It was a bitter start to 2023 for me. I'm not complaining that my end-of-year trip, countdown night, or the following day was terrible. I woke up feeling overwhelmed - a new year for a fresh start, but I felt like I had little to nothing to move forward with.
Why is that? Let's take a time machine back to early 2022
Back in the time a few months after, I decided to move to North America. At first, it was for studying, but I fell so in love with my new life here that I told my parents I won't go back - ending up with no more financial support.
With some of my savings and gains from crypto and NFTs from the past two years, I thought I would be fine. I would definitely be able to survive, start my own business, get investment, and get citizenship, respectively.
I WAS WRONG. Things seem easy and achievable when you only look at successful figures and stories - or in my case, I saw my friend get a massive investment after he decided to drop out of university during the crypto bull market.
What I did and what I have learned.
In January, I started a blockchain education company with a few friends I met during networking events and mutual friends. I ended up stepping away in June and started a new company specializing in what I'm passionate about, NFT.
I feel sappy thinking about this company all the time, but I wouldn't ask for a better ending. Here are what I've learned:
1) Finding a co-founder is like finding a marriage partner. This is 100% true, and if you search online, you will indeed find a lot of support for this. What you need to discuss and agree on at the beginning is
What is the current stage in your life they are in?
Are they passionate about the startup life or the thing you are planning to work on? Make it straightforward on 'how passionate,' the things they are willing to sacrifice to make this startup successful, and most importantly, 'when to stop.'
For me, when to stop is the most important thing to understand because outside of the startup, we all have our own lives. We have our own pain that we are suffering daily, whether it is the visa deadline, the upcoming rent, the chance for their scholarship to be cancelled or whatsoever.
2) For a startup to survive and succeed, you need a founder with the solid required expertise. I love building things, and it has always been my life goal to create a product people love and improve their lives.
I left my first company because we were not planning to build a product. We didn't have a technical co-founder, so instead, my co-founders wanted it to be more like a consulting company. We did a lot of educational sessions and workshops, but that's different from where my expertise and my life goal lay.
3) We spend money on unnecessary things. Trying to be a professional and legit company as early as possible was ideal, but not from day one. I realized that we can't benchmark ourselves to competitors or similar organizations that clearly have more resources than we do - because when we did, we lost the opportunity to spend our limited resources on what yields better outcomes.
Half a year passed. I quit my job as an operation and customer success at NFT marketplace. I dropped out of university. My visa had almost expired, and my savings were running low.
My new journey. No co-founder at first. I took online web development courses to at least understand the tech stack and build my own POC for new ideas.
Well, don't judge me, but after I told you what I learned about finding a co-founder. While learning how to code, I met one person at the NFT event and somehow, after a long conversation, decided to loop them in for my new project...
We built things so fast that I decided to fly to a big tech conference to showcase what I have and potentially get investors (Yes, my hope was that high). I Got a few leads and contacts ready to send them what we had developed a few weeks after I got back. Then I was ditched. End game.
That's where my trust issue started. I locked myself in the house, barely went out for events and networking and completed the first full-stack web dev course. It was a great feeling.
I then drafted everything, tried to make my idea concrete and consulted my developer friends whom I had known for five years. Things worked out great. I could present my ideas properly and get into incubator programs.
Here is the list of ideas we built the POC and tested the concept for:
NFT verification and utility management for NFT projects (we stopped this because it relied too much on ecosystem partners, which in this case, we need to wait for mass adoption and businesses to get a sense of what it's like to work with NFT communities)
Decentralized shop and earn reward program - one membership for every place you go and what you buy (We stopped on this mainly because of a similar reason - businesses need more time, and for them, gift cards and punch cards are working fine, their customers).
Social media for fashion and lifestyle, where we optimize it for UGC search. (I loved this idea so much as a fashion fan BUT building social media is hard... stealing time from dominant social media is a pain, but if someone wants to chat about it or see how it works, just hmu)
Currently, we are building an ultimate discord management tool for web3 companies with the hope of making community managers' lives way less complicated - will share what we have soon ;)
Okay, for now, you should know how much I love building products and exploring business opportunities. However, as I mentioned at the beginning - it took a lot of work, and it was never easy to find the right product and expect it to hit off the ground in the few weeks after that.
It sounded like an incredible journey, right? But why did I feel paranoid since early 2023
Well, the answer is:
I can only pay one more month of rent, and my visa has expired. So you can now imagine living as a visitor in the country without a credit card or insurance and can't work even part-time (I worked part-time for a month and a half before it expired, and it's gone with my previous rent.)
I'm now fighting the overwhelming feeling that comes in every morning by going to the gym, building my product, and looking for a job that might want to add a crazy product person to their team.
At first, I thought I would only want to keep this whole messed-up part of my life private. But since many people are already writing and sharing successful, happy-ending use cases - here you are, the real and ongoing one.
