Juho Makkonen and his co-founder Antti Virolainen started
working on Sharetribe back in 2011, after spinning it out of a
university project they had been working on since 2008. In 2012,
they tried hard to get funding but “luckily investors said no,”
Juho recalls.
Here are his key lessons about why not (!) getting funding
actually saved their company, as shared by Juho on
episode #015 of the Startup Milestones podcast.
We didn’t know Lean Startup principles
Juho and Antti were working on their peer-to-peer sharing
platform for neighbourhoods and communities. The idea was, that
closed communities like neighbourhoods or university campuses could
share anything among each other in a trusted environment: anything
from tools, to rides, to services.
(Un)fortunately, they got the University of Helsinki as a first
customer and managed to win pilot projects with the City of
Helsinki and an insurance company. So they soldiered on until they
received feedback from their pilot customers and others that their
solution was not really solving a big relevant for them. They saw
that people thought it was a nice idea, but few people would
actually use the platform and share things on it.
Asked about the lessons, Juho says: “we had not discovered Lean
Startup back then. Today, startups know all about it. But we did
not write down our assumptions and the problem we were trying to
solve. Instead, we built…