Startups explained by a first time founder.
"Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth." - Mike Tyson
As I write this essay, it's around 1 AM in India. I plan to post this after I've finally launched Azurro (at least the Android app on the Play Store). It took me about 3 months to build this software from scratch, after completely deploying all my applications. I can't lie—it was incredibly painful.
Now, as I write this paragraph, it's 1 PM, and Azurro is published on both the App Store and Play Store. I still maintain that this journey has been painful. Jensen Huang was right when he said, "To build a startup is a tough job. Great companies are not built on intelligence but on character, and great character is formed from suffering."
In my case, it's been painful to learn things from scratch. I had knowledge in coding, algorithms, and data structures. I thought it would be easier to find someone who could code better than I could, and I'd manage the non-tech work. That was a bad idea. I'm grateful that the people I approached rejected me. I thought, "Screw it, I'll build it myself." I had never shipped a server-side application, never deployed any JavaScript projects online, and knew nothing about writing mobile application code. But I learned it all. AI has been an amazing tool here, helping me learn and accomplish ten times more than I thought I could do alone.
My parents keep asking me, "What's next now? What's going to be your next idea? Make sure your next project has a bigger market." I have no clue. Azurro is the only thing that might—in hip-hop terms—get me outta the hood, you know? Building Azurro is fun, and I'm creating this for the community I've been part of for many years. I find my life similar to one of the founders I admire—Phil Knight. Love his book "Shoe Dog."
As I'm about to launch my product, you might wonder how it stands as version 1. I think it's terrible. But will it always be terrible? Absolutely not! It reminds me of those videos where UFC fighters are asked to rate themselves out of 10, and even the best ones often say they're an 8.5 or 9. When asked why not a 10, they respond there's always room for improvement. I feel the same way about building startups—at least from my three-month journey. There's always room for improvement while building Azurro, both today and five years from now.
I have never understood founders who secure significant funding rounds and then give up when they run out of cash. Right now, I'm mostly relying on my family’s income and dealing with various insecurities, yet building this company doesn’t feel like work to me. It feels like a video game—write some code, encounter bugs, fix them, deploy, and show the product to friends. This is something I would love to do for the long haul. I know that once I start with the operations, things might get different and messier.
TL;DR: It's been almost three months since I started building Azurro, and in my experience, startups are all about—Fuck around and find out!