Lessons From My Startup Journey

When I was about 20, I started my first company in Hong Kong. The idea was very simple: buy wholesale goods in Asia and sell them on eBay in Germany and Spain. This was before Alibaba was a household name, so the whole import-export thing felt a bit more improvised than it does now.

Running that business was hard work and it quickly became clear it wasn’t something I wanted to do long term. But it did something important for me: it showed me what entrepreneurship actually feels like from the inside. A couple of years later, that experience made it much easier to walk away from my job at Deutsche Bank. Since then, I haven’t been "employed" in the usual sense.

Over the years I’ve started or joined more than a dozen tech startups in very different areas. There’s a cliché that 9 out of 10 startups don’t survive their first two years. That matches what I’ve seen, and in crypto the failure rate feels even higher. Most of the projects I worked on never really became successful businesses, at least not in the financial sense, but each of them left me with something I’m glad I learned.

Here are some of the main lessons that stuck with me. Maybe they’re useful if you’re just getting started.

Money Is a Weak Long‑Term Motivator

There is nothing wrong with wanting to earn money, but I noticed that beyond a certain point it stops working as a real motivator. For instance, as an IT consultant I could often earn more per hour than I did by investing those same hours into my own companies. The classic dream of “hitting it big” with a startup is exciting when you first think about it, but if you take the statistics seriously - maybe 1 out of 10 makes it - you realize that the expected return on your time is not that great.

Even if your startup survives and grows, it doesn’t usually turn into a passive income machine where you sit on a beach and watch numbers go up. In most cases, it means even more work, more responsibility, and more stress. And you still don’t know how much of the revenue will actually end up with you after salaries, costs, investors, and taxes.

The worst combination is putting your time - which is really your most limited resource - into something you don’t even like doing, just because you hope the payoff will be worth it later. That leads straight into the next point.

Do Something You Actually Like

I once read an article that made the point that we are all a bit irrational in what we choose to dedicate our lives to. Only someone slightly “off” will voluntarily stick with a project for years that most people would find boring or too hard. But that is exactly the kind of energy a startup often needs.

You have to be willing to keep going when there is no clear external reward, to say no to other jobs, to limit your free time, and sometimes to miss family events because something needs your attention. You won’t do that for long if you secretly dislike the work.

If you choose a direction purely because it looks lucrative or fashionable, there is a good chance you’ll grow to resent it. That resentment can show up as procrastination, as bad decisions, or as a quiet wish that the whole thing would just fail so you can stop. On the other hand, when you genuinely care about what you’re building, people notice. There is a different atmosphere around a project that is run with real interest and care, and that tends to attract better collaborators and better customers.

Treat Your Business Like Something Living

One perspective that helped me is to think of a business as a living thing that needs care, attention, and time to develop. A bonsai tree is a nice metaphor. Most days, you just water it and make sure it has what it needs. Every now and then, you stand back, look at the overall shape, and carefully cut back a few branches so the tree can grow in a healthy direction.

In a similar way, some days in a startup are just about doing the obvious work: answering users, fixing bugs, paying bills. Other days are about stepping back and making small adjustments - changing a feature, dropping a product line, or trying a different way of reaching customers. A lot of those choices rely on a mix of data and intuition: a sense for what your “tree” needs from you right now.

If you see your company this way, it becomes less about forcing it into a rigid plan and more about listening to what it actually needs. A question I’ve found useful is: “What does the business need from me today to be a bit healthier or stronger?” Over time, this mindset shifts your focus from just chasing external milestones to building good internal habits. Once those habits are in place, good outcomes often follow almost as a side effect.

Think in Decades, Not Months

Like a bonsai, a business with real depth doesn’t grow overnight. If you go in with the idea of building something just to sell it in a year or two, you’re already orienting yourself toward short‑term tricks rather than long‑term health.

Designing a company mainly so that it looks attractive on a slide deck or in a due‑diligence report pushes you toward choices that may look good in the short run, but are bad for the underlying product. For example, you might raise money and then pour it into aggressive marketing to inflate your metrics so the company appears “hot.” That can work for a while, but if the product isn’t solid, those customers won’t stay, and anyone who looks closely will see that the numbers are cosmetic.

Most of us have encountered businesses that feel different. A small, family‑run shop where you get the sense that the owners care about the details, remember your face, and stand behind what they sell. It’s not something you can fake by just adding a few slogans. There is a certain solidity there, built up over many years.

I think something similar can exist in tech. You can usually tell when a product is the result of years of careful work versus a quick attempt to catch a trend. It’s like the difference between someone who has trained consistently for 20 years and someone who tried to get fast results in a few months. From a distance they might look similar, but in practice you notice a big gap in how they move and how resilient they are.

