Hear me out. Building a company is a lot like launching a rocket ship. Not one of the new SpaceX ones that explode five seconds after liftoff.. I’m talking about those old ones from the late 20th century with the big red fuel canister in the middle and the space shuttle attached to the side. You know the one. Let me explain.
I’m about a month in to bootstrapping my startup for real. As in, I’m no longer trying to work on it alongside my university degree, random travels, band gigs, etc. For the first time, I’m in London dedicating 100% of my time to it. What that means is everything is happening at a rapid pace; successes and failures mean each day, or even each hour, is a rollercoaster rather than each week. On the plus side, you learn a lot when everything is rapid fire. But, you also realise how much you need to pivot— constantly.
I won’t go into detail in this blog, but my startup, Klank, is effectively a three-sided marketplace in the entertainment industry. As I learn more about my target customers and their willingness to use a product/pay for it, I realise that product-market-fit is a lot farther away than I naively thought a few months ago, before I had launched my service.
So, right now, Klank is the rocket ship having just taken off from the space station. All of the parts are intact, from the fuel canister to the orbiter (space shuttle) to the two rocket boosters on the side, propelling the thing forward. But as you know, as a space ship plows through the atmosphere and leaves orbit it begins to shed those component parts, one by one. In a way, that’s me finding product market fit. I have all these aspects to my marketplace that I ‘think’ are going to work, but realistically we have to wait and see what parts of the spaceship fall off and what remain on.
After awhile, just the orbiter remains. The one part of the ship that is “going to the moon” and, ultimately, safely returning home. The rest of the parts have been stripped away, burned up in the atmosphere or having plummeted into the ocean somewhere.
I think the one difference with a startup is you don’t know which part of the rocket is actually going to make it to the moon (whereas with an actual ship you better hope its the part with the astronauts inside). Twitter started as a way to subscribe to podcasts. Starbucks began selling beans and espresso machines, not coffee. Sticky notes were the product of failed glue and Play-Doh was a wallpaper cleaner. Point is, some of the most successful companies didn’t know what their orbiter would end up being, and often it takes going through the Earth’s hot af atmosphere to figure out what stays, and what gets left behind.
So in my head there are three different directions Klank may take, and I believe that one of them will reach the moon, while the rest may burn and fall entirely. But I don’t quite know which. And that’s rather exciting.