Bootstrapping a new venture

#leadership #strategy #decisions

Dakai

They say running a business is hard. It wasn't particularly hard for me when starting my first company, Dakai. I had luck because I arrived in the middle of the wild west with all the gold diggers rushing to the rivers of capital to find gold and I was the guy in the back selling all the shovels. ICOs raised millions of dollars; enterprises were hiring us to consult on this new technology, we even had some government deals rolling. Then the market crashed two and a half months after starting my new venture.

Fortunately, we already positioned ourselves in the frontline of blockchain service companies in Europe. The issue is that slowly sales got so complicated that currently, it's almost impossible to find clients who outsource projects. We are doing fine though, the only issue is: there is no way to scale further.

Another problem I faced was that I couldn't ask anyone, I couldn't write about anything, and most importantly, we could barely mention our past clients' names, because the road to success in the blockchain world is paved with heavy NDAs wherever you look. This is the reason I stopped blogging and using pretty much any social media the past half year or so.

MVP Yard

Back to Dakai for a moment, I'm not planning to stop. It's vital for me to be in the coolest industry out there right now. To be at the forefront of innovation, but it's also essential to create a predictable sales model.
Since the new industry I'm entering is way less hostile I plan on blogging about how I am setting up this new venture and what steps I take to get clients, deliver projects, do strategic thinking or whatever that happens to us on this journey.

What is MVP Yard you might ask? MVP Yard will focus on creating minimum viable products for anyone and everyone in need of one. We will prioritize precision, clear communication and a German management style that we excel in. As a middle-sized corporation, it's a pretty bad idea to hire fifteen developers just to experiment with a new product you would like to offer. It's more common to outsource this kind of thing. As a startup founder, you might not have the connections to people who can build your project in record time, but you might have some capital from your last job. This is precisely why we want to help. We want to create and grow your startup further with a wide range of service offerings.

Of course, it's a limited industry, I'm not going to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but I would like to use this company to have more space to innovate. Dakai grabbed all my attention and ran with it so I couldn't focus on anything else. With MVP Yard I would like to focus less on the company after a few months and start to develop 'side projects' - projects that have the potential to grow further than any of these two companies.

On another note, I'm also embarking on a social journey. A journey that I share with the world. I am confident that mistakes are already in the making, but I'm prepared to share them with you guys. I am also hoping that if some of you have experience with running a traditional service company, you will give me a few hints on what I should and more importantly, should not do.

PS: We already had a few clients (was running this as a secret), and I'm pretty excited about a first peak of the landing page I've put together during the weekend: