This is a second installment of the story of all random, silly, funny, failed business ideas I had before I finally co-founded the one that worked. Read Part 1 here.
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Age 24
Before I co-founded StackAdapt, I was starting to get desperate. I knew I wanted to get something of my own going, and I was throwing myself at any idea, hoping one would stick. Here are some of the most memorable:
With a partner, I decided to launch a business ahead of Valentine’s Day printing Facebook timelines of couples as a wall poster. I acted as a designer and arranged screenshots of the newsfeed in a sample poster for printing. Only after hanging one on the wall did it occur to us that we would likely get sued back to the Stone Age for trademark infringement. We abandoned the project immediately. The potential return was just not worth the effort.
At that time, one of my best friends was working in Nigeria in the microfinance industry. On one occasion, he recounted how highly coveted Blackberry phones were there -- not just for their utility, but for the status signal. Consequently, the premium on Blackberrys was exceedingly healthy. The dots connected in my head -- I lived in Toronto next to the birthplace of Blackberry (Waterloo) and my friend in Nigeria could help with market intel! Since the iPhone was gaining popularity in Canada and everyone was switching to Apple, finding refurbished Blackberry phones was easy. Next up, I had to find a distributor in Nigeria to sell the refurbished phones. My first instinct was to reach out to Export Development Canada:
Spelling mistakes, weak story, poor grammar - no wonder I never got a response.
My next move was to start foraging through Nigerian classified websites. I found some guy who claimed to be a distributor looking for suppliers of cell phones. Bingo! He only provided his phone number, so I had no other option but to call him. I purchased credits on Skype to call and, miraculously, he picked up! He must have been at a local market judging by the background noise. Shouting, I tried to explain that I was calling from Canada and I wanted to sell him some Blackberry phones. After about five minutes of trying to convince him that the call was for real, I hung up. I don’t think he ever believed me. At that point, it became clear that something relatively simple on paper is often much harder in practice. That was the end of my attempt to sell cell phones to Nigeria.
3. My next idea was to build a website where business buyers of software could browse products by industry, read current users’ reviews, and so on. A few years later, I discovered G2 which had many of the capabilities I aspired to build, except their business model was much cleverer than mine - I was envisioning making money through affiliate types of sale. Looking back, I think I could have made that business reasonably successful. The reason I ultimately abandoned this idea is that I went into it without the mindset that I could make it work.
4. The last business I went in on with a couple of friends before StackAdapt was a video platform that would allow politicians to engage with their constituents. Video communication was just gaining momentum at the time, and we thought it could be an interesting niche. Retrospectively, we should have done some market research - every sales call we tried to make was met with confusion about the need for the product in the first place. After we failed to get traction, we pivoted into a platform for celebrities to connect with their fans via paid experiences (think Cameo, but we didn’t think of having asynchronous communication, which is a clever spin). I distinctly remember a discussion with my friend, the CTO, where we lamented the fact that we couldn’t find existing infrastructure we could build on top of to enable video streaming on our platform. Because we were such amateurs, we overlooked the really big opportunity - to build that infrastructure! That being said, I don’t think we had the chops to execute that great idea. This brings me to my last point: you can have the best business idea in the world, but without actually executing it, it’s worthless.
Age 25
When I met my co-founders, Ildar and Yang, we saw a clear opportunity in advertising technology. Ildar and I worked in the industry, the market was huge and rapidly expanding, and scalable technologies like machine learning showed a ton of potential for making decisions based on a massive amount of data that is generated online. We didn’t encounter any other platforms that wanted to put user experience and automation at the forefront of interaction with software. After some market validation (a story for another time), we launched StackAdapt. Fast forward almost eight years, and StackAdapt is still going strong. We support thousands of advertisers on our platform, we have a team of over four hundred people with a presence in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Australia, and, most importantly, we still feel that we are just getting started.
While I strongly believe there is no formula for starting a successful business, I think there is one necessary ingredient that stands out is your attitude. Looking back, it is what made StackAdapt successful. On the first day I started working with Ildar he told me: “failure is not an option”. We had no product, no customers, and no real experience running a company, but this do-or-die frame of mind is what I believe, made us unstoppable. This was something we could control - but there were things we couldn’t.
For example, the fact that three of us barely knew each other before StackAdapt, but nonetheless were able to form a strong working relationship and friendship while building the company was serendipitous. The odds of forming such a strong relationship were against us here, perhaps even more so than other external headwinds we needed to cope with.
Reflecting on how slim the chances were of getting to where we are today, the only thing I can do is express gratitude for how things have unfolded, for support from our families, and to the people who put trust in us. Thank you.
Today is December 2, 2021, and my story is still being written. To be continued....