Cheers to one year running a startup!

Wait, let me grab the bottle, we went for the good stuff this time, you know, the one that doesn’t have the orange sticker plastered on the neck and is on the second shelf from the bottom at the bodega down the street from our new, tiny office.

Running a lean, mean business machine surely has its obstacles but hear it from the horse’s mouth you will not regret trying — the road you go down is fun, exciting and extremely challenging.

Oomf co-founders having a little fun at the new, tiny office: James Riel (left), Dan Lawless (right).

Running the company from our wallets.

Early on, this was a great way to start out, it really kept us focused on the essentials. We started out of two broke kids wallets, literally by the time we got a little funding we were limping along like a dog with three legs. Power to the three-legged dog though.

Most of the process has been a big learning curve and we inevitably made mistakes along the way. However we have both found the best lessons learned are the hardest ones lived. So make mistakes, learn from them and don’t make them again. I am sure anyone who starts a company for the first time would agree and if you don’t….

…where is the unicorn emoji?

We conceived, prototyped and released a product that we wanted to test a market in less than five months part time on our own dime. It was ugly, crude, most of the components were off the shelf from amazon; however, at its core, we had a solution to the problem. And this crude, ugly, off the shelf solution provided invaluable feedback as to what we needed to do next.

Feedback, feedback, feedback…

After dabbling in the market and releasing 25 units, we sought feedback from these locations. We got great advice as well as the validation we expected — there is a need for our product! However, there were a lot of fundamentals that needed to change for it to be well received and culturally accepted.

It’s a hard skill, to never take constructive criticism to heart...

Many customers have no idea how much time or effort we spent getting our hideous looking product out the door. But, we got it out the door and we got awesome feedback! Good & bad. It’s a hard skill, to never take constructive criticism to heart, but it has been invaluable in shifting our product and business model.

Taking all the criticism we got from our first go around and incorporating it into our next product helped predict how the consumer would use it. These insights drove how our product looks, feels, works, interacts, the whole shebang.

Raising a little bit of seed money

Seed money can come from anyone, just because you think it’s going to take hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what you want to do, doesn’t mean you have to raise it all at once.

We both had next to no cash at this point and (co-founder) James will probably hate me for saying this, but at one point he had a bag of change on his counter that he was using to pay for things. Talk about going all in! He took the plunge, quit his job and started focusing all his time on our startup.

I was pretty much paying for his rent and ramen noodles.

Nine months in since our lightbulb moment, four months in since James started full-time, we had to re-evaluate everything. We quickly put together a big-picture plan of action for how much we were going to need to raise for this little venture of ours to keep afloat.

We estimated high but conservatively, and we were able to show our profitability projections as well as what we’d need to do to get there.

In our attempt to find funding, we contacted our advisor who informed us that if we were to go after an angel round through a firm, it would take anywhere from six to eight months.

F*ck that! We are men of action!

We don’t have patience for things that take 6–8 months to secure — at least not yet. Nor could we afford it with our competition gaining traction.

So we went back to the drawing board. Again. And determined that we needed to find someone we knew who had a good chunk of change and would buy into our dream and help us make it a reality.

We started soliciting people we knew with money. Not an easy conversation or thing to do, but after a month and a half we found our angel and what an angel it was!

We got lucky. Really lucky. We were able to sell our dream to an unbelievable engineering manager who wanted to give us some cash. And we walked away with so much more. Money is awesome. But equally awesome is the trust and following he has built throughout his life.

Building the team and sharing equity.

This is where the fun begins! It was time to find our talent, within the budget we laid out.

We figured, if we were going to sell people on ‘the dream’, we ought to give them a slice of it. We did just that, and everyone crushes everything they do with us.

This approach would allow us to stretch the seed money over a six month runway and by the end of the runway be in a position to start flying.

The three of us (James, myself and our angel) worked very closely to determine which positions were critical for our success and brought those people on first. This ultimately sculpted the talented team we have today.

When we were a company of two, we ran the entire show. Learning to delegate to people’s strengths and trust their judgement was a hard aspect to overcome as co-founders. And though it can be difficult to do at first, once we realized what happens when talented people are given the reigns to do what they do best, the real magic begins.

We still wear a ton of hats, but now we can focus more on strategy

and growing an awesome culture.

Our team consists of four full-time and six part-time team members, who all hustle like they were working two full-time jobs. Maybe more.

Collectively, we understand our product and love the thrill of being integral to its successes.

First few weeks of sales = Success.

A 90% sales conversion rate in the first few weeks of sales

is a hell of a bang out of the gate!

There’s no way we would have been this successful without all the criticism and the pivots it lead us to take.

Over the past year we conceptualized, prototyped, tested the market, went back to the drawing board, restructured our strategy, found investment, rented office space, hired a team of rock stars, followed our gut, optimized the entire process and are seeing our proof of concept for the next version in less than three months of hiring our team as well as a 90% sales conversion rate. On top of all of this, I have been in China for the past 2 weeks and will be here for the next 3 months to oversee our manufacturing process and ensure that we release on time and possibly even ahead of schedule!

What a way to wind up year one! Things are going pretty awesome at Oomf. Congrats to the team for all the hard work!