The longest shortest 2 years
Q1 2020 marks Reset’s two year anniversary, from when we had our first conversation about how we could help distributed teams find affordable space to meet and work. Since then, we’ve served 500+ unique customers, worked with 10+ space partners, pivoted our business model from B2C to B2B, signed on advisers, and have raised money from outside investors. Since our pivot, we’ve served an additional 15 companies, half of which are outside of Austin.
It feels both like it whizzed by but also took a while, and we wanted to reflect back over those last two years and share few key lessons that we’ve learned with others on this journey:
1. Your partner matters
To all those solo-founders out there — kudos to ya’ll. Starting a company is a hard feat, and doing it alone can become very lonely and makes it so much harder. I’m incredibly lucky to have found a co-founder partner whose strengths are my weaknesses, and vice versa. She takes the lead on all things brand, creative, hiring, and marketing, while I lead sales, business development, and operations. We’ve also had to work on building trust and communication skills these last two years, and having a partner that is open to that and willing to work on that has been a great asset in this process. This has allowed us to run our parts of the company pretty autonomously and remote, so we can operate pretty nimbly and flexibly while still having outside jobs.
Having someone that has your back, that you can trust completely, that you can argue with and disagree with — these are invaluable assets to have in a partner, and has made my startup journey more enjoyable and rewarding.
2. Celebrate the small wins
It’s hard when you get hundreds of no’s from investors, from partners, from customers, from vendors. It’s natural to get down in the dumps, especially when you see the news covered in headlines of startups raising millions and millions of dollars while you’re not. Especially with the state of the funding for female entrepreneurs. That’s why when you get wins, celebrate them! You’re not jinxing anything, celebrate when you make that sale, make a new contact, get a customer review, or even just get feedback from an investor that you’re on the right track.
Enjoy the small wins when you get them, because they are what keep you sane when you’re in the troughs.
3. Learn to let go and move forward
You don’t have to continue doing things just because that’s the way you’ve done them before. If something is not serving you, cut it out and move on. When we found that our original legal and accounting representation no longer worked for us, we learned our lessons and found better fits. We’ve automated processes like closing our books and tracking our sales pipeline from excel sheets into more robust software, saving us time for a small trade off of money. We’ve let go employees when there was no longer a fit, venue partners when we didn’t see a future partnership there, and even contractors when we didn’t need their services anymore.
Our biggest example of this was our pivot from B2C to B2B. We let go of our entire business model of daily workspaces for remote workers and pivoted into private meeting rentals. This decision required us to shed a lot of creative assets we had built up, our customer base, an app we had piloted, and we had to create a whole set of new internal and external processes to facilitate the pivot.
We haven’t looked back since we made this decision, and as every week passes, our founding team has gotten sharper focus on our goals and has learned to cut out the noise, saving us time and effort!
For our final share, here are a wealth of resources during this journey that have helped us along the way:
- Elpha and Alice have been great for informal discussion threads between female founders and a safe place to ask questions
- Female Founders TX and Austin Startups as Facebook community groups for more Austin specific entrepreneurial communities
- First Round Review, Austin Startups, BlueSkyPartner’s mental health blog have all been great reads to help motivate, inspire, and provide support through the ups and downs of the journey
