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How I Started a Company with $100

A series of blog posts on how you can do the same

By Mads Koch PetersenPublished 5 years ago 9 min read
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Interviewing with nation-wide newspapers at 19. How the hell did that happen?
I started a company at 19 with only $100. We have now done $100,000 in revenue en route to doing $1m within the next year, attracting attention from numerous investors. We bootstrapped our way from $100 to $100k while being in college and without taking external investments. In my blog, I'm going to talk you through the journey—and how you can do it yourself

27th November 2017. The bar is gloomy and smelly. It's 5 PM on a Wednesday, beers are €1 per litre, and looking around you get the feeling that the crowd is primarily recently divorced, unemployed, and alcoholics sitting in a somewhat semi-circle around the bar growling at each other slowly deteriorating into their seventh beer of the day.

"We should start a company." "We should TOTALLY start a company!" My friend and I exclaimed looking intensely at each other while putting down the crust of the scourged and cheese-overruled toast that we had consumed in a couple of minutes.

We were in Lisbon and had taken an early day to reconvene at a bar—the only one open at that time in the area. During the week, my friends and I had loosely talked about starting a company to earn a few bucks—primarily with the objective of us going out more often.

In the dimly lit bar surrendered by half-drunken Portuguese people, we were dragged in by a Halloween offer from Wix and spent $100 to buy a year's subscription for the build-your-own-website service. It was impulsive and a typical decision conducted after two-three beers—not something I expected to ever be more than pocket change.

Who would have thought?

Fast-forward to July 2019. Mimer, the second name for our business has now generated more than $100,000 in revenue and while on a family vacation just finished a call with the fourth prospective investor for our company. We have been in every major news media nationally and been supported by the Danish Fund for Entrepreneurship as well as Copenhagen Business School.

What in God's name happened?

I would love to say that it is merely a product of hard work, meticulous data crunching, dedication and sleepless nights but being in the midst of it, it appears more like a series of coincidental events that have led to us being acclaimed as the most promising student startup at Copenhagen Business School in 2018.

However, taking a step back there are several lessons to be learnt from our journey so far and these are the ones that I will address through a series of blog posts.

How we built a startup from nothing with nothing being no-one

Starting a company, especially while studying, is a many-faceted discipline and has several pitfalls and de routes that can hinder a successful start. We went through most of them not knowing what we were doing and thus, I find it quintessential to share some of these learnings and ill-doings. My thoughts will be brutally honest and will, apart from what you need to do, include a lot of what not to do.

The subjects and topics will be updated and evolve along the way as our journey with Mimer continues and we experience new and exciting things. For now, these are some of the key learnings that we have lived by to create a successful company from nothing—which will be delved deeper into with a continuation of posts:

