Not all projects are meant to grow exponentially and play the startup game

We were fortunate to find a very welcoming community of entrepreneurs at Founders Founders. Some were seasoned startup builders, with proper investors, exists and the all deal. Which was great! I was still trying to figure out how, when and if I was going to be able to grow TNDS after bootstrapping it with little money from myself, friends and family.

I knew a few things about startups but I never considered myself a real business man or to have the same profile these entrepreneurs had, with their fancy jargon and more many acronyms than I could memorize. So a little advising and some expertise was very very welcome.

One great thing these founders had was a support network between themselves, which manifested in a bi-weekly round table event behind closed doors. People felt safe to share numbers and all kind of details while asking for advice on a specific topic. At one point, we applied.

I laid out my precarious business plan and ideas on how to grow. But most importantly, I explained all the paradoxes and things that made me unsure about any of the obvious routes. For context, these obvious routes included things such as growing the number of students in our school, opening up more locations and a few other alternatives.

To me, most of these options would damage the school’s main premise which was the high-quality learning experience → which meant a lot of personal interaction → which meant time+staff → which meant money.

That afternoon, we discussed many options, some of which shed a lot of clarity into my mind and plan but none felt 100% right.

• If the plan involved investors, who would be willing to invest in such a tiny thing and at which return? It would have to be an investor more focused in the good we were making than the profit, since there was hardly going to be any.
• We couldn’t expect to make money out of tuitions since that would involve having plenty of students to be able to make a profit or increasing tuitions. Both of those options would impact our value proposition of high quality. Also, was it really fair to put that weight on people who were trying to change careers and change their jobs?
• To me, it still made sense that hiring companies should be the ones paying for the privilege of hiring these highly skilled workers, not to mention for the service of having us grooming them and making projects for said companies before hiring. That was what we focused on, even though it wouldn’t easily become a growth strategy, but for the time it made sense. It also turned out to be super difficult. (see Lesson → We thought we could rely on partnerships but it was very hard to sell these).

As described in our story, that year was incredibly difficult. At the time it wasn’t easy to understand what went well or not but now in hindsight, I’m glad that I didn’t force myself to play what I like to call “The Startup Game”. Thinking about constantly raising funds, accumulating more and more advisors who would probably be super focused on returning a profit, while growing and accumulating responsibilities to others makes a bit anxious. Sure, a profitable exit at the end of the story is what lures most entrepreneurs, but the path there (if it was even possible) makes me anxious still now. I still don’t believe there’s a profitable business model and a win-win situation in all of this, unless we lower our standards.

In the meantime, we’ve witnessed the rise of many massive online courses of different models, of many bootcamps and courses, including those who have payment agreements that supposedly benefit the (good) students. I’m pretty sure those are all profitable businesses but I don’t believe they can balance all the other plates that we cared so much for. And in the end I chose to stay true to what I believed in.