First 365 days of being an entrepreneur

A year ago today, I started work on what is now called Illumineto Spark. I was an army of one this time last year with not much more than an idea for a product and a super short list of who I wanted to partner with to deliver this product to the market. 365 days later, there is so much to be proud of:

• Incorporated Illumineto, Inc.
• Raised "friends and family" seed capital
• Developed a world class sales enablement product with users throughout the Americas and Europe

And the greatest accomplishment, Illumineto will be commercially launching our product Illumineto Spark next month, just weeks before the first anniversary of our incorporation. Wholly smokes, Batman!

Things I've learned in the last 365 days

Starting a company is hard. I know that's speaking to the obvious, but what I have learned is to focus on what's critically important to build, what can wait and of course how to pay for everything. Speaking of paying for stuff...

Raising capital is (really) hard. Especially now. The quarter we decided to jump into this venture, worldwide markets started to slow. And the venture capital world all but paused. To make matters worse, early round investors (angels, seed VCs) have all slowed their incremental investments and instead seem to be holding on to their cash to further support their existing bets. Just do a search on Medium on startup investment and you will see what I am talking about. We are very fortunate to have current investors that know each of us and know what we are capable of achieving and for that, I am incredibly humbled by their trust and commitment to us. You know who you are, so thank you again.

Do the absolute minimum. What I mean by this is do just enough to get by. With everything. Your website, your payroll system, your product. Of course the hard part is “what’s just enough?” Anything more than the minimum rips into your cash which you really feel when you’re trying to stretch every precious dollar you have in the bank. There is a phrase here in startup land called a “minimal viable product” (MVP). And it’s totally true… don’t polish the apple. Get to your absolute minimum capability set and get people using it as soon as possible. And for goodness sake, don’t worry about an infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands of users. You won’t need it when you run out of cash. It will take you way longer to build than you most probably have sustaining capital to pull off. We almost did this, then realized what we were doing to ourselves. To be clear, we have a highly scalable, redundant SaaS platform, but it’s also not a Facebook-like infrastructure. And that’s OK. We have more than an MVP and that’s probably OK too, but I do wish we had done “less” and got our product out sooner. But if that ends up being the worst mistake we made, I think I will still be able to sleep at night.

Team matters. A lot. None of this would have happened without an incredibly dedicated team of partners, vendors, colleagues, friends and of course our spouses. Nick, Phil, Blaine, Danny, Luis, Rob, Andrew A, Andrew S, Lee, Jeff, Terry, Ray, Frank, Dori, Trisha, Cindy, Kathryn… and so many more. Thank you for all your hard work and assistance you have provided.

So here we are, on the eve of our product launch. So many lessons learned and perhaps the most important one: Deciding to be an entrepreneur was the best decision I have made in my career. Success or failure of my current venture will not taint my appreciation for what I have learned these last 365 days. It's been a joy every single one of these days.