Founders 🚨 If you’re building a Product or Startup? Read this…

My phone showed me this picture memory. The chances of this memory ever happening were pretty much impossible.

A few December’s ago.

🏕 I was reluctantly living out of a suitcase from a friend’s new home in Ilford, London.

👵🏼 The previous old lady left behind a master bedroom, like a scene from Austin Powers, the carpet, the walls and the curtains, bright purple! 🕺🏻 🟣

🛏 The new mattress my friend treated me to, was like sleeping on weetabix, a spine buster. The fresh coat of white paint was pungent and nostril burning. 👃🏻

This temporary bedsit had a very clear objective: Solve a Problem

After what can only be described as living a childhood fairy-tale, 8 years to become a Chartered Architect, specialising in residential, sustainable hi-rise design and parametric modelling.

In 2009 before moving to London, I designed a 25 storey tower for Manchester which incorporated a lattice diagrid (X) system and double skin micro climate. The tower had similar engineering cues poignantly for this post to Norman Foster’s ‘The Gherkin’.

During my fourth year in London I decided to flip into a different universe; Software.

I set up a company, built a website, iPhone app and platform in Beta while working full time  for 12 months. I didn’t tell anybody outside of my family and a couple of friends.

This 🔥 in my belly, had to be explored.

1) Leap of faith:

I quit my job… Two months before the app went live. 

2) Sacrifice:

Eleven years in architecture.

3) Risk:

Skin in the game. £45k Bank Loan for London survival.

For context, I’m a non-technical solo founder (I didn’t code) originally from Old Swan in Liverpool with a real scouse accent. I don’t come from family wealth, didn’t attend Cambridge, Oxford or MIT. 

Within months of going Live, we gained traction and Users in 50 countries, piggy backing onto the existing hashtag #mipic – A Spanish word, “my-picture” Three national startup competitions were entered, miPic won every one and received a nice feature by INC.com.

I then popped my Crowdfunding cherry raising £170,000 with Crowdcube which enabled miPic v1.0 designed in Brick Lane, built it in Buenos Aires after a life changing day at Richard Branson’s house. This whirlwind 6 months followed with an exciting hello invite to Accel Partners.

And then… Suddenly, the handbrake was pulled.

A back seat driver got excitable and demanded we bizarrely franchised the company, blocking new investments. 🤯

I felt punch drunk, like I’d just done 10 rounds with Tyson Fury. 😵 🥊

I was told “you shouldn’t have mentioned your Accel meeting.” In simple terms, we over performed our six month plan and ears were burning wanting more equity.

I then lost 10 months of our Roadmap untangling over emails, distraught with worry how I would pay the team or buy my own food shopping.

I chose to leave my apartment in Clapham minus a traumatised burnt-out ex girlfriend. I was operating on instinct and first time founder naivety. I told everyone, “don’t worry guys, I’m going to solve the problem.”

The new bedsit in Ilford. The first train station walk was eventful.

An angry looking chap appeared from a tower block, running in my direction crossing the road, swinging a machete.

🔪 YES, A MACHETE… Shouting at two men I was walking towards.

🎒 I held onto my straps and continued walking, I didn’t cross, I didn’t stop or turn, I kept moving and walked past them. I heard screams and shouts putting my key into the door thinking “what the hell have I signed up for here.” Founders often ask themselves this same question.

That same ‘machete week’ in December, I was invited to meet a couple of gents at their office near Liverpool Street. Yes, you guessed it – The Gherkin.

The Holy Grail and icon for Business in London

I visited the Gherkin many times before, studied its engineering in detail but never been inside, behind the curtain.

The Gherkin is the architectural postcard and pinnacle of business in London.

This was not an episode of The Apprentice but as real as it gets, I was walking into the exact visualisation I had dreamt a thousand times.

We grabbed coffee and went upstairs to the 12th floor, to their floor!

I met with Marcus Traill and colleagues at Quantres about chapter one of miPic’s story and my vision for the company.

8 weeks later, Marcus and Craig Mawdsley both Directors at Starling Bank became 5% Shareholders in miPic. And just like that, I’d ‘solved that Problem’ and inadvertently arrived at a much more professional investor table.

Marcus, Michael and Craig of Quantres.

I had no real insight into what Quantres or who their solo founder was, Harald McPike is a self-made entrepreneur and financial trading adventurer.

I sold 25% equity in miPic
to Harry and his team for £1,100,000

From meeting to completion in 6 weeks over Skype. Where I’m from that’s not loose change.

