a few people. And I've also done things like written a few articles by noon time. And if that is done, that sets up my day and. The next thing would be other things like customers, request family, friends, and other matters. Right. So that those will get settled first, maybe a few hours in the daytime.

So it works because it became a habit and it works because when you kind of do marketing and sales it's okay. It's not really, you don't, you don't equate them to pushing people to buy, but you have to equate them as building a form of relationship where you start early and you contact the person regularly to keep in touch and you need to start early and keep doing very frequent, frequent touch, touch points, right.

So that they. Associate with you and find you familiar. If you were to just set up the first meeting and straight away, talk about your product or service or something that you want to exchange money for your service, then they will find it strange. Right. And they wouldn't really think that they can trust you yet.

They don't even know you. So that is why the everyday. Scheduled for this will eventually work. So you may not be PLC early if you're not doing it now, but you need to really give it a try first before you go drive without the customers. Right? So even if you have customers going on now, you should give your busy schedule an hour day to set this up.

And the next thing that I have not done those days, that the big mistake was I did everything myself. Right. And the lesson learned was to hire right from the start. So this. One isn't the obvious until you drag your feet to grow a business at snail's pace for four years. And that was what happened to me.

And it feels worst when your competitors who started later than you get ahead of you in shorter time. And so many of them got ahead, which is fine for now because I found a gap. And if you can fit in, you can find this gap and go with it. There will be people who will want your service. Right. But I said is a failure for me and a great lesson.

I will never forget. So when I start this startup, my thoughts were just very simple because I've been freelancing all my life. I just have to charge my clients differently than I used to. So that was what I thought then I want, I went on to spend my time working on that project one project at a time. So since my model is a request, it's a design.

And you can do changes as much as you, like. I receive tons of requests a day by a group of customers. And I have so much to yet the revenue stays the same, right? Because I, I let them request as many changes as they want in a month. So that was when I started to look for designers by Facebook groups. And I thought I could pay someone to just offload my wall, but the nightmare didn't end.

Because what I pass to the other designer did not seem to fit the customer's requirements because some of them started to feed back that there was a drop in quality of my work. And I saw myself spending at least four hours a day, designing, redesigning, not even designing, it's redesigning the work to get to the quality that people expect expected.

Right. But this redesigning work, you know, I could have just used the time. To better spend on growing the business. So what I've learned is to train your people, to deliver the quality work, you don't just leave them. The one thing that they can do something similar to yours, know that quality is always important and should be well baked into the design process.

I've learned that I should have hired a new designer right from the start and not, and not work on the quality and provide that value to the customer first. So meaning yes. I promise myself to give them as much quality and value. Yes. But not for myself. I should have just high at first, right. From the start, my first customer to give them that expectation.

Right. That this is the kind that we can deliver. So you don't over promise. You don't promise much, but you deliver based on the, your, the people you have hired. Then you communicate your customers, that this, this will be, be something that they expect right from your team. I could also give my customers a two week free trial to test it out.

Right. And that's when I should be giving all design projects to my new designers and keep my hands off working on them. So if you were to ask, I would say to stop working on the designs itself. From a higher level on the strategy. Let designers who are willing to be the ones designing, who wants to want to be freelancers who want to have a job with regular pay to do the work, because that will eliminate the chances of me trying to input the value I've been giving my customers.

When I was previously offering them a one to one customized design service is very different. Right. And then this will also relieve the time I need to be doing sales and marketing to grow the business. So the staff you hire maybe highly talented with a great ethic, a great work ethic. However, it's only right now that I realized nobody would have the same ownership as the founder.

And it's not that the employees are not good. I will never try the best they will. What I'm saying is for the most part, they do not have the exact same love as what you, as a founder would have over a baby who is not their own, right from the get-go, it's not their own, you know, and we as founders have to take time to build a strong and trusting relationship with our staff members and, and designers to make this happen.

So you may think that yeah, you know, I, you can hire because of that and all that, but you can because you can train. So I, I, myself made a mistake and I should have hired a designer to do all the design right. From the start, train them to become better people, better designers. And then they will feel that yes, they are closer to us and they would take up more ownership over the company.

