Why I started to drive UBER instead of raising more money for my #startup

These days, all around the world there is a huge rush to raise money for your startup. Even here in Slovakia — CEE Europe, there is a big bubble around the “startup thing” and it became something like a fashion. Having a startup these days is something like wearing Adidas or Nike several years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, I really admire people working on themselves and trying to start their own thing. But starting a company, creating real value, prove your product or service is really a different thing than just having an idea and try to raise money.

I see a lot of people here in Slovakia chasing the few investors like 2 freaking weeks after they have “an idea”. Yep, we have such people too. Very few people really get into the work, do their research and try to gain at least some revenue before raising capital. And the other bad part is that many of them think that they will build next Facebook or Twitter just like that.

I tell you what: building a company is much more than writing a freaking web application, and trust me — we have also taken our time to realise that.

Example: You want to build next @Slack? There’re plenty of tutorials out there to build Slack-like app in a few days. Take this one for example https://thinkster.io/angularfire-slack-tutorial#introduction

So why there’re not dozens of Slack-like successful companies?! Because building a web app and building a company are two different things.

But back to the point.

We’re building @AdultTranslations (http://adult-translations.com) - a translation service for the adult industry. And we’re doing really, really well.

We are few months in the adult business and we already have connections to several of the biggest companies in the industry. And yes, you surely know some of them ;-)

We’ve just returned from the very special conference which took place in Bahamas, which was limited to only 75 people at maximum. And it was strictly invite-only conference for the CEOs, owners, presidents and directors of the biggest companies in the industry. I’m really not sure how we did it, but we’re able to get an invite to the conference.

After only few months in the industry, we’re starting cooperation with some of the biggest players, one by one. One step at a time. We’re doing several thousands in revenue monthly, but we’re still not profitable yet and we’re running out of our saved money.

We could have chased some investors and spent 3–6 more months raising capital, or we can somehow get through few months and focus on building the revenue from all the leads we have and relationships we gained.

And here’s where UBER come in. I’m starting to drive UBER to get through these few difficult months to save us from raising money. Not only to save equity, but also to show that there’s other way to build a company rather than raising capital.

So don’t fall into the “raising money” trap and start to think what you could do, if there were no investors.

If others can do it, you can do it too! I wish you all the best.