  • Why I started a company while studying
    • I got fed up with all the theoretical, farfetched non-sense of my business undergraduate within a couple of months. Yup, not a patient guy. Being a student is one of the most unique times to start something—you have time, no kids/family, you can afford to fail, you have the perfect network right at your hands, and you have the youthful spirit of a young hustler
  • Starting from nothing and keeping your company lean
    • Most people I meet have this amazing idea that will do this and this good, but unfortunately, they need to build a $100k app first... Well, guess what? Most of us don't have that kind of money and if you start by getting investors in, you miss much of that lovely early-stage freedom. With Mimer we needed a platform to enhance communication between our users and to sell through. What did we do? We built a Wix site and communicated merely through the old-school e-mail system until we had the cash to build something real. It works. Test the market, then build something great while keeping cost at a minimum.
  • Marketing success
    • Initially, we spent literally nothing on marketing because we didn't know much about it. However, as it turned out our best scaling efforts didn't come from expensive Facebooks ads or competitive Google keywords as most people strive for. They came from partnerships with key players, lead generation through an e-book, offline marketing, and lots of other untraditional efforts. Don't always go for the ordinary.
  • PR darling
    • We have been in +20 newspapers, a couple of magazines and blogs, national television and radio. Now let me be clear: There are a lot of more exciting companies in Denmark than us. Then why have we been published so broadly? Why are we a household name? We were bold, had a bit of an edge, and were persuasive as hell—something I will dive deeper into further along the journey
  • Analytical excellence
    • Analyzing customer data and marketing effectiveness was one of our biggest flaws in the beginning. Now, it is the most effective means of optimizing our marketing and setting goals and KPIs for ourselves. It is not possible to overstate the importance of data analysis.
  • Deciding on the product and refining it
    • How many products do you want? How many categories? B2B and/or B2C? We started out being very narrow, then we wanted to do everything, now we are back to being reasonably narrow. It is hard to sell something if customers are in doubt of what you are selling. Don't do everything—at first.
  • How much do we charge?
    • Pricing is something that is very tricky and something that kills a lot of good businesses. We have iterated and re-iterated our prices several times being on the verge of insolvency due to too low prices. A note here: Customers often want to pay more than you think, and don't go into a price play unless you have the powers to push the market down. Differentiate on other qualities.
  • Keeping customers satisfied
    • In a society where people are increasingly influenced by their peers' opinions, keeping customers satisfied is one of the most important means of driving sales. Respond quickly, provide excellent service, and keep in touch with your customers.
  • Building the right tech
    • We spent the very first cash we had on building what we thought would be a proper tech platform. Turned out half a year later that it was shitty. We did not know what we needed to build—or how to do it. When deciding to build tech, it is important that you are very clear about what you want and where you want it to go with a laser-sharp customer orientation.
  • Scaling the supply and demand side in a two-sided business
    • We have two sides to our business: Freelancers and customers. What do you scale first? How do you keep the interest of the side you scale if the other side does not come? It is an inherent struggle of two-sided businesses that can only be solved through initial blitz-scaling.
  • Dealing with international expansion
    • We are launching in two new markets for the first time. Preparation is king. We have thought a lot about having the right people in place, transferring our learnings from Denmark and starting with great pace. It is not easy and we have no clue as to how it will go.
  • Automation is king
    • E-mail, processes, bookkeeping, taxes, bills etc. etc. F***ing boring. Something that can kill every prospective founder is the admin surrounding a startup. Everything sounds amazing but there is more groundwork to it than most people think. Learn how to set up clever automation and get rid of the worst.
  • Having fun while working—a lot
    • One of the things I have found most important to my journey is that every time I go to the office to work on Mimer, it does not feel like work. It feels a bit like being in the backyard, 9 years old kicking my feet sore with a football. We have focused a lot on having the right culture—while also getting shit done.
  • Reach out for help from senior entrepreneurs
    • Oh boy, had we been screwed if we had not had the help we got. An important lesson is that entrepreneurs, successful and unsuccessful, love to share their experiences (and to drink coffee). I mean look at me, spending my vacation in Tuscany writing a blog post. Reach out, get help, and don't be afraid to ask stupid questions.
  • Attracting and dealing with investors
    • Embodied in the Silicon Valley rush of entrepreneurs, a lot of people seem to think that the holy grail is to attract investors and raise a shit-ton of funding at a valuation that your company has no chance of living up to. Well, surprise, it's not. We have learned an awful lot about dealing with great offers and the timing of investors and that, in a lot of cases, the right thing might be to wait.

All of these things helped us build a scale-up with an extreme growth spurt—along the way, this will be updated with links to the deep-diving posts explaining more on these subjects.

Where do we go from here?

27th November 2018. Exactly one year after our initial meet-up at the shady Portuguese bar we ran around in wilderness in the streets of Copenhagen. Just a week earlier we had won the CBS Startup grant of $12k and had successfully grown 100% since last month.

Now, July 2019, revenue has 10x'ed since 2018, investors are lining up and we are soon launching a new platform in two new markets. However, writing this, I realize how little we still know about a lot of things and how far we have come nevertheless. That's why I love what I do, and why I want as many as possible to do the same thing.

We are on a constant journey to learn how to scale a start-up and hopefully, we will learn a lot more in the coming year.

I will start diving deeper into the topics that I briefly touched upon here in my next blog post and hopefully, it will become a useful source of material for starting a business on a budget and scaling it.

This post will be updated with links—bookmark it and stay tuned.

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About the Creator

Mads Koch Petersen

20 year old part-time entrepreneur, part-time student at Copenhagen Business School. Blogging about why and how to start a company while being a student and scaling it.

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