It all started as a determined statement, when Regadas came to me and said: “I’m going through with this, you and the rest of the guys are either in or out, but I’m doing this!”.
For the past four years, since our early twenties, we had dreamed off an idea, an app that would revolutionize how you view and share content. - never heard that one before, uhn? It was just around when twitter hit the scene, the web was buzzing and we felt the calling too.
As engineers we drew sketches, held numerous meetings and even made a prototype, but it was just not enough, the problem we set ourselves to solve was just too damn complex, there was no way we would be able to do it with no budget and in our spare time.
Now, you may be wondering, why didn’t we pitched it and got some VC or seed money? For out of college kids with no business background, we just were not ready to bet that much. The employment rate for software engineers was, at the time, 100%. It was easy to find a stable job with a nice salary. Not only that, it was a cultural option. Many Portuguese youngsters were raised to believe that being an employee was the dream, “it’s just less troublesome”.
In between studies, work and all the shit our young asses would get themselves into (that week) we never had the time to come together and getting down to it. So when Regadas came to me we were at a breaking point. It was now, or never. We were not getting any younger and our responsibilities grew each year. As a brave heart fan, and an adventurer myself, I got absolutely galvanized by his speech and immediately caved. Of course, with such a ultimatum the others were not hard to convince either.
Eventually we all agreed that our big idea was just not going to happen without us getting together and working full-time. We needed to subside ourselves, hence betabranch was born. As many european and Portuguese companies, inspired by the likes of 37signals, we went on to formulate an innovative business plan: our consulting work was to pay for the development of our most demanding ideas - I am face palming so hard right now. As we came to understand, building a company is not as easy as we once thought. And that big idea, well, that was not what was moving us either.
As out of the egg entrepreneurs we set ourselves to create an offer that both, provided value and showed our company potential. The project was a job board, geared towards freelancers, a tough and competitive market, but we hopped that by incorporating a skills engine that allowed to quickly filter and match candidates with jobs we would gain some traction.
Regadas and I got to work, due to our availability we could cover more ground quickly. We estimated that in a month we would have a working prototype, in the backend we did. The frontend was nothing but a great learning and humbling experience, I’ve spent countless hours studying usability and information architecture. A friend with some design experience came to our rescue and eventually we arrived at a satisfactory outcome, however, much later than anticipated. Our first business lesson was about to hit us.
By the time we were getting ready to launch a couple of solutions had emerged that in some way or another had leverage over ours. Not only that but we failed to investigate our competitors offers and their specific business models. Our business model was a two way, we hoped companies would pay for the privilege of quickly finding potential candidates and we assumed users would be delighted to find specific job descriptions. Even though we were proud of our work, our offer was not going to cut it. We had hited our first wall. Many were to follow.
As we developed more projects, matured ideas, got to know and speak with other startups/developers/enthusiasts/geeks we realized these problems were not exclusive even to experienced people, we adapted and evolved, earning ourselves the knowledge the hard way. As we overcome every challenge together we ended up becoming a hell of a team! As it turns out, that was the biggest lesson.
And that big idea we had, well that was not what this company is all about. It is just an excuse for us to have fun, like we always did back in university.
We have come a long way, and to think we are just beginning… it is the most humbling experience of all, what a ride! Here’s to learning!
(Rúben and Regadas, when we were installing a free software mirror back at university.)
by Pedro Carvalho @ betabranch.com