Building a Startup with the Greedy Algorithm and a Bunch of Misfits
Greedy is an algorithmic paradigm that builds up a solution piece by piece, always choosing the next piece that offers the most obvious and immediate benefit
When I quit my job at Microsoft back in 2015, I didn’t have any solid reason. The reason I say so is because I had just gotten a promotion, and I didn’t have any startup ideas. Probably the only reason to quit was to not to lead a life which seemed like a formula. Get a Job, pay bills, take a home loan and keep paying it for the rest of the life. With no practical skill sets, no team, and no product idea, I started my journey. Probably a little bit of self-taught python coding.
As of today 29th April 2019, our company PushOwl reached 2 milestones. We just crossed 10K active merchants and $50K in monthly recurring revenue.
Our small company is run by 8 folks whom I can heartily say are the closest thing to family. (Thank you, Kunal, Rameez, Nitesh, Asiya, Felix, Adhithya, Raj and Vanhishikha for being part of the journey.)
What happened in between is my story!
And this blog is meant for every individual who is starting a company without any clue, without any north star, without a billion dollar idea, without any product skill, probably an introvert, without any design skills, no understanding of Venture Capital, and no idea on how to build a team. Basically nothing. The only component which worked out is having 24 hours a day (every day). And mistakes — a lot of them.
Phase 1 | Prologue: A series of unfortunate events
With enough savings in the bank to last six months ($360USD/month to be precise), I started my journey. To save cost, I started working from home. In retrospect that was one of the worst ideas. When at home, I was either working, sleeping or doing nothing. Staying indoors like a zombie and having no context switches, my productivity started to drop exponentially.
After about six months of doing nothing (supposed to be my peak time given that I had all the enthusiasm after quitting the job), I decided to switch to a co-working space. In the meantime, I had also learned that starting a company with folks who have a day job doesn’t pan out — job priorities, weekend commitments, reduced productivity. You end up waiting too long for their work to be done. And if the folks are your friends, it only gets worse.
My next learning was working with a team where the priorities are just not aligned, and working on a “hot” trend. Since Chatbots became cool back in 2016, we started building a company around that. The company mission was to automate chat support. But personally, someone wanted a Lamborghini, someone else wanted to work on cool tech and another person just wanted to build a startup 🙌. Clearly, it didn’t work out and I ended up leaving midway while breaking so many personal ties.
After a bunch of failed ideas under my belt and trying to start a company with my friends, I was out of time, without any friends, and a complete failure (or that’s how it felt at the time).
Nobody understood what was I trying to do; neither did I.
Phase 2 | Let’s be an Indiehacker
Building a product with zero revenue but a tonne of learnings.
Being an avid reader of hacker news, I regularly read stories about solo founders who have built a self-sustainable business. The best part of being an indie-hacker is that you don’t have to raise funds nor build a team (or at least I thought so). You can travel and earn on the go. For a person like me, that seemed like the perfect solution. Around that time, I came across push notifications. There were existing solutions, I found them to be an MVP as well. And I thought I could build something at par or even better with few weeks of hacks (or at least I thought so). A push notifications service with a mobile app would be killer! 😂
So on May 1st, 2016 I registered pushowl.com (tried a few combinations of push + random stuff, ultimately found “owl” and it resonated quite well with me. I had a habit of working late at nights or not sleeping at all). Old habits die hard, and I soon asked a few of my friends to help me with my idea. And so they did, but only for some time.
I was back to square one!
So, I realized that I suck at building teams, and I decided to continue the journey alone. After building the MVP, the next challenge was to build a landing page with the help of my freelance friend Nitesh. I think we rocked it! 🙈
I was ferociously teaching myself copywriting, design, SEO, growth hacking, pricing. There was so much to learn. While I wasn’t getting any customers, I was happy that I had a prototype which I could use for my learnings. Somehow, I was patient, probably because I never had any expectations of success. For the next year, I slept in my co-working space on the sofa with a sleeping bag every alternate day (taking a shower is important :P). I didn’t feel like going home or taking any weekend off. I was happy being anti-social (probably watched too many Gary Vaynerchuk videos). I used ‘OneNote’ and filled it with things to do today and in the future. In this period, I met a great designer and friend who helped me build a polished version of our landing page. However, we still didn’t have a single paying customer!
After almost spending a year in kind of a trance (now 2017), I was woken up by my dwindling bank balance and reminders from my parents to get stable. It had been two years since I quit my job, almost a year of PushOwl and nothing much to show. Almost in a panic mode, I started picking up random things. I started pitching to a few VCs to raise funds (of course, it didn’t work out — a single guy in an overly competitive market with zero paying customers), going to startup events, and working on side projects.
Around the same time, I met the Shopify team who co-incidentally took an office in the same co-working space that I was working in. After having a conversation with Vargab Bakshi and Namra from Shopify, I decided to give it one last shot — focus and build an app which is highly tailored for Shopify merchants.
