{"id":343,"date":"2020-10-14T12:41:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T12:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1323286"},"modified":"2020-10-14T12:41:40","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T12:41:40","slug":"how-my-childhood-startup-failed-miserably","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"How my childhood \u2018startup\u2019 failed miserably"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/img-cdn.tnwcdn.com\/image\/growth-quarters?filter_last=1&amp;fit=1280%2C640&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn0.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F10%2Fboris-child-gq.png&amp;signature=4eb7ee09fbcaa6f3027beb63d8c412ef\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"><\/div>\n<p><em>This article originally appeared in <a href=\"https:\/\/mailchi.mp\/thenextweb\/tnw-weekly-boris-newsletter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">our weekly newsletter<\/a>, where TNW\u2019s CEO Boris writes about being an entrepreneur in tech \u2014 everything from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. He also answers readers\u2019 question on any topic every week, send him yours on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Boris\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Twitter<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This week we received questions that are interconnected, so I\u2019ll answer them with one story. This week\u2019s questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cWhat is the first thing you ever sold to anyone?\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWhat is an essential step many first-time founders miss to prevent premature (and problematic) growth?\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When I was a kid, I lived in a typical Dutch town with lots of canals. What wasn\u2019t typical about it was how drunk people behaved on the weekends: they would throw bicycles in the canals for the lols.<\/p>\n<p>These bicycles would rust away until the city would drain the canals once every 5 or 10 years to clean out all the garbage. That is, until an enterprising young man (me) found out that you could fish those bicycles out of the canals with a rope and anchor, fix them up, and then sell them.<\/p>\n<p><em>[Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/growth-quarters\/2020\/10\/08\/youre-saying-i-have-to-do-something-well-then-im-not-gonna\/\">You\u2019re saying I HAVE to do something? Well, then I\u2019m not gonna<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So when I finally started to receive \u20ac2 a week in pocket money from my parents, I was already selling one or two bicycles a week, for \u20ac50 each.<\/p>\n<p>As a young entrepreneur, I tried to maximize my earnings, so I asked a few of my fellow students to help me fish for bicycles and fix them up. My thinking was simple:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>find and sign up one kid per canal near each bar<\/li>\n<li>have them fish out the bicycles<\/li>\n<li>repair them and sell them<\/li>\n<li>let them keep a percentage and give the rest to me<\/li>\n<li>scale<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The goal was to expand to other cities in the Netherlands and maybe to other countries, as soon as we saw more demand and could afford to make that investment.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, that plan failed. As a first-time founder, I failed to realize that my friends weren\u2019t mere clones of myself.<\/p>\n<p>Each person I added to my team had their own talents, peculiarities, and ideas about my business. One of them figured out that returning bicycles to their rightful owners and collecting a fee was also a viable business. I hadn\u2019t considered this opportunity because I was too focused on my clones and scaling my original business.<\/p>\n<p>Another kid realized that fixing up bicycles was worth something in itself, so she focused on that. A third kid came up with the idea of selling better locks to prevent those bicycles from getting thrown in the canals in the first place, which basically killed my business.<\/p>\n<p>I started losing focus on my original goal. I got lost in dealing with all these different personalities and ideas.<\/p>\n<p>After a while my parents and I were invited to the police station, where in no uncertain terms, we were told that fishing for bicycles and reselling them made me both a thief and a fence.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s my (mostly) true story of how I made my first sale, and how I made some mistakes most first-time founders make when faced with premature (and problematic) growth.<\/p>\n<p>Wanna ask me something? Shoot me a message on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Boris\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Twitter<\/a> and your question might be featured in my next newsletter!<\/p>\n<p><em>Can\u2019t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/author\/boris\/\">here<\/a>, and sign up for his newsletter <a href=\"https:\/\/mailchi.mp\/thenextweb\/tnw-weekly-boris-newsletter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"c-post-pubDate\"> Published October 14, 2020 \u2014 12:41 UTC <\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/growth-quarters\/2020\/10\/14\/how-my-childhood-startup-failed-miserably\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article originally appeared in our weekly newsletter, where TNW\u2019s CEO Boris writes about being an entrepreneur in tech \u2014 everything from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. He also answers readers\u2019 question&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}