October 27th, 2019 at 10:14 Amsterdam time the first commit of Meettrics was finalized. Now on June 5th, 2022, 2 years, 7 months and 9 days later it's time to acknowledge a new phase has been entered in the project. We've hit the MVP.
Meettrics is the first scheduling app built for teams. It works great for individuals too, but the maximum potential is when your entire team is utilizing it. Customize your scheduling portals with your company logos and any informational or promotional material to go along with it. While giving your prospects and customers great first impressions, the backend of Meettrics ensures easy integration into your sales and marketing automation pipelines.
We've only just begun but already have traveled a vast distance to get here. I'm sure you will see much more in the future about the product of Meettrics and how it can benefit your teams and company. Visit our LinkedIn page to get updates on the product. For now, I want to focus on the timeframe from the idea to the MVP.
Before I even start, I must warn that this will not read like a normal start up article. Most people wouldn't call Meettrics an MVP. In some ways, everything I am doing is cutting against the status quo. It's not that the status quo is wrong. It's not that those things aren't useful. To give you everything I know would take writing a series of extremely dry novels. There is normally a few 'correct' ways of doing things. But every one of those has an infinite number of 'wrong' ways to do them. I have focused on what to do when things go wrong. In doing so, I've seen more mine fields, quicksand, and sirens than most. And so my first and most foundational cornerstone of Meettrics was "What if I just stopped cutting corners and did everything right from the start?".
Now, I recognize one can not be perfect and mistakes will always be made. However, if one could minimize those to smaller and inconsequential consequences to your business, then your business would have a much higher chance of success and perhaps most importantly, you will save boat loads of money in achieving success. We'll come back to that later.
Sometime in October 2019, I was working as the CTO of a legal tech startup and we had a marketing consultant. One challenge of employee onboarding is adjusting to the cadence of the company. In this case, we were rapidly iterating on product and needed someone to get into that rapid rhythm. However, we kept having meetings scheduled one week apart. The decision making cycle would have been a month long. We needed two cycles a week. And so I started to think about how I could quantify this? If I want to ask someone to improve, I should have a tangible metric for them to do better that they can calculate themselves. I really dislike ambiguous grading criteria. And so the idea was alive.
But I paused. Previously, starting a side project and following the normal advice, it didn't work out. I suppose my career progressed backwards from larger enterprise to smaller start ups. This felt normal to me back when I entered the industry. I was always worried of the advice that "the first customer is the hardest". That was the big hurdle to pass. If you succeeded with that first hurdle, each hurdle was easier and easier.
While it's true that the first customer is the hardest to acquire, it's not even close to the biggest hurdle you will have to face in starting a business. The first customer only starts an uphill climb that becomes steeper and steeper. Your skills as a founder is what will determine how high you can go. The more tools and people you can leverage at your challenge will be the key to determining that. The startup founder journey can not be others lifting him up. These founders will never go as far as the ones that can inspire and lead their teams.
Meettrics became my journey. Starting over and over again when there is adversity was not going to be an option. Meettrics would become self sustaining. Until then, my personal focus was not to deviate for that. No jumping to the next side project. Success is effort * time. I had to put in both.
My anecdotal experience is the hardest stretch for startups is the post series A stretch. That first round is much easier than the B round. By the time you get to the B round you can't cover up flaws with aspirations. You have either proven your proposition or not at that point. The success is your ability to convince others of your proposition. Once startups get the series A funding, the stand out founders quickly emerge. Have they seen it before and are navigating deftly between the challenges they will face? Or have they entered new territory and are learning their way? I always like the saying that "one gets in trouble when they don't know what they should know".
Not knowing doesn't equal failure. Quite on the contrary, it's probably more the normal for founders. What it does mean for the company is that more waste is created. This equates to dollars that were spent that didn't need to be spent. A founder may have hired the wrong fit for a marketing position and thus lost the salary paid and opportunity cost of having the right fit in place. As long as the founder has the resources to cover the mistakes, it should be all fine. The trouble arises when the debt incurred through waste exceeds the amount available to pay for it.
And so, given the constraints that I was not going to abandon this, I started to build a SaaS base which is largely identical to every SaaS company. I looked back on my decade of building apps and realized I spent far more time on annoying things like logins, billing, and permissions than I should have. I built the same thing over and over again for every company.
With Meettrics, I wanted to avoid every pitfall in the series A to B growth stretch. If I could sidestep all the annoyances I've experienced, it should be quite fun and enjoyable experience to focus on the growth and marketing of the product. What we don't need to focus all that much on is finance, legal, billing, analytics, privacy and more. After all, at the time, I spent less than 2 hours a day on the project.
Meettrics is forging a new path. We aim to show a new way that focuses on maximum success with minimal capital. I've spent a few hundred dollars on Meettrics so far and we are about to receive some great market validation. The team that has jumped in to help is firm in the bootstrapping belief. We will not take investment. We will share everything business agnostic that can help others bootstrap their own SaaS companies. It's a long and difficult journey. We aim to pave the road and build inns along the route so any one can do it.
To focus on today, have we succeeded? Not even close. We must not lose track of our goals or let some success get to our heads. These early successes might indicate we are succeeding, but we also realize we have a long way to go. The uphill climb is just beginning. But we've prepped the route. Cheating? Perhaps. Does the destination care about the journey?
Follow Meettrics and I on LinkedIn to get updates as we progress towards our MVP launch. We aren't conventional. We like this. I suppose time will tell if it helps or hurts us. But regardless of where it ends up, we are having a great time doing it. And come back in a few weeks to see our launch! (July 2022)