Belgian entrepreneurs, what’s wrong with you?
It’s now been a month since we launched The Family in Belgium 🇧🇪 and two things make us super excited: 1/ Belgians are so cool; 2/ we believe there is a big pool of talented entrepreneurs. This being said, we’ve already seen some serious culture problems — which means there’s a lot of toxicity to clean up around here.
Why do you spend so much time on subsidies?💵
Most of the startups we’ve met have gone after public money and are now complaining because they have to justify every penny they spend. What did you expect? You’re spending the people’s money, dude 🤷♂️
There are 3 problems when you apply for a subsidy:
1/ The timing is usually wrong (if any). Entrepreneurs often apply for a subsidy before they’ve even really started their project;
2/ It’s incredibly time-consuming. You would be better off working on your business;
3/ As previously said, you will have to justify every penny you spend.
Conclusion: Forget it!
Why does your cap table look like THAT?!
We’ve met too many entrepreneurs who are proud to say their CTO’s working full-time for only 1% of the company. Meanwhile, 25% is owned by some random investor (or incubator/accelerator) who gave them €25k because they put together a slide deck and a 5-year business model spreadsheet that’s a complete fantasy.
Everyone’s pretty much in agreement that you launch a startup because you really believe it will be a billion dollar company. Knowing that, how could you give up so much equity for so little money?
At The Family, it’s also true that we (most of the time) like startups where the cap table is equally split between co-founders. First, because it aligns the interests of everyone for the long-term, and second, because it shows that all of you are essential to the project.
Keep your cap table clean, by Oussama Ammar 👉 Right here
Why the hell did you outsource your tech to agencies?
We’ve met startups that are a 100% tech-based product, but without any CTO. And the 2 common arguments we hear from CEOs are either that they “got a good deal” with an agency that worked on the code for free in exchange for equity or (even worse) they have no time to code it themselves.
This gives off 2 signals:
1/ You don’t put any value in your technology, since it’s just another outsourced job; therefore, it has no value.
2/ It’s fine to not have a CTO — at the beginning, at least. But why don’t the people on the team learn to do it? Nowadays, you can learn everything quickly and efficiently.
By the way, if you don’t have a CTO to code the first version of your idea, you should ask yourself if it wouldn’t be better to pretend you developed the idea — like Dropbox did with this video — and then raise money to hire the best possible person 🙈
How am I supposed to know if you should quit your job?
First of all, we are not your parents: you do whatever you want. Second of all, if you’re asking yourself this question, it means you’re probably not ready to get out of your comfort zone (and there are many good reasons not to!).
Running a startup is a serious job, not something you do in your spare time. A real, ambitious startup requires you to be focused and 120% committed.
Who cares how much traffic you’ve got?
Your number of downloads or visitors is bullshit; only retention matters. At The Family, we prefer you to have 100 users who cannot live without your product rather than 1000 people that barely use it. Being focused on what matters and not on what satisfies your ego is the only way to grow in a healthy way.
Retention is so important to us that the 2 startups we have selected so far (out of around 100) here in Belgium were then at about 20 customers/users… but those users were absolutely crazy about the startups’ services.
La croissance est importante? Oui, mais la rétention est clé, par Oussama Ammar
Les outils de la rétention, par Côme Courteault
Want to be global? Start with a niche.
Yes, we agree, Belgium is the best country in the world. But when it comes to startups, you go big or you go home (to find another job). A startup by definition has no boundaries and should be thought of that way from the very beginning!
That being said, the best (and only) way to go big is to start locally… with a niche. Two examples that Nicolas Van Rymenant and I know very well:
1/ Menu Next Door
Nicolas’s idea was to become the Airbnb of the food: anyone good at cooking could sell delicious dishes to their neighbors. Nicolas’s ambition was to build an international company, but to do so he started with a niche market: wealthy and young women in some of Brussels’ upper-class neighborhoods. Then, niche by niche he managed to expand and find real growth.
(Menu Next Door closed in Feb 2018 because they weren’t able to create a sustainable, profitable business model. Nicolas is publishing an article about how it all went soon!)
2/ Benjago
Benjago aimed at allowing people to get a driver’s license cheaper by digitizing the process of booking a driving lesson. At the beginning, we had instructors and trainees dispersed all across Belgium. I was excited but satisfying all that demand was costly and very challenging. We started to grow exponentially the day we focused on lower-income people living in a few select cities.
(Benjago had to close in Sept. 2017 for legal reasons -unfair competition towards driving schools. 👉Read about it!)
NB: I specifically gave two examples that ended “badly” to highlight the fact that starting with a niche is necessary, but not in itself sufficient for success. Plus, they’re what really happened to us ;)
NDA, seriously?
“An idea has no value, only the execution matters” is probably the thing we can see most easily in the digital age. Yet we still meet people who are scared to talk about their startup idea 🤦🏽♂️
Don’t worry, we won’t be stopping what we are doing to copy your idea. It’s in your interest to fully disclose your idea so that we can help you as much as we can.
Why are you pitching that much?
So many founders spend time on startup contests thinking that is their job. If you do it to enhance your skills, or because you are a bit too shy, that’s fine. But it’s not your job. Your job is to get your business to grow bigger by selling your product/service to your clients.
(BTW, if you are a bit superstitious, you might have noticed that most startup challenge winners are dead within a year 🍀)
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The underlying idea of all of this is that time is the most valuable asset you have as an entrepreneur. At The Family, we want you to waste it as little as possible. Keep in mind that even Warren Buffet can’t buy it:
With ❤️,
