A true Start-up story: day one - a little history, the first year.

Posted on May 20, 2007

A true Start-up story: Day one

Let’s start the day one of telling a small business story with a little history. So, how does a start-up start? (Note: actual names and some small details are left out for the sake of the story and maybe some legal implications)

First of all, I’m your host for the Journey, Cristian Dorobantescu, a part time entrepreneur from Eastern Europe. That’s the story of my small business and of my other 2 partners in the company.

Back in 2005 I’ve decided to change jobs, from Project Management to Sales, which ended up as changing Employers as well. Taking out the reasons to change jobs, somewhere in the process I’ve came to realize that no matter how many jobs and employers I will change, I will never probably become really rich (or at least rich enough) as an employee only - I needed to start a business. Later I’ve discovered that having a business doesn’t necessarily and automatically make you rich, but it gives you the opportunity to be rich. Anyway, until I wrote that post about “Entrepreneurship as an Opportunity enhancement” I was really sure I’ve started a business to become rich.

Ok, let’s stick with the story. Once the idea about starting a new business lurked from somewhere, I tried to “sell” my idea to 2 of my best friends - both programmers. We set our goals to make and sell software products, Web Design and other Internet related things, while keeping our day jobs. We created our site in English - we wanted to conquer the World as any Entrepreneur does when it gets past the Entrepreneurship fear- .

Making the site in English proved to be a mistake later as this set us in a very competitive market, where we didn’t actually have any chance - Web design (more about this in day three).

Anyway, we’ve got to do what proved later to be a successful free product, which brought us some attention. We also got our first customer from Austria, which helped us partially to pay for 2 laptops - first big investment, which we paid about 70% from our pockets.
Around this moment, I’ve decided to switch hosting for our site and for our customer from a cheap USA solution to a much more expensive and reliable one. This was the moment when I realized I should make a company policy in getting the best tools for the job - which I try to keep even today.

Unfortunately about this time, the other 2 partners in the company decided to leave their shares (one to his wife, Tina, which by the way is the sister of my girlfriend) and the other to me - we weren’t making any profit back then anyway. With their leave, they also took the free product with them - I wasn’t able to sustain it from the technical point of view.

This was probably one of the worse times, the company got no products, no programmers and no nothing. The entire business plan (yes, I wrote a business plan) went to trash, while one third of the company went to my girlfriend (Simona).

I’m not ashamed to say that the salvation came from my previous job: they actually sent me the first paying customer and offered me their Web Design tools. Thank you! This way (and based on my previous experience as Project Manger) I’ve started learning some programing, Tina did the creatives - just enough to make the first Websites for the first paying customers.

The first year ended up with virtually no profit. I had my first doubts about entrepreneurship and we seemed to go nowhere, but as we all kept our 9-5 jobs, things weren’t so bad after all.

Continued day two.

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