Start-ups can be tough – but stick with it, results can be awesome
Founder of online learning platform Careercake, Aimee Bateman, on entrepreneurship and the challenges of fundraising for start-ups
WE all know the statistics, nine out of 10 start-ups will fail, right? And by fail I mean they spend all their money.
A lot can happen before then, and whether or not you deem that as a failure is determined by how you define “failure”, but for the purpose of that statistic, it’s quite simply, they ran out of cash.
As founders we all know the odds are against us, but we proceed regardless.
No founder starts a company thinking they will be one of the nine who fail. If anyone thought that, noone would ever start. We must possess the confidence and conviction to truly believe that we are in the small percentage that will succeed, otherwise we would never get out of the blocks.
This mind-set, in my opinion, is actually the easy bit for most founders.
Keeping that conviction once the journey starts is what really counts.
I founded my start-up three years ago now, and after initial success we are now knee-deep in what the author and serial entrepreneur, Scott Belsky would define as, the messy middle.
That period of time after the exciting investment raise and the exit (hopefully a successful one).
It’s the messy part in the middle when you have to knuckle down, enhance product fit, increase market traction, get profitable and then scale, scale and scale some more.
Being a start-up entrepreneur is not glamorous.
The journey is not easy and every founder who reads this will know, it’s harder than anyone ever told us it would be.
Would we have still started this crazy journey if we had believed them? Yes, most definitely, but there are things I wish I had known.
RAISING INVESTMENT IS TOUGH
You’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the right investors.
You’ll meet people who instantly get your vision, who believe in you and have a wealth of “been there and done it”.
Those people are to be cherished. Even when they challenge you. Give them information before they have to ask for it and be honest and open at all times.
In addition, be both assertive and humble at the right moments and you will definitely reap the rewards.
These guys are going to be in your life for many years, so pick wisely and treat them well.
Now, that all sounds wonderful, but keeping your confidence and conviction when others are doubting you is when it starts to get hard. I met an investor once who took me out for a glass of wine in a posh restaurant in London.
Surely she is going to say yes if she is taking me out for wine, yes?
Nope, as soon as we’d ordered she started listing all the things she disliked about me (yes me personally) and my business.
I sat there and listened calmly and respectfully, feeling utterly crushed and embarrassed.
Then I had to finish my glass of wine, thank her for her time and race across London to meet another potential investor (while trying not to cry on the tube).
There I was met with “Careercake? What type of name is that?
“You’ll never be taken seriously in the corporate world with a name like that. I’ll consider investing if you change it”.
Again, I thanked her for her time, jumped on the last train back to Wales, feeling scared and unsettled.
Like a lot of founders, it hurt, but then I remembered that all those things the first lady said she disliked about me, were actually all the things I liked the most.
And I wasn’t going to change our business name, when we had 32 million YouTube hits kicking back to that domain.
I just brushed it off and arranged some more pitch meetings, that’s