Revisiting Entrepreneurship
When I wrote my Reflections at 30 post, one of the realizations I came to was that during the next decade, I want to set aside time for creative and entrepreneurial pursuits. At the time of writing my post, I imagined that happening in a few years, after getting some more years of work experience under my belt.
So it came to my surprise that a few days after publishing my post, I was approached by a friend with similar goals.
I didn’t expect myself to return to entrepreneurship so soon. But over the past few months, my friend and I have been working on a project that we hope to get into our customers' hands soon. It’s been a whirlwind of new learnings and experiences that I want to share, especially for other people who dabble with the thought of building something new.
This isn’t the first time I’ve built something. For those of you who have known me for a while, you may remember Hangster, an app motivated by my desire to find friends who were free to get tacos (really any dinner, but mostly tacos at El Grullense).
Stanford in 2015 was buzzing with entrepreneurial success stories, and that world seemed much more exciting than the windowless cubicle farm I was in when I was interning as an engineer at Raytheon. Some friends and I wanted to put our hat in the ring and were especially motivated by success stories like Snapchat, built by alumni while they were on campus. But we were inexperienced and immature. Hell if you knew me, I was a cocky bastard imagining myself the next Zuckerberg. It turns out watching 6 Seasons of Silicon Valley isn’t enough to prepare you for what it actually takes to build a company. My friends and I raised some money and had some solid user metrics for a time, but those numbers were decimated when the college summer came along. After graduating, I gave up on any entrepreneurial ideas and focused my energy on finding a job and building my career.
Product Foundations and Entrepreneurial Challenges
At Hangster, I had the most fun talking to users and understanding their problems, so much so that my friends nicknamed me “Feedback King” (among other, NSFW nicknames). This motivated my entry into product management, a career where I could get paid for doing the same and use that feedback to build cool products.
In product management, there are generally two career paths. One is remaining employed as a product manager, either working as an individual contributor working with teams to build new products and features or going into people management. The other path is building your own company. When I got started in product, an entrepreneurial journey seemed like a fantasy, even after my experience with Hangster. But over time, as I built new skills and learned from mentors, entrepreneurship started feeling less unrealistic.
But being in the working world brought a host of new hurdles. I wasn’t a college kid with a bunch of free time anymore. And the comfortable reliability of a paycheck lessened my excitement of leaping into the unknown and experimenting with building something new.
The closest I got was during the pandemic when I started conducting user interviews to assess the feasibility of creating a Yelp clone with an emphasis on restaurant recommendations from friends. But this idea lost steam when I got the sense from most of my interviews that Yelp and Google Maps were good enough. A constant product management lesson I learned was to solve critical customer pain points, and this didn’t feel critical enough.
When it comes to beginning a journey into entrepreneurship, one of the biggest hurdles is motivation. One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I can’t work in a vacuum. I get the most enjoyment when I’m working with other people, and entrepreneurship can be especially difficult as it is an extremely isolating journey. I know a few friends who found success on their own, but having someone you can bounce ideas off of and an accountability partner is very helpful. But this person needs to be motivated too.
A lot of people (including) myself like the idea of entrepreneurship. But when push comes to shove, they may not really be into it. I remember talking to one friend who seemed interested in working on the Yelp idea, but only insomuch that it would help them escape their current company. The moment they did get their new job, they bailed. Another opportunistic friend at first seemed excited to work together on another project, but after I put in work on conducting research and gathering requirements, they balked when they realized actual work was involved.
If you’re looking to build something, finding someone with a complementary skillset and the right motivations is key. What are those motivations? In college I had the wrong motivations, as I imagined raising funds from some prestigious investors and building a massive, iconic company. These days, I’m focused on independence and learning. I’m interested in building financial resilience, which is part of the motivation for building another income stream beyond my full-time job and investments. The other is getting my hands dirty and simply seeing if I can make money on the internet, without the guardrails of someone else’s startup or big company behind me.
That’s why I was very thankful when Michael approached me with the proposal to build something new. My friend Michael loves entrepreneurial schemes and in college he also pursued his own venture. These days he has other methods, whether operating his AirBnb or finding promising investments.
Michael suggested we work on an e-commerce project together, as he had some experience in the space and was interested in building something, but had struggled to find time. I had no e-commerce experience whatsoever, but I knew what it took to identify a need and take a product from conception to launch. With his technical skills and e-commerce experience, and my product and operational skills, it was a match.
The Journey So Far
Working on an e-commerce project is like nothing I’ve worked on before. All of my previous work experience has been digital products for consumers and businesses. But it’s been a fun new muscle to stretch.
The first hurdle for Michael and I was identifying the kind of product we wanted to build. E-commerce is a large world that includes anything from clothing to physical tech products, but we landed on supplements. While a crowded space, supplements naturally lead to recurring purchases (as customers order their weekly/monthly subscriptions) and higher profit margins as production costs are lower.
But within that space, what were we going to sell? We brainstormed several ideas trying to find an unmet need, when we landed on one: supplements for friends who roll at raves. Many of our Ivy-league educated friends have a “work hard, play hard” mentality and when it came to festivals, they would always come prepared. They’d fill plastic bags with Vitamin-C, Magnesium, N-acetyl cysteine, and other legal supplements to prevent neurotoxicity and speed their recovery. Instead of manually collecting these supplements, could they be combined into a single serving? Seeing other brands in the space didn’t demotivate us, it encouraged us that there was a market and opportunity here.
In e-commerce, a lesson I learned is that branding is a big part of the picture. Onyx Coffee Lab and Black Rifle Coffee Company both sell coffee beans, but one is tailored to liberal hipsters while the other to Trump supporters. We wanted to make sure that our brand would appeal to ambitious urban professionals who also like to party. I contracted a former coworker of mine to help us design a brand that would thread that needle.
Building physical products is challenging because they’re physical. But fortunately, it’s not like we’re cooking these formulas in our kitchen. Across the country, there are a multitude of private label manufacturers and laboratories that do everything from researching formulas, manufacturing powders and capsules, and packaging and marketing. The challenge has been finding one that can create our formula for the right quantity and price. We’ve seen some quotes starting at $70,000 and with order minimums of millions of capsules. As we’re running a bootstrapped business, finding the right manufacturing partner is key.
Going through this journey, the hardest part is quieting the voice in the back of my head. Do I really know what I’m doing? Is anyone going to buy this? What if it doesn’t work out? In my product management career, there were a lot of lessons about the right way of doing things, about all the steps and validation you should do before you build and launch. It was some of this validation that kept me from pursuing other ideas.
In this journey, I’ve been more comfortable with throwing some of that away and accepting that mistakes will be made. I’ve come to terms that yes, it might not work out. But even in the worst case, I will come out with some valuable lessons. I at least hope to offer my friends a product that keeps them healthy when they go out.
I’m not ready to call myself an entrepreneur yet, not at least until something gets sold. But I’m excited to revisit this path, learn something new, and build something cool.
We still have a lot of work to do, and the product we launch with may look completely different than what we have today. If you want to follow along, check us out at temposciences.com and give our Twitter and Instagram a follow. I look forward to sharing more learnings and reflections as we continue our journey.