Factoring fear & funding: What scared these Amsterdam’s entrepreneurs the most during their startup journey

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Halloween is upon us. It is fun, and there is no denying it – trick-or-treating, donning insane costumes, and of course, carving jack-o-lanterns. 

Halloween or All Hallows’ Evening dates back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celts marked October 31st the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the dark and cold winter. It is a season marked by death and suffering. As a result, people dressed up in various costumes to ward off ghosts. 

Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities, parties, and celebrations. Besides all the fun activities and celebrations, Halloween also teaches numerous life lessons, and one among them is ‘Conquering your fears.’

Most of the time, fears are what hold us back from living our lives to the fullest. So how do we pick ourselves up and face those fears and move ahead?

We at Silicon Canals took this Halloween Day as an opportunity and asked a few Amsterdam-based founders to share the scariest moments in their professional journey and what advice they would give young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation.

Here you go:

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Image credits: Marnix Broer

Marnix Broer | StuDocu

What StuDocu does: StuDocu is a student-to-student knowledge exchange platform where students can share knowledge, college notes, and study guides.

What has been the scariest moment in StuDocu’s journey till now?

“For sure, the introduction of our Premium system. StuDocu started off without any business model, we thought that advertisements would eventually bring us the revenues to sustain the team and company.” 

“However, that wasn’t the case. Therefore we came up with our Premium system. We found this to be scary because, firstly, going from a 100 per cent product to (partly) paid is super difficult. What will our users think? Will they understand why we need to do this – in order to keep the website alive?” 

“Secondly, we didn’t know about A/B testing back then, so it was purely on guts. Definitely the scariest minutes of our ‘StuDocu-lives.'”

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“Well, that’s a simple answer. Test, test, test. Never make big decisions, without testing them first.”

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Image credits: Wonderflow

Riccardo Osti, CEO | Wonderflow

What Wonderflow does: Wonderflow helps companies understand what consumers think about their products and services and what improvements will drive the best results

What has been the scariest moment in Wonderflow’s journey till now?

“When we were a small startup, it happened that twice we ended up two weeks away from running out of cash. The first time we were just five, it would have been manageable, but the second time we were already thirteen, and it would have been a more serious issue. It’s a scary situation, but it’s not uncommon even for the most successful companies. In fact, Elon Musk admitted that Tesla was 3 weeks away from being bankrupt, right before getting more funding and seeing its stock price on top of the world.” 

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“I think it’s unavoidable for high-growth ambitious early-stage startups. However, if you do the numbers right, getting early support from a business controller or director of finance, you can start fundraising at the right moment, limiting the risk of running short at the bank.”

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Image credits: Julian van de Steeg

Julian van de Steeg | BridgeFund

What BridgeFund does: BridgeFund, an online business platform that offers fast business credit to SMEs without the intervention of a bank.

What has been the scariest moment in BridgeFund’s journey till now?

“As an online lending marketplace that brings together supply and demand of money for entrepreneurs the whole COVID thing was quite the thriller, especially in the early days.”

“99 per cent of our target group comprises of SME’s who borrow money and they got hit hard during the height of the pandemic. The other 1 per cent of our target group consists of individual funders who supply the money we lend out to the SME’s.”

“My primary worry was that both these groups would panic and switch to one of the common instinctive survival modes: freeze or flee. But boy was I wrong, I realised I underestimated the resilience of the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit. By far most SMEs switched to the third instinctive survival mode: they fought.” 

“Secondly, I worried about our funders getting cold feet. But I was wrong again. In the past couple of years, we already proved to our funders that our business was solid and they trusted us to steer the company through the eye of the storm. And we did just that.”

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“Never underestimate what entrepreneurs are capable of in terms of creativity and boldness. This also applies to young entrepreneurs reading this. The fact you started a business already says a lot about you.” 

“Trust in yourself and your capabilities to find out what to do when times are tough. In my case, I could gather a team of like-minded people: employees with an entrepreneurial spirit.”

Orderchamp
Image credit: Techleap.nl

Joost Brugmans | Orderchamp

What Orderchamp does: Orderchamp is a marketplace that brings independent retailers and brands together to provide wholesale service for local communities.

What has been the scariest moment in Orderchamp’s journey till now?

