My first startup experience

The story begins here ......

It is already 2 months ( as from 2021) since my friend, my elder sister which I always considered, my mentor, my psychologist and my CEO died after suffering 1 month in the ICU in the hospital. She met with a road accident and the real culprit was someone who was drunk and crashed his car against my CEO fiancee car. 

                                                    

In December 2020, I got a WhatsApp message from her, she wanted me to work for her regarding a healthcare idea (cannot give more detail due to the privacy and confidentiality of the project). I just asked her in what way I can be helpful since we were very closed and shared personal stuff of our lives. She just told me on my face just work on this idea of hers and she will guide and advise when appropriate.

I had full trust on her since she promised me the position of Chief Technology Officer. I had never expected to taste the position of the Top Management at such age despite I was also working on my own idea which was Blockchain, my cup of tea among all technologies and something which I was really resourcefull and already doing training to work as career within the Financial Services. And the most amazing fact was that I was still at university precisely University of Technology Mauritius, so I had barely professional experience with an incubator program of MIT Global Startup Lab, some internships in private IT company and social work experience.

Action Plan

My first reaction was to architect an action plan to build a business roadmap success and believe me it is not easy to prepare what we call in the Top Management language the strategic planning of the startup since new ideas kept on coming and without the least doubt new startups who were building similar ideas that we got BUT STILL WE KNEW WE WOULD MAKE IT HAPPEN BECAUSE WE BELIEVE IN US.

1.  Preparing learning process and educating yourself on technologies.

I followed extensive online courses on e-learning platform Udemy, Pluralsight and other reputed platforms. But above all, first advice is to learn programming which I already knew on a beginner level, so please ensure you know Python, Javascript and Flutter for mobile application. Apart from this choose wisely your cloud provider such as Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure. Even if you got a great startup idea, educating yourself with cutting edge technologies is key to materialise those ideas into reality.

2. Working on the MVP

Our product that we wanted to offer to our market was crystal clear and building it required a lot of data and also research. So we adopted both R&D and Innovation strategies to ensure we accelerate our MVP journey quickly and test our product to some test users with which we could trust. My CEO work experience as a psychologist was advantageous to us to build a very precise product that was simple to use and also very powerful regarding the features we opted for implementation.

3. Partnership & Collaboration

As a startup, you need to build partnership and collaboration even if you have staff, resources and your network of people and organization. For marketing and business development my CEO was looking at it but regarding Operation, Strategy and Technology I was completely rooted in that due to my incubator program experience and internships in private IT companies.I decided to enroll in Google Cloud for Startups for our product development strategies and also the technologies that Google Cloud offers within its AI, Machine Learning and Big Data products and services.

4. Seek advice to trust worthy professionals

When I was building my MVP, I was stuck regarding what specific platform to choose,what technology to use and on what level should I start. I was lucky since on Linkedin I got experts in Cloud Computing, Chatbot development, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and even Blockchain. So I did not lack people behind my back.

5. No risk no reward

This famous saying always vibrate in the mind of any person who wants to achieve, " no risk no reward" and indeed for 1 year we walked on that proverb and experience a lot of facilities from people who were willing to help us for free. I got great engineers and CEOs who were interested in our idea and were offering us advice, consultancy and tips for free. And in a startup world every piece of bread is super important to feed on.

I am super duper grateful for this journey despite the pain of losing the girl who got the vision of building something that could change the way we see the corporate industry. This startup experience force me to go out of my comfort zone, take initiatives, defy the odds as a university student and challenge myself in an unprecedented way. But as another proverb says the journey continues.....