“That’s a small step for me and a giant step for mankind”
I guess, that’s what every startup founder thinks when they first launch their product (at least, that’s the feeling I have, when I come up with a new idea).
But in reality, it’s the other way around. It’s a small step for mankind and a giant step for a founder’s personal development with the potential of eventually being an asset for humanity. Even though we, the founders, feel otherwise.
This feeling of inventing the next big thing and the fire you carry inside you, just waiting to be unleashed, are the things that make entrepreneurship so fascinating for me.
That’s what fascinated me since I was a child. My parents founded their first business when they were still students. Me and my brother had (and have) the invaluable opportunity to see our parents building and running a business.
The fun parts, the hard parts and the painful parts. And the parts that nobody who’s pursuing a regular employment will ever experience this way: The rewarding feeling of winning a new client, working from every corner of our beautiful planet and helping people and businesses succeed.
Foundation.
2021: I was 18 years old. And I felt ready to found my startup. So I did it.
I learned software engineering with JavaScript when I was 14, so I wanted to build a digital business which does its thing, even when I’m not working on it. Since I always was fascinated by our visits of entrepreneurship conferences where we could listen to brilliant entrepreneurs who achieved their personal goals, I wanted my app to be about personal development. I wanted to bring the feeling you have when you are at one of those conferences where you hear something that makes you change the way you look at the world, to an app.
Besides the fact that I founded a bit early (September 2021) and underestimated the time it takes to build such an app and the company behind it, I’m more than happy that I took this step.
I’ve learned so many things just by founding a company, coding apps, architecting a brand from scratch and managing the absence of revenue due to an unfinished product. This experience is what got me ready for building a healthy foundation for a healthy business.
Why this blog?
Even though I’m not there yet, I feel like I’ve experienced and achieved some pretty interesting things that I want to share with other founders.
Besides building my own startup, I’ve joined my parents’ business, an ad agency focussing on digital products and experiences. Together with my dad, we founded our new parent company, 4Dnet.work, which bundles our diverse set of services, projects, apps and brands (which is not an easy task).
And I’ve built a variety of different big and small apps and software products for clients which empowered me to sharpen my problem solving skills and helped me to build my own app with the highest coding standards and the most modern technologies.
This way, I have some pretty interesting perspectives to share. I’m not just a startup founder, I also know what it’s like to be part of a family business, working with (difficult) clients, building a SaaS product and so much more.
And I love to challenge the way I think about business and society by imagining new ideas, concepts and perspectives.
My blog is the right place for all of that. Welcome aboard!