But this miPic investment, insignificant to the bigger picture, at less than 1% of Harry’s £130 million investment into fellow solo founder Anne Boden who has created an incredible brand and FinTech disrupter in Starling Bank now valued at £2+ billion just a few years later.

Investing in Technology businesses requires serious capital, scaling a product to millions of people requires much more than just Code. Brand building, tone of voice, a Consumer end product, logistics and most of all creating a talented happy Team.

Architects design Master Plans, Infrastructure, Buildings, Layouts, the Look and the Feel. For it to stand up, we rely on Engineers and Technicians to play their part… Correctly.

Architecture was the perfect foundation and baptism into the startup game. Taking an idea through design, iteration, construction and delivery, bouncing through revisions and criticism along the way. Nothing ever runs in a straight line.

Founders!
Develop a Thick Skin Immediately

The simplest and most elegant of products are often those working the hardest within. The Gherkin’s beauty is made possible thanks to it’s column free floors and diagonally braced engineering.

❤️ At the Gherkin’s heart, multiple concrete core lift shafts act as the buildings linch pin cantilever. Each diagrid lattice (X) connects to the heart and Cores discreetly within floors, resulting in a masterpiece of column-less open spaced architecture.

The Building works in a trapeze of balance, tension and compression.

Building a Tech Startup holds similar parallels alongside my brief stay in Ilford.

Your Core Mission and Values must be able to withstand an earthquake.

Prepare for challenges, massive sacrifice, heartbreak, road blocks, maniacs, sleeping on sofas while remaining upbeat. Keeping a level head during the absolute 💩 shi*est of times and calm during the most ecstatic of celebrations, is a necessity. ✊🏼

On the day Harry’s £1.1m investment arrived in our account, I took our iOS engineer Shab to Sushi Samba in Heron Tower at 2pm. 3 glasses of Champagne and 2 courses later, I’d had enough. I didn’t entertain calls to go out and celebrate.

During the Uber ride back to the purple bedsit in Ilford. I was content and smiling, knowing that this working class kid from Liverpool’s dream had come true.

I never gave up when several people told me it was impossible to solve the problem. I kept pushing from the bedsit slash building site with courage and belief, 18 hours a day until the job was done.

My advice for Founders, document absolutely everything along your journey.

You never know when it will be needed. As Architects, it is engrained in our brain to be meticulous about detail, a screw that came loose or a pixel not aligned. All while seeing the forest from the trees and birds eye view of the Masterplan from above.

Being able to reflect on these memories is priceless and a reminder how far naivety and tenacity can take you through difficult periods onto the next chapter.

If you think this Chapter was wild, wait until you hear the next! 😱

I continue to share my mission of building miPic, a crowdfunded company in public. To join our journey with 80 other shareholders, check out our pitch page below.

Godspeed to every Founder pursuing their dream. ✊🏼

Carl

Are you a founder?
Share and tell us about your hurdles below

I was at a conference a couple of years ago watching Dhiraj Mukherjee tell his whirlwind story to a thousand people of co-founding his startup, Shazam, that music app we all use. Little did I know, the impact his inspirational words would have on me personally and our own journey for miPic.

At the time, I was extremely exhausted, probably depressed and unquestionably burnt out, living out of a suitcase at friends’ houses. I faced a very serious realisation that miPic was just a few months away from closing before we’d even got started due to an incredibly difficult situation that seemed impossible to solve. What was a year of pride and ecstasy building our company and brand became a nightmare as new investment in the company was blocked.

Two months after watching this man on stage at Startup Grind, I was standing on a train at Waterloo in London, slumped and dazed when he stepped onto my carriage next to me.

During Dhiraj’s talk at the conference, he gave a little anecdote from the Shazam story which stuck with me that summer. Back when the company was in its inception, the founding team were really struggling with the functionality of their product– specifically the algorithm which detects the song and sends users the artist, title and so on. They were short on funding, each of the founders were looking at ways to support the business or step out and go back into full-time work. They almost gave up. Their lead Tech Scientist asked to be left alone for some time while he gave it one last shot at building the code. Some time later he reappeared and cracked it. Shazam was born. They kept persisting, kept pushing and found a solution.

Background

Just four months before the conference I was unbelievably ecstatic–  we had just launched miPic v1.0 after six months of hard and ridiculously long hours, getting the product out in time for Christmas. With our small team in London and an agency of 10 developers in Argentina, f**k it was fun.

