A year and a half ago, I left Raya to start a new business with Yousef Osman and Chris Miller.
I have had already joined few startups at different stages but OverC Studios was the first time I start from scratch.
I made a lot of mistakes, learnt a lot of lessons. Most of these lessons are already mentioned in the great book “The Lean Startup” by Eric Reis. I highly recommend the book for everyone working for a startup, not just founder.
Few lessons I learnt:
1. Be aggressive:
Approach your ideas using the most straightforward way. Fail fast or succeed fast.
2. Ship before you’re ready:
Another very common mistake was trying to ship something that we are not ashamed of. Lesson learnt: if you are not ashamed of your product then you probably haven’t built anything.
3. Recruit the right team:
One of the few things we did right was hiring the right team. For a startup in this early stage, we needed a team that can pivot fast, learn a lot and build things that we weren’t sure how their final status would be.
4. Identity:
I can’t emphasize on the importance of your company identity. Don’t waste your time trying to be everything for everyone. We wasted a lot of time trying to get services and build products and that time was very dear.
It has been a great journey and I truly enjoyed every day of it. Goodbye OverC Studios.