Why I love startups
How my love for startups started and it impacted my life
I was 18 and in my second year of college. I got the opportunity to intern at a startup called goDutch. It was a YC-backed startup and I was assigned to scale the campus program. I was barely getting paid anything, but for the first time in my life, I experienced how much you can get done if you keep an open mind and learn at 10x speed. I closed some of the biggest campus partnerships there, including IIT Bombay and many others.
Fast forward to summer of 2021, and I applied for a program by GitHub India called GitHub Externship. I was accepted and joined the Collab.Land team for the next 3 months as an intern. I was introduced to Web3/Decentralisation at the start of the year in a podcast by Naval, and I did everything possible to learn and fast-track into a Web3 startup.
The next 3 months were some of the best. I built a new user onboarding flow using NEAR names, Aurora EVM, and found some possible improvements within Collab.Land for user onboarding. I created a new doc site from scratch and was interested in continuing forward with the team.
I was offered to join the team full-time as a core team member, and that was one of my happiest days. I experienced everything possible in a startup's life cycle in the next 3+ years. I wore multiple hats across Engineering, Support, DevRel, Product, and Data, as we were a small team. We launched multiple products including NFTs, Token, DAO, Marketplace, Dev Portal, and a product that didn't work out as expected called Telefrens.
The launch days were the best days because there was possibly nothing more important; a successful product launch is all that mattered, but it was not always the result. I learned tens of different frameworks and processes, tried User, Data, and Vibe driven decisions. I iterated, iterated, and iterated. Weekends didn't exist, 14-hour workdays; every day was an attempt to work towards a better result.
The biggest lesson I learned was about Revenue and Value creation. We had 3M+ active users, one of the biggest in Web3, but we didn't monetize on time. By the time we wanted to monetize, there were already 2 competitors in the market, and our tech and unique idea were commoditized. We saw every possible struggle from having enough runway to runway shortage and focus back on Revenue for survival. I was burned out by the end of it, but I was very clear in my head -- a startup is all I want to build or build for in my life.