There is a lot of shiny, “plastic” output in the modern tech world - flashy branding, big launches, but not much substance. Personally, I find it easier to trust a product or company that clearly has a long‑term plan and behaves as if it wants to be around in ten years.

Focus on Processes, Not Just Goals

In technology, the environment changes quickly. New frameworks, new platforms, new regulations - it’s normal to pivot once or several times. If you become too attached to specific goals or timelines, you can end up forcing something that no longer makes sense just because you once wrote it in a plan.

Process is the more stable thing. By that I mean your daily and weekly routines: how you talk to customers, how you ship changes, how you make decisions together, how you handle problems. Coming back to the bonsai idea, you can ask: “What does the tree need today?” Maybe it’s more user feedback, maybe it’s paying off some technical debt, maybe it’s cleaning up your internal documentation.

When you invest in clear, healthy processes, changing direction becomes much less dramatic. You don’t have to treat pivots as failures; they just become adjustments. The analogy with fitness is useful here: there are many training programs that can work, but what matters far more is that you show up regularly, don’t injure yourself, and keep making small improvements. In a startup, consistent, thoughtful execution usually beats the perfect strategy that nobody follows.

Stay Lean Longer Than You Think

There’s a strong cultural pressure in tech to “scale” fast: raise a big round, hire a lot of people, open offices, and so on. In my experience, more resources and a bigger team do not automatically make things better. Often, they just make the system heavier and harder to steer.

Every new hire and every extra budget line adds a bit of complexity and a bit of expectation. Investors bring their own priorities and timelines, which may or may not fit what your particular project needs. If your main metaphor is still a living tree that you are trying to grow in a healthy way, then you don’t want to pour so much fertilizer on it that it burns the roots.

In many cases, you can keep things going with a side job or a consulting gig while the core product slowly matures. That is less glamorous than announcing a funding round, but it gives you more freedom to grow at the right pace. I’ve seen cases where people took on more money and more obligations than they truly needed, and then found themselves pushed into directions that were bad for the product and for their own well‑being.

If you do decide to bring in investors, it’s worth making sure they understand what kind of business you actually want to build, and that they are comfortable with the time horizon. Taking on money from people whose only interest is a quick exit can put you in a constant state of tension.

Not every company can be bootstrapped from a garage, but quite a few can get further than you might think with a small, focused team. Build the smallest genuinely useful version of your idea first. Only add more people and more capital when the constraints become a real bottleneck, not just because “that’s what startups do.”

Protect Your Integrity

Trust is still one of the most important assets a business can have, and in a digital environment it can disappear very quickly. People have endless alternatives and can move on with a few clicks.

Being straightforward in how you communicate - especially about what your product can and cannot do - goes a long way. Overpromising might work for a launch, but it usually damages you later. It is better to set modest expectations and then quietly exceed them.

One thing I’ve found helpful is to focus on doing the core job well, and then look for small, genuine ways to surprise people in a positive way. It doesn’t have to be big: a thoughtful answer to a support request, a small improvement you ship because one user asked for it, or simply fixing something annoying without making a big announcement.

If your product and your behavior are consistent over time, you don’t need to shout quite as loudly with marketing. Happy customers and word of mouth will never fully replace advertising, but they make everything else much easier.

Plan for Bad Weather

Markets change, regulations appear, new competitors show up, personal situations shift. None of that is unusual. If you assume that everything will go smoothly, you will probably be surprised at some point.

If your focus is on building strong, flexible processes and keeping your operation relatively light, you are already preparing for these shocks. Simpler setups are easier to adjust: you can cut costs, redesign the product, or, in some cases, pause the project for a while without everything collapsing.

This is another argument for not building too much fixed overhead into your company too early. If you have a huge team and a lot of external expectations, every change becomes a political and emotional event. If you keep things a bit leaner, you still have to make hard decisions, but it is usually easier to do so without destroying relationships.

Allow Yourself to Be Different

A lot of products and brands in the world look and feel very similar. You can see the same stylistic patterns in logos, websites, and marketing copy. It’s understandable - copying what seems to work feels safer than trying something that might fail.

The downside is that if you stay too close to the middle, you end up fighting for attention in a very crowded space. You’re one more similar offer in an ocean of similar offers. You have to spend more and shout louder just to be seen.

Trying something slightly different is riskier in the short term, but it gives you a chance to occupy a space where there are simply fewer competitors. You may miss the mark a few times, but you also increase your chances of finding something genuinely original that resonates with a specific group of people.

The important part is not to confuse being different with being reckless. If you build your product and your company in a relatively flexible, pragmatic way, you can afford to experiment. You can test ideas, discard what doesn’t work, and keep what does, without losing the ground under your feet.

I like the image of moving lightly and adjusting quickly most of the time, but being very focused and committed when you see a real opportunity. It’s less glamorous than some of the startup mythology, but in my experience it leads to a healthier and more sustainable journey.