Starting a business sounds exciting until you’re three months in, staring at a spreadsheet that doesn’t add up. Most first-time founders learn the hard lessons the expensive way, through trial, error, and a fair bit of stress. But some of that pain is avoidable if you know what’s coming. Here are five lessons worth learning … Read more
There is something nobody really prepares you for as a founder. The skills that got you here — the hunger, the opportunism, the relentless yes — become the very things that hold you back when it is time to scale. It is a strange problem to live with, but a pertinent one as your idea … Read more
When we registered the domain for Data Solver, our B2B compliance software, we thought we were being proactive. We had a holding page live within weeks. We had business cards printed with the URL. We went to networking events, did a few talks at accelerator programmes, and started having conversations with potential customers. We genuinely … Read more
When we started talking to potential customers at Data Solver, we didn’t have a product. We had a problem we believed was real, a rough idea of how we might solve it, and a set of assumptions about who would care. What we got back from those early customer conversations was almost nothing like what … Read more
When we were building Data Solver, we didn’t have money for a polished demo. We didn’t have a working product. What we had were sketches — hand-drawn wireframes, scanned and turned into simple diagrams — and a very clear sense of the problem we were trying to solve. Those sketches opened more doors than we … Read more