I’d like to think we did a few things really well in our fintech start-up, Bilbus. And, of course, we made our share of mistakes. In between, there were a lot of things we could have done better. Good timing forgives mistakes. Bad timing highlights them.
It’s easier to simplify some of our lessons learned into 2 groups: those we should have known better; and those we had to experience first-hand. Like many of us who end up repeating history, I hope to avoid many of the simpler errors, and with concentration, the cloudier ones. The ‘have to experience’ errors, I’m hoping get relegated into the ‘been there’, and save my team a lot of time in my next endeavour.
Avoidable, Predictable, Expensive Lessons
Complex problem: not seeing the bottom of the iceberg. In hindsight, without sufficient capital we should have gone for lower hanging fruit and identified a simpler challenge we could cut our teeth on. The complexity of business finances (despite our experience), was a challenge for a better-funded, confluent timing. Reshma and Carlos summed it up nicely: “when you have to educate too many pieces of a complex value chain, it’s difficult to crack”. We knew it was going to be difficult when we started. We were determined to try.
Bootstrapping and undercapitalization: a longer development and sales cycle is much harder when climbing up the hill in a 500cc engine while others with more powerful engines follow you and overtake. In some cases, a train with hundreds of million dollars whizzes by with all the component parts and resets the standard. Risking one’s own money (or close friends and family) is a both a risk and opportunity. Low interest rate environments make the decision easier but there is a fine line between determination and pride. Sometimes, it’s difficult to see which is driving the train. While external money may have no patience or domain expertise, it does force a brutal simplicity. The competition gets funded and they thank you for your ideas. No one remembers you did it or said it first if you’re still trying to hit a traction point.
We made the best of what we had. I’ve heard horror stories of offshore development and we learned and ran a reasonably tight operation. Still, slow or not, our cash burn was low and we built a full suite within a frugal budget. Others have burned through multiples of what we spent and at time of writing, and have still not solved the problem. Shame there are no points for efficiency and cash conservation!
Simplicity, UX, UI came after functionality. A classic, enterprise-first mistake that took a while to rectify. The user experience and interface has improved hugely since we first started. But even then, the ‘technical debt’ and our lack of in-house design made this a piecemeal effort that is better leapfrogged with a new build.
Team: this drives the world of commerce, and is the hardest to get right as it’s down to chemistry, external influences and time. I’ve been mentoring a few start-up teams in 2 accelerators and observed a good many more. There’s an intangible to the team that’s not easy to call. Casting a critical eye over our own team, hindsight makes it easier to read the signs. We actively tried to address gaps and overlaps. A number of consultants and freelancers wanted to work with us and we came close with a few really excellent advisory board candidates. But whatever the reason, we weren’t able to get the right people who could ride with us on the train as cofounders. Team is hard.
Technical debt: trade-offs to get to market faster come back to haunt you. Being agile & innovative cost us more time and money to retroactively fix build issues and maintain a self-testing modular architecture. I’ve spent months trying to avoid repairing individual ‘cracks’ and find new ways to replace ‘sections of pipe’. I’ve also had to learn more about database optimization, front and middle tier architecture and API calls than I had ever cared to! Recently, a team I was mentoring at a fintech hackathon thought I was a CTO! In today’s market, I wish!
Realistically, we could and should have handled all of the above better. There were of course, other factors affecting our journey. Lessons for the next one. In the second part of this post, I’ll list some of the things that our experience didn’t counter and I doubt we could have easily avoided.