The Start

This is the first chapter of Kommon: A Startup Story, a set of key lessons for first-time founders told through the story of the successes and failures of my business.

I have been told that putting these lessons within the full narrative of an early-stage startup, including real customer data and product feedback, has meant they really resonate for first-time-founders navigating their own startup journeys. The introduction to the series with further details on why I wrote it can be found here.

Introduction

It’s hard to define the success of anything without knowing the original expectations.  The same is true for companies. 

There is lots of startup literature which tells founders what success should look like (often in terms that coincidentally are beneficial to venture capitalists).  However, starting a company is personal.  I imagine every founder has different motivations depending on their interests, family life, financial position, view of the world, and many other factors. 

So before telling the story of Kommon, I wanted to talk about my reasons for starting the company.  Not because I think they’re particularly original, but because they are my reasons.  I hope they will help you understand some of the choices I made, and whether or not those same dynamics apply to you.   

Something Important, Something Difficult

It’s a common startup story to found a company because you saw a problem in the world that needed solving. 

That was me.  But not at first.

In the beginning, I just wanted to start a software company.  It didn’t really matter what it was.  If you’re reading that and think that could be problematic further down the line, you’d be right. More to come on that later.

It was 2019, I’d just moved to Ottawa in Canada for my partner’s work, and in doing so had called an end to an 8 year career at a corporate intelligence and cyber security consultancy.  I had received an offer to continue working for them remotely, but it was 2019, so remote work seemed a bit odd.  Times change.

I had that rare thing in my career, a clean slate to pursue anything I wanted, and I knew I wanted to start a software company.  This was for two reasons:

1. Something important: I’d had a fulfilling career at my previous workplace.  Over eight years, we grew from £5m to £30m in revenue and 30 to 300 people, and that had brought opportunities for promotion and growth from an unpaid intern to a director of the firm.  But while that company delivered exceptional services, technology hadn’t been the focus.  Meanwhile, the most valuable and exciting companes were building software to eat the world.  I felt like I’d been on the sidelines.  If I wanted to understand our world, I needed to understand software, and I couldn’t think of a better way to do that than to start a company.   

2. Something difficult: I’ve always been attracted to hard challenges. Yes I know that’s a self-important thing to say, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it. This has been a net-positive trait, although not without its foolish moments. In all the startup literature, one thing that stands out is just how hard it is to be a founder.  The idea of starting a company, from scratch, on my own, in a new sector, in a new country, in an unfashionable city, was the type of challenge I was looking for.  

My career up to this point (or massive narcissism) had also persuaded me that I might have the skillset to pull it off.  I’d developed products, managed teams, and sold successfully, in a fast-growing company with all the challenges that come with that.  

If others could do it, why not me.  I just needed an idea.

Finding an Idea

I started by thinking about three things:

1. What am I good at: deep knowledge or experience of a particular area would make it easier for me to identify problems of commercial value, and also credibly lead a company.

2. What am I interested in: I knew that success wouldn’t be overnight.  I was going to be committed to this for a long time, so it had to be an idea I was excited about. 

3. What would make a viable software company: the idea had to have sufficient commercial potential. 

I quickly discovered that number three was the hard part.  There were lots of topics I was interested in.  A few of those I felt I could be good at.  But very few of those ideas showed promise they could be a viable software company.

I had a rough test for number three.  I had previously worked with a former partner at a global investment bank, let’s call her May, whose commercial opinions I valued.  I used to ask myself, if I had to pitch May for $100k to invest in this business, would I want to give that pitch, and could it succeed?  All my initial ideas failed that test, until one didn’t.

Reflecting on Startup Ideas

In hindsight, I believe I over-indexed on the ‘what am I good at’ part of the decision-making process.  Previous experience and sector knowledge is a valuable asset in founding a company, but countless founders have built businesses in unfamiliar sectors through their talent, hard work, and market demand.  

I would now encourage most founders to reach beyond their experience to place greater weight in their thought process on what the world needs. Your opportunities are likely greater than you think. 

Thinking Operationally

There was one additional factor beyond those three.  I knew that my opportunity was likely to be B2B.  It was where all my previous experience was and I’d never been a particularly engaged consumer.