However, I was still not sure things would work out, given my history. So, I explored the idea of taking my old job after receiving an inbound request from my manager.
But when I went to my old office again, I felt like I was quitting. I was giving up on my dreams (which weren’t even so big!). I just couldn’t fake it. So I cursed myself for even thinking about going back and decided to give it one more chance. Then, Shopify happened!
Phase 3 | Facing my fears
While building products and PushOwl, I had always been escaping one thing. Talking to people! I wasn’t talking to customers and I didn’t want to build a team. Being anti-social wasn’t helping. With my last chance, I finally started doing the one thing, which I should have done from Day 0. Talking to the customers. Soon, I realized Shopify merchants could be found in a lot of FB groups. Still being anti-social, I didn’t comment on anything but, I just read through all the posts every day. I had subscribed to pretty much all the groups and read every post and every comment.
I was afraid to even mention PushOwl in any of the posts because I felt that it won’t provide any value. So I didn’t. But I came across a few common problems after observing a lot of posts. What theme is this store using? Which app is on this store? Being a developer, I could quickly look at the code and know the answer. So, my first few social interactions were just helping folks with problems that were unrelated to what I was actually working on.
My ‘OneNote’ reminded me of side project marketing. So I built WhatStoreTheme.com and WhatStoreApp.com. My first social media post after a long while was about my side projects — something that I felt solved real problems. I added a small “Powered By PushOwl” link and this was how I got my first initial customers. Satish Kanwar (GM of Shopify) commenting and appreciating the work was the highlight of those days 😊.
Around the same time, Kunal joined our team. Almost at half of his last salary, he had moved to a new city to work for a startup (project). He had accidentally applied on an internship post, thinking it was a full-time job. Anyways, the mistake happened, and he joined a few months before we officially launched on Shopify. Kunal was given random tasks. I remember once, he was given a target to get 5 customers in a week (which he miserably failed, not his fault though). I was paying him with the leftover cash I had after selling Microsoft shares.
By the time we launched on Shopify, we were broke. To manage things, I applied for Storetasker (run by an amazing guy and now mentor, Jonathan Kennedy) and fortunately, I got accepted. Working at nights, I managed to earn enough to keep the lights on. I also thought I could pitch PushOwl to the customers that I worked with on Storetasker (but I was wrong, the context matters. Or I was just too shy). But, I did end up pitching to a client, Simon Rodrigue, who was an advisor for Smile.io and an ex-SVP Walmart. As of today, I still reach out to Simon, whenever I have a problem which only a few folks would understand.
Things turned for the better when PushOwl got selected as a “New and Noteworthy app”.
Phase 4 | Path to Happiness
We take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Having realized the benefits of talking to people, I started reaching out to app developers to take advice. And you know what — I got help from folks whom I was inspired from. The right direction from the start really helped become what we are. Thank you, Bjorn Forsberg!
After almost two years in the journey, I was finally able to define happiness for me. My happiness was directly proportional to the happiness of the people whom I interact with. The more I could be a part of someone else’s dream getting fulfilled, I was happier. Which meant, our merchants getting sales via our platform, or my teammates getting their dreams fulfilled.
Over the next year, building a place where folks enjoyed working was my source of enjoyment. Kunal adopted a dog (Dany) against the wills of his parents (it wasn’t tough for his parents to start adoring Dany though), Rameez got a camera which he always dreamt of, Asiya lives independently in Bangalore after coming from an orthodox family, Felix runs his strategy his own way without our interruptions, and Adhithya is taking complete ownership of design. When our company became the source of our team’s happiness, everyone took their job to their hearts and did them as owners of the job. They call me the boss, but in my eyes, they will be the bosses of the respective departments which they are going to build in Phase 5, making me redundant.
We really didn’t have to do any crazy marketing (Shopify App Store took care of it), except to do what we loved. We helped our merchants — they gave us stellar reviews. We provided a platform which helped them do more sales — and they paid for subscriptions. I started being more social (at least online) and made more friends in the last 2 years than I did my entire lifetime. Our team has now traveled to Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, London, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka. In every place we landed, we had a Shopify Partner to go out for a coffee. This is an ecosystem I am honored to be part of.
Phase 5 | To Infinity and Beyond
What started as a learning project, is now a platform which is used by 10K merchants online. 5 million notifications are sent out of our platform every day. And PushOwl has not just become a part of the marketing activity of these brands. Our mission is to empower merchants with a new version of PushOwl which will help them do “more sales with fewer notifications”.
And yes, the next stop is 100K. We are lucky to have the footsteps carved by so many amazing folks already. Shopify, Privy, Bold Commerce, PixelUnion, Smile.io, Recart, Forsberg+Two, Shogun, Fera, ShopMessage — We are learning from you!
And we know our next step is going to be challenging, but full of learnings.