We turned on the new website to much relief and in January 2016 received a few nice surprises. The company was recognised by Inc.com and featured by The Next Web. We were also invited in to meet one of the industry’s notorious Venture Capital Investors, who’d previously invested in the likes of Spotify, Kayak and Facebook. We were all on a high, the team was bouncing and it seemed like we were on track… in the blink of an eye our whole plan was derailed.

(This deserves a post of it’s own, so I’ll come back to that later.)  

A surreal couple of months followed, what was once a very exciting time quickly flipped into fear, anxiety and inconsolable heartbreak. Our roadmap for the year was to build and launch the platform, fix any bugs over the new year period and start marketing with a new round of investment. I made the decision not to accept a proposed new round of investment because it would have killed us, so I was suddenly out scouting critical funding, with a product ready to market and no budget to operate, or to live.

The Train

To give ourselves a fighting chance, I decided to sacrifice my own living expenses, leaving my home of 5 years in Clapham to stay with friends and sofa surf. I would use the remaining Crowdfunding cash left in the tank to hire a marketing assistant to lighten my load so I could focus on chasing down new investment. On this particular day, I chased Dhiraj, right down that train carriage and stood next to him.

“Hi.”

Fight or Flight – When our back is against the wall we do things without deliberating or finding excuses, it’s instinct. No matter how tired or burnt out I was that day, there was no way I was leaving that train without speaking to him. With nothing to lose I said “Hi, excuse me”. I introduced myself and thanked him for sharing his Shazam story at the conference. In twenty or thirty brief seconds I presented my business to him and showed him our app –  miPic. He raised an eyebrow and agreed to meet me for coffee, so we swapped business cards. That evening I sat on the River Thames in Wandsworth eating dinner with my ridiculously excitable Argentinian friend ‘Caro’ and a new found energy, one that wasn’t scared but fuelled and inspired.

The following week, we met in Pret a Manger and I told Dhiraj my problem which halted our progress. With his head in his hands on the table shaking his head in frustration, he said he wanted to help. One sentence that stood out was “you have to pound the pavement Carl and don’t stop”. 

The next day he wrote an incredible heartfelt email to his closest friends in the startup community with a rallying cry – the email subject read ‘Help a fellow founder in need’. It finished on “I don’t know Carl personally, but this is an opportunity to help someone in a way they will never forget.” Now I’m not embarrassed to say as a 36 year old modern-day man, when I read his email, tears rolled down my face for about half an hour. (Thank god, my friends weren’t at home ?)

Keep Going!

That period was the hardest emotional and physical struggle of my life and there was a glimmer of hope. I met all of Dhiraj’s contacts that month for coffee, all great guys but were unable to help directly to solve my problem. This show of support from total strangers gave me the extra kick I needed to keep pushing 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for months. Dhiraj kept in touch over email throughout the autumn with encouragement and intros and it went right to the wire. Thankfully there was a solution that most didn’t think was possible, and we did pull off a miracle to give miPic the future it deserved raising £1.3m investment 6 months after meeting Dhiraj.

The moral of the story is to never doubt your ability to make things happen, even if your exhausted on a train heading home for dinner. With belief, positivity and obsessive hard work, it’s all possible. 

I lost a few things that year but never gave up, I pounded the pavement as Dhiraj asked. If you too are a founder going through hell– keep going, you may surprise yourself at what is waiting for you around the corner. Or even on a train… ?? Meeting Dhiraj really gave me that turbo boost of motivation and restored my faith in human beings when I needed it most.

Startup Grind – Fireside Chat

Three years after meeting Dhiraj on that train, on Thursday, August 8th 2019 we shared a fireside Q&A in association with Startup Grind London.

We discussed Dhiraj’s journey with Shazam from inception to exit and how our chance train encounter empowered me to push on and enable miPic to overcome a mountainous hurdle, saving me from despair that summer. Our talk gave a real insight into the pitfalls and ecstatic moments we encounter founding startups, from seed funding, to crowdfunding and VC investment.

Just tap below to watch the full Startup Grind chat!

Learnings

1. Be prepared for banana skins when you least expect it

If you have investments in the pipeline, there’s a chance things may change, never be desperate and don’t stop pushing until the deal is done.

2. Never be afraid to say – Hi!

When you need help – ASK! Everyone you know and more. Don’t be afraid, the worst that can happen is they say no.

3. Be Positive, magic can happen

Be persistant and be relentless. Exhaust every possible option towards your goal. If you push hard enough, the universe will make it happen

If this post resonates with you in any way, shout me in the Comments below! Did you overcome a challenging period which seemed impossible?