From student to CEO
Execution and Research
With the basics of networking covered in our previous article, which are the pieces of the puzzle that you as the CEO have to put together, it is time to fully explore the depths of execution to find the fastest and most efficient way to found your company & get investment money behind your project.
Assuming you have established a basic network of important contacts of valuable resources, it’s time to dive into fully executing your vision. Due to the uniqueness of each project your specific needs are most likely different than mine were, but the steps required to put things into motion are the same. In my case I was focusing on building new hardware and implementing a new way of receiving feedback for table tennis.
As a table tennis player myself, I saw and experienced the problem in learning table tennis and wanted to come up with a solution.
For quite an extensive period of time (over 1 year) I was experimenting with cameras, multiple sensors and quite a lot of equipment in general. All of this would definitely work, and I figured out how the technology worked and was experimenting with a simple prototype, learning new skills along the way. All my solutions seemed to make sense and I honestly thought the product would be great, until I realized it wasn’t.
I shared my idea with a client of mine I was working for, who was executing a startup of his own. He was interested and offered his experience, connections and help. Full of excitement, I jumped right on board and went to test my prototype with him, to check for real first feedback from a possible user, customer and a person with high interest. We got quite a lot of attention from other ping pong players and even the main coach, but found out quite a lot of issues with the whole process and user experience, that I didn’t realize in front of my computer screen. You always need to test with real users. There was simply too much setup required for a comfortable user experience and even then the conditions seemed to be necessary to get just right for this execution to work.
Having more questions than answers, I realized the solution to the problem needed a pivot (always be ready to pivot and explore new ideas) and started discussing my problems with people I trusted, mainly one of my co-workers as mentioned in the previous post. This led to the real and final product which we are now building.
This was late 2018, (and I’ve been working on and off for over a year at this point) and I had lots of tasks that needed to be solved:
- I’m building new hardware: Patent the idea
- I’m trying to make this a business: Make a business plan
- I want to live in US: Get new visa (I’m a foreigner)
These were three main problems that had (and keep having) almost endless smaller subproblems within them that you will be addressing for quite some time. Firstly, getting a patent done isn’t as they say ‘rocket science’ and one of my school professors suggested I can write the patent myself in order to save money. I spent quite a lot of time researching how patents work, what the costs are, how they are structured only to not really get anywhere. It wasn’t until spring 2019 when I got to connect with a patent lawyer through a personal connection when things really started to kick off for real.
Working with a patent lawyer is a great experience because you get to feed all your knowledge and information to a professional who processes it properly for you. Be ready to have all the details of your product figured out in order to describe it as much as you can. Your lawyer will work out the patent, you just let them work and give them time. (As mentioned before — Connection is King, you now have an indirect connection to a patent lawyer through me). Depending on your project, your patent needs might vary from mine. You do not necessarily need a functioning prototype, but you do need to describe your possible invention in detail.
Be prepared to spend money on this as patent work can cost you anywhere between $4k to $15k depending on your project. Since I am not a lawyer, I am not giving you any legal advice but simply stating my experiences and explaining what has worked for me. To make the work easier for your lawyer give him all the details and information on your competitors or similar products out there. You are coming up with new ideas and solutions to current problems and knowing current solutions and products can help you distinguish yourself from others and implement new ideas.
As I mentioned earlier, you do not need to have a working prototype when working on a patent. That’s because the invention you are working on may not exist yet — you are inventing it; you do need to know however exactly how it is put together and how it works. Your patent lawyer will fill in the details that will describe your idea about 40 times more detailed and broader than you do, you just need to give him as much knowledge as you have.
Speaking about the prototype, with my computer science background I was able to build it, which also served as a proof of concept. There was a learning curve (as there is with anything new you are learning) where I had to learn how to build new hardware and how to program the whole thing. Depending on your personal skill set, this may or may not be a difficult task. Even though I did coding, I still had to learn quite a lot. I used to go online to do research, ask specific questions about hardware on internet forums, forums for specific products that I would be using and asking the community to point me in the right directions. Don’t be discouraged if this takes you quite some time; if everything goes smoothly, you don’t actually have the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. Learning from failures is, through my experience, very valuable.
Depending on the project you are doing, your prototype may be a lot different from mine. I was building a simple motion tracking device that would produce different sounds under different circumstances. With each new knowledge of different parts of hardware I was able to make new sketches of configurations, how to connect different pieces together, learned online (and also in school) how to solder hardware properly, checked out templates on hardware solutions and then was modifying those solutions and implementing my own ideas.
If you are not able to do certain steps yourself, then go check your connection network to see who you know or who might know people that could help you out.
While you might know people who can do certain things (such as build new hardware prototypes), figure out quickly if they are the right people to help you. A friend of mine who has built new hardware before and had his own company before did offer some help, but it was mostly in the form of telling me where the problems are, what difficulties there are, what issues I’ll be facing and all these obstacles that are ahead of me. Of course I knew this already (not in such detail) and it felt more frustrating than helpful; I don’t need to hear the problems — I know them already, I need to figure out solutions. So be careful not to have too much hope in certain situations and not to spend time where it is unnecessary. Hearing from other people about your problems can be more counter productive and frustrating as you might think. That is because they are telling you what you have already learned and figured out, just re-introducing the problems again when you are long past that phase.
Now the good news is that perhaps you don’t need to build a new hardware, maybe you need to build an app. That’s great. If you can’t do it yourself, that’s great too, all you have to do is figure out how it will be built. Sounds easy right? Actually it is, you just go back to chapter 1 and find the connection in your network that could assist you on this. In my case it is our CTO Jonathan who knows all these things that I don’t.
It is not really what you know by yourself that makes you and your idea valuable, it is the unique team of individuals behind it that is the driving force.
We will touch more in depth on team value in the next chapter of business plan (I will share my templates and documents) and in the chapter of seeking funding. Keep in mind that funding is the most important part of your project and getting seed funding should be your primary long term goal and vision, which we will cover in detail as well.