How I grew a company to a team of 6 within 6 months, balancing a 9-5 job, a full time schedule at UCLA and only $800 in my bank account

How do you start a company in college when:

- You are 18 years old
- You just moved to a foreign country
- You don't know how to code or design
- Only have $800 in your bank account to design, develop and scale
​​
Here is my journey:

New College, New Country, New Life

The decision to drop everything I had back home to move half way across the world was fueled by one motivation: growth.

I knew UCLA would push me far out of my comfort zone and had all the opportunities I'd ever dreamed of to grow. With that ambition:
- I averaged 2-3 business workshops/ talks/ seminars a day
- Sat in Anderson MBA school's classes
- Began reaching out to, and meeting with the most driven business people I could find at UCLA and in LA

And in the process I came back to my dorm at around 12am everyday, did my assignments till 2-4 before passing out in bed.

Hit the drawing board

I had come to UCLA knowing I wanted to prove myself in the world of business and what better way to do that than to start your own company. Easy Peasy...
Not really: 
I began working hard on Flow day in day out:
- Surveyed 500+ students going to Westwood on Saturday nights
- Got into a 10 week long startup accelerator
- Built pitch decks, business plans, and validated the idea
- Sourced & pitched to 25+ businesses in Westwood & Hollywood 
BUT:
- As an international student, I struggled setting up the legal frameworks to get the company started and I could not afford an attorney to figure it out. As I tried to figure out workarounds, the feasibility of launching this project in the US seemed highly unlikely with my resources. 

A much needed pivot

By January, the legal processes were taking too long, and despite my early signs of success, I could not see it materialize due to the challenges. I saw a great market for Flow in Malta and I figured that I would not have any of the legal hurdles that way. I could go back home in the summer and bring this idea to life. 
BUT, I was still facing a lot of struggles.
​I was:
- Dropping a company that I had invested hours of my time
- Starting another tech venture, despite having failed to find a tech co-founder for months
- Was working on a company in the US to launch in a country half way across the world 
- I had no money, no team members and 5 months to make it happen

Market Research & Night Job

I was operating out of LA but my market was in Malta, 9 timezones behind. So I began reaching out to all my friends, networks and family trying to set up calls ranging from 12-5 am.
-I called 50+ party goers, 20+ bartenders and send out quantitative surveys covering 500+ partiers. 
- Built flowcharts to explain my self to developers
​- Mystery shopped by calling and emailing 15+ businesses, similar competitors, and service providers successfully operating in the industry
- Sourced potential customers and reached out to 20+ bar owners

Given, I was already working late at night and really needed capital to launch the company, I got a job working as an Access Monitor at UCLA.
Due to the low activity past 12am, I could work on Flow, and invest my salary back into Flow.
GREAT!

Slow Technical Progress

After having received the market validation, I needed to find someone with a shared vision, who could help lead the technical development of the project.
So I began:
- Going to tech clubs on campus
- Reaching-out to online tech communities
- Cold messaging people to meet
- Going into tech Career events
- Making announcements in front of computer science classes.
 Despite these efforts I was struggling to find anyone interested. I needed to get development started given the 5 month idea to market timeline. 
SO decided to invest my earnings from my night job towards outsourcing the development.

​Ideation -> Execution

​​All the market research gave me the validation that I needed to confirm the market for Flow in Malta. I was now set and ready to go:
​
- I iterated the business model according to my findings from the market research and fine tune it to the Maltese market
- I needed to have a more concrete way to represent the idea to developers. So, I began taking graphic design courses on 2x speed and educate myself on UI/UX
- I designed the wireframes for the app to supplement the flow charts and built a mock up website on the domain: www.drinksflow.com

Trip to Malta

For Spring break, I flew back to Malta. I strategically crammed all meetings with club owners, pitches to investors and company set-up transactions to the 2 weeks I was there. 
Before I had brought on any team members, had raised any money, or had a single line of code written,

​I had already:
- Validated the idea with rigorous market research,
- Had designed most of the UI/UX for the app 
- Had 3 Investors interested 
- Was signing on contracts with my first potential customers

The Dream Team

While in Malta, I also began looking for team mates. After all, the team was half the battle in a start-up. First off, reached out to friends and the friends of friends. On March 28th 2017, I met Jeremy Scalpello.  A child coding prodigy and my soon to become best friend was the yin to my yang. I was the dreamer, the extrovert, the "business guy". He was the analytical, technical, and the "tech guy". Later, we brought on board Paul Kathmann. At the time he had experience working at startups and had a great eye for details and an incredible analytical mind. Marcus Laffoucriere joined as the operations manager, bringing incredible energy, work ethic and motivation to the team. With time, we grew the team and so did our culture grow strongly. 

We competed, and became the runner up for a startup competition called the Million Dollar Idea. We began implementing OKRs and project management techniques to coordinate everyones weekly tasks and despite living in different timezones, made it all work. 

Cash is KING

When figuring out the financial model, the biggest restriction that I was facing was the limited cashflow and resources. When reaching out to payment gateways, I faced a lot of rejection with the likes of BrainTree, Adyen and PayPal having rigorous vetting processes and not wanting to get into the nightclub industry. (Wasted so much time going through their sales funnels)
Other alternatives had fixed pricing models charging 3% & 30 cents per transaction. Incurring a 30c cost on transactions every transactions costing $3 was not feasible and we started ideating features such as having tabs that would get closed all at once. (10% VC per transaction, ARE YOU KIDDING!).

After a lot of phone-calls, negotiations, and financial modeling, we ended up signing a deal with a payment provider from England with higher % transaction costs but without a fixed model.
Flow now had  a scalable financial infrastructure that leveraged the B2B B2C marketplace nature of our business model and hence allowed us to spread costs across multiple channels and have a very low burn rate: also called innovating in zeros.

Automate, Eliminate, Scale

When it came to marketing, taking a holistic approach that included both digital and physical marketing was vital.
For digital, understanding our target market was crucial and all the market research carreid out was really paying off in helping us understand who to target. With regards to content and framing of the business model, Memes were a highly valuable method to regularly check in with our followers, share relatable content and leverage the viral nature of memes to accelerate our organic growth.  I highly believe in the importance of automations and prioritized the implementation of systems and automations in place where possible. In that light we implemented various scripts and social media buffers that bought us time to focus on other aspects of the business whilst a regular social presence set in place.  

This allowed us to gather hundreds of signups before even launch and once launched, physical marketing props and material was used to lead the in-venue marketing efforts.

Ready, Set, GROW!

After months of blood sweat and tears, Flow finally came to life and my pieces of my growth philosophy were finalized
STRATEGY: Flow had a talented & vibrant team, market research was carried out, financial structures were set, legal processes were finalized & development was under way.
SALES: Positioning statements were clarified, pitch decks were made, sales scripts were crafted and Flow was scheduled to launch in one of Malta's largest night club venue: Bar Native
MARKETING: Automated social networks, was launched on the App stores, had physical props printed and distributed and had an omni-channel marketing strategy in place.