Before I jump in, probably you noticed that the email looks a bit different, and the post URL is different as well. That’s because I changed the hosting platform from Ghost (which is powering vladcalin.ro, my personal website), to SubStack and it’s jointhetechbubble.substack.com URL (I know, I’m looking into getting a better domain).

It’s just a technicality, the posting schedule is the same, every Monday and every Thursday, but I will remove the YouTube channel promotion for now, as I can’t find the time to do video content reliably momentarily.

Let’s proceed to the actual content you came for!

About my first startup attempt

It's Monday, so it is the time for a new article from the "The Tech Bubble" series. This time, I am delving into my personal past experiences with startups, what I tried and failed, and what I learned from my various attempts.

The first ever try, was something called UPPI, which was supposed to be "Shopify for restaurants", meaning it wanted to be a one stop shop for all the digital needs for a restaurant: we give them website with built in ordering and reservation management.

Obviously, it didn't work out.

But it's interesting to think back and see exactly the mistakes I did. Some would say it was obvious, but for the 20 year old Vlad, it wasn't. It was an idea that could have grown into the next unicorn, because the digital presence was crucial for small businesses, and there are a lot of restaurants around.

So, how it began?

The idea

Honestly, this was probably the biggest indicator that it will not work: the way I came up with the idea.

I didn't start from the client, from a real need or from personal experience with dealing with restaurants. Instead, my programmer mind went the other way around: since I was a programmer, I wanted to build a tech solution. I wanted to build a product. I started from there, and then I started to explore what would make sense to build, something that in theory has a high chance of success (based off my intuition).

So I naturally thought to pick some service market that I frequently access, and build for them. So I though... "hmm restaurants need digital presence, so why not".

It was the classic startup founder thinking that basically dooms a new venture from the start: you start with a solution (the technology), and then you look for problems to solve. In reality, to even have a slight chance at success, you need to go the other way around: start from the client, find their problems, build the solution.

When you have a hammer, everything starts too look like a nail - ancient startup wisdom

So there I was, I had a target market in mind, a product idea, but little did I know that the chances of getting somewhere are absolute zero.

If you would see my idea in some pitching competition, you probably wouldn’t think that, because I managed to justify myself that it was a good idea. And it would probably be a good idea. But the process to get there was totally wrong.

The validation

Then, I did something smart: I tried to validate it.

I opened Google Maps, made a list of “leads” with all the local resturants from Iași that had the email listed (I was scared to death to cold call them, and also the listed numbers were for ordering food and making reservations, so the weren’t good anyway) and then I sent them an email presenting my solution, and asking if they would be interested and what price point did they consider approriate.

I gathered like 40 contacts, and I think I got like 5 responses back. From those 5 responses, 2 were just plain rejections, but 3 also contained valuable feedback. I think those restaurant owners saw a struggling wantrepreneur (wannabe entrepreneur) and wanted to help me in any way they could: serving me a real life lesson.

The biggest mistake here was that the email I sent was basically trying to sell them the product I didn’t have yet, to see “if they bite”. But in hindsight, this email should have been an invitation to discussion about the challenges of the restaurant business and explore together ways technology can address them.

Their answers basically boiled down to

we not interested in such solutions, new sales from digital are not a big chunk of the new client market since for local businesses such as ours growing our client base is done through work of mouth and local advertising, we already have a website, Google Maps listing and we take orders/reservations on the phone, which is good enough for us - restaurant owner delivering me a dose of real life teaching

Of course, paraphrased. But the idea was there: this kind of product doesn’t have a market (or at least didn’t have at that time).

Conclusion

So right then and there, I decided to dump it and move on.

It was my first attempt at the startup life, to start something from scratch. But I have to admit, coming from a highly technical background and didn’t really have a lot of experience in the real world yet, it was bound to start that way.

But in hindsight, it was a valuable experience, made me get past my anxiety of cold contacting strangers over email (I don’t know why I felt that way, it was just email. Worst case they could ignore it, like the other 35 did).

And I have to be honest: my brain was so hard wired to think that the tech can solve any problem and trying to smash technology into every market because “it has to work, otherwise, it’s THEM that don’t see the potential”, that this mentality also derailed my next 4 attempts.

Thanks for reading The Tech Bubble! The next post will be about my attempt #2