And that leads to a better culture in the team. Right? So the last point I would like to make is it would be best to look far is good, but you need to break up the tasks into small bits. So what, in 2014, I started to do something very radically different than before. I started to wake up at 5:00 AM in the morning.

I wrote my goals. I meditated, I read Googles. So at those moments, I was just obsessed to grow my business up to at least a hundred thousand in monthly recurring revenue. Right. And those were those days and who would want that? Right. So it's the same for me. I want that dream to become a reality. And those days I follow a number of gurus advised to be fearless.

And I impart my goals dream big. I write them down. This one I did, and I followed everything. But guess what? I never reached that milestone at all with those advice and the big mistake, wasn't that, wasn't the goal, that piece of code that I set, but it was the broken up task that I taught myself to do to reach that goal.

What do you have to do to get to a hundred thousand monthly revenue? It, it does look like a lot to you right now like that. Right. a thousand and I absolutely fell for that. So I started to list out tons and tons of things I wanted to do. And I got so excited about them that I did everything on the list and then not carry on with them after the first week of listing them.

So it's a bit like if you want to go on a crash diet, you want to reduce your weight. What do you do is you start to eat salads, right? That's it, I'm just, I'm just hypothetically saying that you try, you change the diet and you change everything at one goal. And what happens is you couldn't last after a while you realize you are back to eating unhealthy snacks again.

Right. And that's because. It's too drastic a change. Your body just cannot adapt to it. So what I should've done is the same year. I should have listed out one thing that I know that will move me closer to the next goal or the big goal. So there is a big goal at the end of the tunnel. I just have to move one step and I will be ahead already every day.

One step a day. And I'll eventually get there, right. Because I'm moving ahead, but I need to make, I need to make sure that I do the tasks that will move my feet. One step ahead, right? Because big goals, they are great, but they can overwhelm you if you don't chunk them down to bite size pieces that are manager, but manageable by the day.

So in other words, you have to look term, but first you get to also accomplish or execute the smallest thing that can move you closer to your goal. Even if it's just a teeny weeny step. Right. Like Lao-Tzu said before, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. And with that, you have to do one thing that's small and then you do it well and do it consistently.

And it wouldn't be difficult to do a small thing. Well, and consistently, because it's small, right? You don't go. If you want to do a big thing consistently and well, it may be harder and more overwhelming. Although it sounds obvious, but it doesn't feel like it works when you actually do it on a day-to-day basis because you wouldn't really see the results.

They're just too small to be felt until you take that consistency, consistent steps. So I made the mistake of overlooking the importance of working on one small thing that can contribute to the larger goal that could happen in a year's time. And I thought that to reach a bigger goal, I had to do many big things.

Well, that could be right. If we imagine the end point and somewhat all the things we need to get there, but don't be fooled like me when you were starting out, you don't think of doing all the big things, big things at one, go to make a huge impact first, because you will end up not doing anything at all.

So you just have to put all those things away. Take one bit. That you know, has to be done to move yourself forward. Simply just complete that one thing for the day. And then you do this consistently. So this will get you moving the needle just a little for now. Right? So if let's say you need to get a landing page done on productising, your design service on a productized design service that you have.

What do you think is the smallest thing to accomplish this? Maybe it's the copy. So let's just start with a copy. Do you need a copy anyway, so set schedule, you start, and then you said deadline to end, and once it's done Unix, you work on other things, right? And when you're working on these things, you just work on these things during the scheduled times.

And once it's done, you move on to the next thing, which could be the design of the page, and you will eventually see your landing page taking shape. And bringing in leads and revenue. So the small things add up to meet you to the impact you wish to achieve. All right. So in short to summarize, here are the key lessons you can take away.

Number one value of time. Number two, focus on sales. Number three, schedule everything. Number four, start with the one small step and number five, do everything consis tensely. So right now start getting consistently focused on the things that are important. To grow your startup and build the business you've dreamed off and live the life you've always wanted.

Right? You can do this guys. So that's it for today. And I will talk soon. Bye.