The Starter Kit chapter has ended, so after more than three years of hard work, I thought I would write a short article detailing my experiences, failures, wins - and what’s next for the team. I hope anyone that reads this post can learn from some of our mistakes and maybe get inspired to start a company while at university.

If you are wondering why we are closing the business, there are many reasons, Covid-19 being one of them. However, the main one is that all of the co-founders have decided that we want to move on to solve different problems.

To all of those who supported us in any shape or form, a big thank you!

Failures

Not running lean enough e.g. buying way too much inventory.

Even though we had never heard of the lean start-up model, thanks to our deadlines our first sales were made by running extremely lean. We used a PDF order form that was sent to new students, which had to be completed and sent back to us. After that, we sent back a PayPal invoice, and only after receiving the money would we purchase the items.

This mentality early on was really useful; however, I wish we had kept more of it while scaling. We ended up spending too much time thinking about scaling processes, and not enough about our core product, talking to our customers, iterating, or improving our distribution strategy.

On top of that, while Justin and I were doing our internships in Japan and Taiwan, we had to make decisions on how to prepare for the next batches of orders. This time, however, we were overly optimistic with our projections and bought three times more inventory than was needed. This was a weight we carried on our shoulders for quite some time after.

Tip: Read a few articles about the Lean Start-up Method or pick up the book.

Not looking for advisors early on

For the first two years, we relied on ad-hoc advice from lecturers and people within our network. However, when we started to build a more structured advisory, we saw a direct impact on the number of mistakes we were able to avoid. Our reasoning for not looking for advisors earlier was that no one would be interested in supporting us and that we were bootstrapping the business. Looking back, we realized that having one or two people with more experience who we could meet or sound out regularly for advice would have helped us a lot!

Tip: Find one or two advisors early on and meet with them rather regularly (e.g. once a month or every two months).

Wins

Pivoting towards B2B distribution channels

The first version of Starter Kit was sold directly to students. What we realized through time was that converting students who were already overloaded with information about university was a terrible distribution strategy (especially for a highly seasonal business). So, in mid-2019 after many brainstorms, we started to pivot and target student residences in The Netherlands. In a matter of a few weeks, we were able to close a deal with one of the largest residences in Amsterdam, one of my favourite meetings to date. Now we did not have to convert students one-by-one but had a contract with a residence for hundreds of packages.

Tip: Try to pivot before quitting.

Building a team of people to grow Starter Kit

Before Victor joined us as a third co-founder, Justin and I were often overly optimistic about how much work we could get done with just the two of us. However, through failures, we realized that building a team of people who were motivated to join us on this mission should be a central focus. Thankfully, we were able to do that and had Sam Gross, Max Samet, Luca Lang, and, Timm-Frederik Hagelmann join us. The relationships we were able to build together are something I will always cherish; thank you to all of you.

Tip: Build a solid core team.

Memorable Moments

There are many fun moments in a start-up journey, and my advice to anyone thinking of starting a business while at university is to enjoy the ride, build a community and cherish it. Here are a few pictures that sum up some of the memorable moments for me:

What’s Next?

As I mentioned, all of the founders have decided to work on solving different and bigger problems than those Starter Kit was tackling.

Justin will be joining Priceloop AI as a Product Manager to help build the future of Machine Learning Enabled Pricing.

Victor will be joining ASIF Ventures as the Director of Marketing to support the entrepreneur community in the Netherlands.

I cannot announce who I will be joining just yet, however, since the start of this year I have been researching blockchain technology thanks to a project I was involved in and more recently started publishing a newsletter.

If you have questions or you are interested in knowing more about Starter Kit, please reach out to any of us.

Some Links

Hotelschool Blog Article (2019) TEDx talk by Justin (2020) Last Interview with all the Founders (2021)

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