However, I struggled to find a business sector I was excited about.  I knew I didn’t want to build on my previous expertise in intelligence and cyber security (otherwise I would have stayed where I was).  How was I meant to find something I was interested in and good at if I was pivoting away from my last 8 years’ experience?

The breakthrough came when I started thinking about the way my previous company had grown and the challenges of managing that growth, rather than the specific expertise of my day-to-day work.  I’ve always been a ruthless optimizer.  I like seeing things done well at pace and appreciate a good process or capability that helps organisations perform better.  On reflection, I had learned a huge amount over that period about what helps and hinders growing organisations, and where I thought the highest points of leverage were.

This brings us to people management.  As I thought more about it, this area began to tick all my boxes:

1. What am I good at: I felt I understood people management well, or so my previous 360 feedback had said.  I still had a lot to learn (as I would find out through my research for Kommon) but I was confident I had a good enough foundation from the teams I had led, and the practices I had seen.

2. What am I interested in: I liked the topic, and I was convinced of the impact good managers could have on people, particularly at the early stages in their careers. Many of the opportunities I had been given in my early 20s were attributable to the manager I had. The impacts of those opportunities had then compounded in the following years into promotions, increased earnings, fulfillment, and wellbeing.  If I could improve management practices, I knew I wouldn’t just be improving company performance, I’d be giving others those life-changing opportunities.

3. What would make a viable software company: leadership development was already an established category with companies spending billions of dollars a year trying to improve their managers.  I was confident that if I could come up with a good product, the market was there.  Moreover, others had recently come to the same conclusion.  In the previous 5 years, startups like Hypercontext, Fellow, Workpatterns, Mesh and others had all shown promising signs working on the same problem, including raising Seed and Series A rounds. 

Here was the initial idea: I would build software for managers to help them be great at their jobs.

Why not Me

All the pieces seemed to be in place except one.  I hadn’t decided to do it yet.

Nor was it that clear what signal I should be waiting for.  Starting a company is a piece of calculated irrationality. With the benefit of hindsight I know that you just have to get started, but back then I needed a nudge. 

Paradoxically my nudge came when I was exploring other options to working on this problem.  After all, being a solo founder was a big life decision. Why not at least see what it would feel like to join some other folks who were already working in this area. 

I reached out and got a meeting with the CEO of another startup who was working on a similar product. I told her that I was enthusiastic about the space, and was considering starting my own company, but perhaps we could instead see if there was a fit to work together. I was excited for the meeting, expecting to have an in-depth discussion about people management, its challenges, and all the things we could do to help improve this vital part of working life.  I got something very different.  The discussion was disinterested, surface-level, and bland (admittedly there were two people in the meeting and one was me so maybe some of this was my fault). 

Typically this type of meeting sucks the life out of a day. But this time it felt the total opposite. To paraphrase what I said earlier, if these folks could do it (with minimal enthusiasm for the mission at hand), why not me.  I still remember stepping out onto the street and knowing that was the moment I decided to do this.

Key Lessons

• Reach beyond your experience: in hindsight, I over-indexed on thinking about ‘what am I good at’ and underestimated the desire of customers for good products, regardless of who builds them. One of the most exciting parts of being an entrepreneur is making your earliest sales and realizing that if customers like your product enough, they’ll take a chance on you. I could have reached beyond my existing experience into bolder areas, backing my underlying capabilities to figure out solutions for customers.

• Think about operational ideas: even though I was thinking pretty narrowly about ideas (see above), my key breakthrough was when I stopped thinking about the thematic expertise I’d gained, and started thinking about operational insights from the businesses I’d been a part of.  

• Test your ideas by working backwards from a mock pitch: it sharpened my thinking to consider not just whether I thought a startup idea was promising but whether I would be confident pitching it to a sophisticated investor, and how I would do that. I weeded out many poor startup ideas this way.  If you have a sophisticated investor to actually run ideas by, all the better.

• Consider your financial options: there are a whole range of options about how founders choose to fund their lives in the early stages of a startup. I’m not going to go through them all but just to say that I continued to do five days a month paid consulting for the whole time I built Kommon (often on weekends). There are various opinions available on this topic as to whether this is an unhelpful distraction from your business or whether it can provide increased focus due to diminishing financial worries.  My view still is that I made the right decision. Although it meant time away from the business, I think it gave us greater runway and enabled better decision-making. I wouldn’t have done it differently.