Happy new year, everyone. I will thrive, and so you are :)
It was a bitter start to 2023 for me. I'm not complaining that my end-of-year trip, countdown night, or the following day was terrible. I woke up feeling overwhelmed - a new year for a fresh start, but I felt like I had little to nothing to move forward with.
Why is that? Let's take a time machine back to early 2022
Back in the time a few months after, I decided to move to North America. At first, it was for studying, but I fell so in love with my new life here that I told my parents I won't go back - ending up with no more financial support.
With some of my savings and gains from crypto and NFTs from the past two years, I thought I would be fine. I would definitely be able to survive, start my own business, get investment, and get citizenship, respectively.
I WAS WRONG. Things seem easy and achievable when you only look at successful figures and stories - or in my case, I saw my friend get a massive investment after he decided to drop out of university during the crypto bull market.
What I did and what I have learned.
In January, I started a blockchain education company with a few friends I met during networking events and mutual friends. I ended up stepping away in June and started a new company specializing in what I'm passionate about, NFT.
I feel sappy thinking about this company all the time, but I wouldn't ask for a better ending. Here are what I've learned:
1) Finding a co-founder is like finding a marriage partner. This is 100% true, and if you search online, you will indeed find a lot of support for this. What you need to discuss and agree on at the beginning is
What is the current stage in your life they are in?
Are they passionate about the startup life or the thing you are planning to work on? Make it straightforward on 'how passionate,' the things they are willing to sacrifice to make this startup successful, and most importantly, 'when to stop.'
For me, when to stop is the most important thing to understand because outside of the startup, we all have our own lives. We have our own pain that we are suffering daily, whether it is the visa deadline, the upcoming rent, the chance for their scholarship to be cancelled or whatsoever.
2) For a startup to survive and succeed, you need a founder with the solid required expertise. I love building things, and it has always been my life goal to create a product people love and improve their lives.
I left my first company because we were not planning to build a product. We didn't have a technical co-founder, so instead, my co-founders wanted it to be more like a consulting company. We did a lot of educational sessions and workshops, but that's different from where my expertise and my life goal lay.
3) We spend money on unnecessary things. Trying to be a professional and legit company as early as possible was ideal, but not from day one. I realized that we can't benchmark ourselves to competitors or similar organizations that clearly have more resources than we do - because when we did, we lost the opportunity to spend our limited resources on what yields better outcomes.
Half a year passed. I quit my job as an operation and customer success at NFT marketplace. I dropped out of university. My visa had almost expired, and my savings were running low.
My new journey. No co-founder at first. I took online web development courses to at least understand the tech stack and build my own POC for new ideas.
Well, don't judge me, but after I told you what I learned about finding a co-founder. While learning how to code, I met one person at the NFT event and somehow, after a long conversation, decided to loop them in for my new project...
We built things so fast that I decided to fly to a big tech conference to showcase what I have and potentially get investors (Yes, my hope was that high). I Got a few leads and contacts ready to send them what we had developed a few weeks after I got back. Then I was ditched. End game.
That's where my trust issue started. I locked myself in the house, barely went out for events and networking and completed the first full-stack web dev course. It was a great feeling.
I then drafted everything, tried to make my idea concrete and consulted my developer friends whom I had known for five years. Things worked out great. I could present my ideas properly and get into incubator programs.
Here is the list of ideas we built the POC and tested the concept for:
NFT verification and utility management for NFT projects (we stopped this because it relied too much on ecosystem partners, which in this case, we need to wait for mass adoption and businesses to get a sense of what it's like to work with NFT communities)
Decentralized shop and earn reward program - one membership for every place you go and what you buy (We stopped on this mainly because of a similar reason - businesses need more time, and for them, gift cards and punch cards are working fine, their customers).
Social media for fashion and lifestyle, where we optimize it for UGC search. (I loved this idea so much as a fashion fan BUT building social media is hard... stealing time from dominant social media is a pain, but if someone wants to chat about it or see how it works, just hmu)
Currently, we are building an ultimate discord management tool for web3 companies with the hope of making community managers' lives way less complicated - will share what we have soon ;)
Okay, for now, you should know how much I love building products and exploring business opportunities. However, as I mentioned at the beginning - it took a lot of work, and it was never easy to find the right product and expect it to hit off the ground in the few weeks after that.
It sounded like an incredible journey, right? But why did I feel paranoid since early 2023
Well, the answer is:
I can only pay one more month of rent, and my visa has expired. So you can now imagine living as a visitor in the country without a credit card or insurance and can't work even part-time (I worked part-time for a month and a half before it expired, and it's gone with my previous rent.)
I'm now fighting the overwhelming feeling that comes in every morning by going to the gym, building my product, and looking for a job that might want to add a crazy product person to their team.
At first, I thought I would only want to keep this whole messed-up part of my life private. But since many people are already writing and sharing successful, happy-ending use cases - here you are, the real and ongoing one.
Happy new year, everyone. I will thrive, and so you are :)
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