Welcome to my adventure 01 Sep 2013

Hi there!

My name is Mark and I just graduated from university. As many among you I’m facinated my the startup community. Awesome people that solve interesting problems. In the last year I was a weekly reader of Hacker News and loved to follow the latest insights of tools and techniques that help modern startup to get some traction in the market.

University is over and I now have the chance to set the direction I want to go into. There are a lot of options that I could do: Continue to do consulting, doing a really long travel, get on some mountains, doing some adventures. I needed some time to filter through the options to decide what I really want to do next.

I decided that I want to bootstrap a startup. To make it more interesting I set myself an constraint: Do it in three month. I have some savings that will give me the chance to focus fulltime during this period without doing consulting. My target for the end of this period is to have an big enought revenue of my enterprise to support me. The aim is to have 2000€ monthly revenue. Coincidently, this is the money I need right now to support my life in Berlin.

I want to write about this path and what happens on the way to it.

I already have some background in tech. I just finished my computer science bachelor degree at the Freie Universität Berlin. I started university at KIT in Karlsruhe, but fell in love with berlin a year later and moved there. And having a liancion with Strasbourg between the both. While beeing a student I did consulting for various startup and founded a startup with a partner.

Consulting meant developing a MVP and adding features over time. The latest project I did was flimmer.de. flimmer.de is a german movie trailer portal, where users get blu-rays and video on demand tickets in exchange for watching movie trailers. Sounds nice, eh. My previous startup is called fahrstundenplaner.de. fahrstundenplaner.de is a calendar application for driving schools in germany. It allows students to book appointments with their driving school online and helps the driving school to maximize their workload. Thanks Profund for supporting us. You guys are awesome.

So back to my current project. I need something that a solo founder can execute in 60 workdays. Thus I have a few constraints

• The idea can’t be too big. I need to develop it without wasting too much of my time.
• The project has to give my customers a clear unique selling point. Without an unique selling point it will be pretty hard to market it.
• I need to have time to research the parts of a startup I haven’t done yet. The first thing that pops in my mind is Sales and Marketing. I need to do some research on how to do this.

Which problem to tackle

I have some ideas in my backlog. Most of them will consume too much time. Others do not have a proven business model, yet and could fail. I want to minimize the risk of getting into an idea that won’t work. Doing a pivot after half the time would make the time constraint nearly impossible.

Thus I will focus on some proven business model. Theresefore I can focus on the execution rather than on the idea. As I really like patio11 blog, as he has many interesting posts about a lot of things that are related to statups, I stumbled acros his latest project AppointmentReminder.org.

AppointmentReminder is a little helper for small businesses that have appointments with customers. AppointmentReminder sends reminders to customers one day before they have the appointment. AppointmentReminder reminds a customer of a small business on the coming appointment, this saves the business money as it is more likely that the customer won’t forget the appointment.

AppointmentReminder has several advantages for small business

• better planing (the customer is more likely to tell the business if he will attend the appointment)
• more revenue (the customer is more likely to attend the appointment, which means money for the business)
• service to the customer (the customer will avoid uncompfrotbale situations)

As AppointmentReminder is only available in the US and Cananda, I won’t interfer with patio11 business.

Doing a german version of AppointmentReminder has several advantages for me

• proven business model (solves a need customers have, thus these customers are likely to pay money for the product)
• the mvp should be managable in my time constraint

Whats next

So I have a project I want to do. The next step is to do a roadmap. I want to get on the problem that is most important first: Getting Customers

Therefore I need to make a list of all potential business sections that could be interested in this product and get in touch with them.

This means: Talking to the customer.

My first step is: To get some validation of potential customers After this I will develop an MVP. After having some customers use (and pay for) the MVP I will fine tune the application. This means fixing bugs, fixing the rough edges and automate all the things.

So my rough time plan looks like this:

First Month: Talking to potential customers Second Month: Developing and Deploying an MVP Third Month: Making a full product of the MVP

Welcome to my journey and wish me the best! I’m totally excited!

Best, Mark