Lessons From My Startup Journey

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

It was hard work and quite fast I knew that I don't want to do this long term. But it gave me something important: I understood how entrepreneurship feels from the inside. A couple of years later this made it much easier to leave my job at Deutsche Bank, and since then I was never "employed" in the usual sense.

Over the years I started or joined more than a dozen tech startups in very different areas. There is this cliché that 9 out of 10 startups don't survive the first two years. From what I've seen that's true, and in crypto the failure rate feels even higher. Most of my projects never became successful businesses, at least not financially. But every one of them left me with something I am glad I learned.

So here are some lessons that stuck. Maybe useful if you are just starting.

Money doesn't motivate for long

Nothing wrong with wanting to earn money. But I noticed that after some point it stops working as real motivation. As an IT consultant, for example, I could often earn more per hour than by putting the same hours into my own companies. The classic dream of "hitting it big" is exciting when you first think about it. If you take the statistics seriously though (maybe 1 of 10 makes it), the expected return on your time is not that great.

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

The worst combination is to put your time, which is really your most limited resource, into something you don't even like doing, only because you hope it pays off later. Which brings me to the next point.

Do something you actually like

I once read an article saying that we are all a bit irrational in what we dedicate our lives to. Only someone slightly "crazy" will voluntarily stick with a project for years, that most people find boring or too hard. But this is exactly the energy a startup needs.

You have to keep going when there is no clear reward from outside, say no to other jobs, give up free time and sometimes miss family events because something needs you. You won't do that for long if deep inside you don't like the work.

If you choose a direction only because it looks lucrative or trendy, there is a good chance you start to resent it at some point. It shows up as procrastination, as bad decisions, or as a quiet wish that the whole thing just fails so you can stop. When you really care about what you build, people notice it. A project run with real interest has a different atmosphere, and it attracts better people and better customers.

A business is like a bonsai

What helped me a lot is to think about a business as something living, which needs care, attention and time to develop. A bonsai tree is a nice picture for this (there is one on my home page too, not by accident). Most days you just water it and check that it has what it needs. From time to time you step back, look at the overall shape and carefully cut a few branches, so the tree grows in a healthy direction.

Startups are similar. Some days are just the obvious work: answering users, fixing bugs, paying bills. Other days you step back and make small adjustments, change a feature, drop a product line, try another way to reach customers. Many of these decisions are a mix of data and intuition, a feeling for what your "tree" needs from you right now.

Seeing the company like this, it becomes less about forcing it into a rigid plan and more about listening what it actually needs. A question I find useful: "what does the business need from me today to be a bit healthier or stronger?" Over time your focus moves from chasing external milestones to building good habits inside. And once those habits are there, good outcomes often come almost as a side effect.

Think in decades

Like a bonsai, a business with real depth doesn't grow overnight. If you start with the idea to build something just to sell it in one or two years, you are already oriented towards short-term tricks and not long-term health.

When you design a company mainly so it looks good on a slide deck or in a due diligence report, you end up with choices that are fine short term but bad for the product. You raise money and pour it into aggressive marketing to inflate the metrics, so the company looks "hot". Can work for a while. But if the product is not solid, the customers won't stay, and anybody who looks closer will see that the numbers are cosmetic bullsh*t.

Most of us know businesses that feel different. A small family shop where you feel that the owners care about details, remember your face and stand behind what they sell. You can't fake this with a few slogans. There is some solidity, built over many years.

I think this exists in tech too. You usually can tell if a product is the result of years of careful work or a quick attempt to catch a trend. It's like somebody who trained consistently for 20 years compared to somebody who tried to get fast results in a few months. From far away they may look similar. Up close you see a big gap in how they move and how resilient they are.

The modern tech world has a lot of shiny "plastic" output: flashy branding, big launches, not much behind it. Personally I trust a product or company more when it clearly has a long-term plan and behaves like it wants to be around in ten years.

Processes over goals

In technology the environment changes fast. New frameworks, platforms, regulations, so pivoting once or several times is normal. If you are too attached to specific goals or timelines, you end up forcing something that doesn't make sense anymore, just because you once wrote it into a plan.

The process is the more stable thing. With process I mean your daily and weekly routines: how you talk to customers, how you ship changes, how you decide together, how you handle problems. Back to the bonsai: "what does the tree need today?" Maybe more user feedback, maybe paying back some technical debt, maybe cleaning up the internal documentation.

When you invest into clear and healthy processes, a change of direction is much less dramatic. Pivots are not failures anymore, they are just adjustments. It's like in fitness: many training programs can work, what matters much more is that you show up regularly, don't get injured and keep improving in small steps. In a startup consistent, thoughtful execution usually beats the perfect strategy that nobody follows.

Stay lean longer than you think

In tech there is a strong pressure to "scale" fast. Raise a big round, hire a lot of people, open offices etc. From my experience more resources and a bigger team don't make things automatically better. Often the system just gets 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, and they may fit your project or not. If you still think of it as a living tree you want to grow healthy, you don't want to pour so much fertilizer on it that the roots burn.

In many cases you can keep it going with a side job or some consulting while the core product slowly matures. Less glamorous than announcing a funding round, but you are more free to grow at the right speed. I saw people taking more money and more obligations than they really needed, and then getting pushed in directions that were bad for the product and for their own health.

If you do bring in investors, make sure they understand what kind of business you actually want to build and that they are fine with the time horizon. Money from people who only want a quick exit keeps you in constant tension.

Not every company can be bootstrapped from a garage. But quite a few get further than you think with a small, focused team. Build the smallest version of your idea that is really useful first. Add people and capital only when the constraints are a real bottleneck, and not because "that's what startups do".

Lean also helps when the weather gets bad, and it will. Markets change, regulations appear, new competitors show up, your personal situation shifts. Nothing unusual. With a light setup you can cut costs, redesign the product or even pause the project for a while without everything collapsing. With a huge team and a lot of external expectations every change becomes a political and emotional event. You still have to make hard decisions when you are lean, but usually without destroying relationships.

Integrity

Trust is still one of the most important assets a business has, and in a digital world it disappears very fast. People have endless alternatives and are gone with a few clicks.

Be straightforward in how you communicate, especially about what the product can do and what not. Overpromising might work for a launch, but later it hurts you. Better to set modest expectations and then quietly exceed them.

What helped me is to do the core job well and then look for small, real ways to surprise people positively. Doesn't need to be big. A thoughtful answer to a support request, a small improvement you ship because one user asked for it, or just fixing something annoying without big announcement.

If your product and your behaviour stay consistent over time, you don't need to shout so loud with marketing. Happy customers and word of mouth will never fully replace advertising, but they make everything else much easier.

Be a little different

Many products and brands look and feel very similar. Same patterns in logos, websites and marketing copy. I understand it, copying what seems to work feels more safe than trying something that could fail.

The downside is, if you stay too close to the middle, you fight for attention in a very crowded space. You are one more similar offer in an ocean of similar offers and you have to spend more and shout louder only to be seen.

Trying something a bit different is riskier short term, but it gives you a chance to sit in a space with simply fewer competitors. You will miss sometimes. But you also increase the chance to find something original that resonates with a specific group of people.

Just don't confuse being different with being reckless. If you build the product and the company in a flexible and pragmatic way, you can afford to experiment. Test ideas, throw away what doesn't work, keep what does, without losing the ground under your feet.

I like the picture of moving light and adjusting fast most of the time, and being very focused and committed when you see a real opportunity. Less glamorous than the startup mythology. But in my experience it is a healthier way, and you can keep doing it much longer.