My startup journey: Reflections & Lessons Learned
[In case you found this post not through my LinkedIn profile — this was initially meant to be a LinkedIn post, but I couldn’t fit it within LinkedIn’s character limits, and wrote this article. Feel free to send me a connection request!]
I’ve been putting off this post for months, but now it’s time to close this chapter properly.
So, if you followed our journey, you may have wondered what happened to not8 and why I disappeared from the radar and stopped posting on LinkedIn…
Journey Recap
Here’s a quick recap for those who don’t know me well or didn’t follow the journey closely:
- In July 2022, Vlad and I applied to Antler with our startup idea. We wanted to build a tool that would simplify the process of feedback collection and sharing for digital agencies. We moved to Amsterdam to take part in Antler’s 10-week acceleration program.
- In September 2022, 3 teams from our cohort were selected for investment. Our team was one of them. Shortly afterwards, we registered our company — Not8 B.V. The idea behind the name was that it is pronounced “not-eight,” which sounds similar to “annotate” — the core feature of the product, which allowed users to leave notes on websites.
- We raised €250K in total — €100K convertible note from Antler and, in May 2023, a €150K innovation loan from Rabobank.
- Fast forward hundreds of CustDev calls, many months of coding by Vlad (and everyone who helped him at different stages of our journey), and a few Product Hunt launches — we built our product. Unfortunately, the website is not active anymore, but I still have this demo video and the promo video from our website.
- We added monetisation quite late. Actually, I’d say too late — we focused on free users first because we wanted to grow our user base, get them “hooked,” and only then add a paywall. But the “getting hooked” part didn’t go as well as we imagined (I’ll reflect on why in the next section). We felt that our product wasn’t “mature enough” so by the time we launched our paid plan, it was already time to start fundraising again. We began fundraising in January 2024.
- However, our traction wasn’t good enough to secure the next round of funding, so by April 2024 we had almost run out of money and it became clear we weren’t going to make it. I took myself off the payroll and started looking for a job.
- In May 2024, I joined Uber Eats as a Regional Operations Manager in EMEA. More on that later.
- We kept the company open for a few more months. On one hand, we still had some paying clients and recurring revenue. On the other hand, I was quite exhausted at that point and didn’t have the energy for tough conversations with investors and paperwork. In November 2024, though, I formally shut down the company.
Lessons Learned
This was a very exciting, yet challenging experience, and I feel that I learned a ton. So I’d like to share some of those learnings here — even if just one of them helps someone, I’ll be extremely happy. Also, I want this post to serve as a reminder to myself in case I decide to embark on the entrepreneurship journey again in the future.
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Lesson #1: Validate the idea before committing (a.k.a. Don’t take the money too early)
The main reason why, in my opinion, not8 didn’t take off was the fact that it wasn’t solving a problem that was burning enough. As they say, it was a “vitamin,” not an “aspirin.”
So, one thing I’d do differently next time — I would quickly test several ideas before committing to the one that is most promising. Start with CustDev interviews, build a quick MVP (now with AI tools like Cursor, Lovable, etc., you can test ideas much quicker than just 2–3 years ago), start making some money, and only then start thinking about fundraising to fuel your growth.
As soon as you raise money from investors, you enter the race — and you need to be sure that this is the race you want to run.
Lesson #2: Don’t mistake people’s politeness for genuine interest
So, did I not validate the idea with not8? I did — or at least I thought I did. I conducted close to 100 CustDev calls and heard what I wanted to hear — that the idea was “interesting” and “promising.”
What I didn’t realize was that people were just being polite. I should’ve taken that feedback with a pinch of salt.
How to test whether the interest is genuine? That brings me to the next lesson…
Lesson #3: Charge early
Don’t hesitate to ask users for money. For some reason, I had a mental blocker — I felt our product wasn’t mature enough to start charging for it.
But you need to do it ASAP. You may not have many features yet, but you can offer personalized customer support, special “early bird” pricing, or maybe even some custom features for your high-potential client (don’t overdo on this one though, don’t let these requests divert you from the main direction; the ideal scenario is when you build what you were planning to build anyway as a part of your roadmap).
As Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, said — “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
Lesson #4: Set yourself a normal salary — not too high, not too low
Okay, say, you found The Idea, built an MVP, started making revenue, and raised your first round. Now you’re wondering — what should be the salary that I set for myself? This may not be a popular opinion, but I’d say — don’t set yourself a salary that is too low. Don’t get me wrong though — it shouldn’t be very high either. But it should be enough for you to cover your monthly expenses, and there should be a small buffer on top of that to account for possible emergency costs. Vlad & I didn’t have that buffer, we ended up living paycheck to paycheck, and this is not the stress you want to have, because it just distracts you from building your company.
Lesson #5: If it’s not taking off — pivot before it’s too late
There was a moment when we realized that we’d already built the main functionality of the product, but the traction just wasn’t there. We still had enough money in our business bank account, and we faced a choice — to pivot or to continue enhancing the existing product, hoping that we’d hit that inflection point sometime soon.
Choosing the latter was easier — we didn’t have a clear alternative idea, and it’s always hard to admit to yourself that you may have spent several months of your life, and tens of thousands of investor money, building something that ultimately no one really needed.
But I think we should have pivoted. We should’ve had that tough conversation between ourselves and with our investors, brainstormed a new idea, and started from scratch while we still had enough runway to do so.
Lesson #6: You need someone to maintain Growth during Fundraising
In a two-founder setup, the “business person” often handles both sales and fundraising. But once fundraising starts, sales usually stall.
If your user acquisition depends on Sales rather than Marketing, someone needs to take over while you’re pitching investors.
In our case, if I could go back in time, I’d hire a Commercial person a few months before fundraising — it would reduce runway, but consistent growth might’ve helped us raise that next round.
Lesson #7: Have someone to handle Admin/Ops job if possible
If your budget allows, hire someone to take care of admin tasks — taxes, grant applications, investor reports, etc. These took a lot of my time and energy that would’ve been better spent on customers and growth.
This list isn’t exhaustive — just the tip of the iceberg — but these were the main lessons for me.
New Chapter at Uber
I know I’m almost a year late with the announcement, but hey — better late than never, right?
Since May 2024, I’ve been working at Uber Eats as a Regional Operations Manager in EMEA within the Marketplace Efficiency vertical, covering Matching & Dispatch, and starting this year — also Timeliness & Prediction, and Maps & Routing.
So all product and feature rollouts related to dispatch algorithm enhancements, order batching, and everything tied to delivery time prediction and actual delivery time in all 14 EMEA countries where Uber Eats operates (UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Poland, Kenya, and South Africa) now go through me.
Geographically, I’m still in Amsterdam — Uber’s EMEA HQ is based here.
Funnily enough, Uber’s office is right across the road from our old not8 co-working space. I sometimes joke that I just didn’t want to get used to a new neighborhood.
Big thanks for reading this far!
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