A story of an entrepreneur building a platform for matching high quality talents and clients in a specific vertical.
- Initially hired a dev agency and spent $200K to build a site and the backend CMS
- Business didn’t go anywhere, shut down eventually
- Did a post-mortem. Problem still existed. Couldn’t give up – decided to go at it again
- This time, spent $0. Founder hustled and built a rolodex of talents and manually did high quality matchmaking
- Business grew. Then (and only then) built the website.
- Again, spent $0. Founder learned Bubble and built a no code site
Lessons:
- Start with “spend $0” as the default option
- Do the business, not all kinds of things that you think you’re supposed to do in order to do the business
- Validate the market first before building any fancy system