“Just after raising my Series A in May 2021, we had 40 open vacancies at some point, when we were with about 35 in the team. I was really scared we could not find this talent soon enough, as we are growing so rapidly, and also wasn’t sure how doubling up would affect the culture.” 

“Next to that, our office situation became stressful as it would have been too small when everyone was dying to come back to the office! Luckily we found the people in time (we’re 70 now), accommodated for the space and we are looking for more people – we have another 40 open vacancies!”

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“Build a recruitment force early on! Even if this will cost you something short-term, it will bring back value long term. Don’t be afraid to combine internal and external hiring skills, if you need people, you need them. And people are the most important asset of your company.”

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Image credits: Lieke Pijpers

Lieke Pijpers | The Next Closet

What The Next Closet does: The Next Closet is an online peer-to-peer marketplace in the Netherlands for second hand designer clothes and accessories.

What has been the scariest moment in The Next Closet’s journey till now?

“There was this one moment in summer, in the middle of a heatwave, that a potential investor travelled all the way to Amsterdam to visit us: an important pitch for us. But coincidentally the shutter of our office did not open that day, at least only for about 50cm. As a result, the investor had to belly-slide into our office on his (pretty big) belly. That was quite an ice breaker.” 

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

Use the investor money for a decent new office perhaps?

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Image credits: Marnix Stokvis

Marnix Stokvis | Aquablu

What Aquablu does: Aquablu is on a mission to provide safe and clean drinking water for everyone – without using PET bottles. The company has built a smart purification system for the consumer market, which can guarantee the quality of drinking water.

What has been the scariest moment in Aquablu’s journey till now?

“For our products, we source parts all around the globe. With the sudden shortages in chips and raw materials, I could say our supply chain was facing its own Halloween this pandemic.” 

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“This one was quite inevitable for us, but fortunately, our broad network of suppliers kept us flexible. My advice would be to not bet everything on one horse. Move fast, yet avoid panic buying.”

Wundermart
Image credit: Techleap.nl

Patrick Dekker | Wundermart 

What Wundermart does: Wundermart is a retail-technology company that offers unmanned shop concepts for the hospitality industry. 

What has been the scariest moment in Wundermart’s journey till now?

“I guess this can differ per person at Wundermart, but for me, a scary moment was to find out we were bringing new developments to market that were not properly validated. During the peak of COVID measures, we were trying new things both in product and markets. The problem was, in hindsight, that we hadn’t involved the customer enough in this. As a result, our efforts were not effective and actually slowed us down.” 

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“Always develop a product with the customer in mind. Make them part of the process from the start and create short feedback loops. You learn so much from this and ensure you’re working on the right things.” 

Rise by Techleap - Der van der Have van Brenger
Image credits: Rise by Techleap.nl)

Derk van der Have | Brenger

What Brenger does: Brenger is an innovative logistics platform that connects consumers and businesses with couriers to transport bulky goods. 

What has been the scariest moment in Brenger’s journey till now?

“In the summer of 2019, we switched to an entirely new code structure, which was a scary moment in itself. At one point, a big chunk of the transports on our platform were suddenly not claimed by our drivers. This generated huge operational chaos, lots of transports were unclaimed, despite the fact that we had to fulfil our guaranteed delivery promise.”

“To solve the temporary issue, we hired a peloton of students who we put in rental vans to fulfil these unclaimed transports. This caused sleepless nights and cost us a lot of money.” 

“Fortunately enough, two weeks later, the problem was fixed. It turned out that the main cause of the problem was that no notifications were sent to courier companies. When this started working again, everything went straight back to normal.”

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

“Test, test, test your product always and thoroughly. So many things can go wrong. Even the smallest error can cause havoc in the delivery of your product.”

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Image credits: VanMoof

Ties Carlier | VanMoof 

What Van Moof does: VanMoof develops and designs urban e-bikes to help commuters get from one place to another without breaking a sweat. 

What has been the scariest moment in Van Moof’s journey till now? 

One of the scariest, but most exciting, moments for me at VanMoof has been how we got Casey Neistat, one of the biggest YouTubers, to talk about VanMoof. Instead of sending him a bike, we had him track the bike with our tracking technology. 

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

I would say never avoid a scary moment, starting a business is one big scary Halloween show.

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Image credits: René Janssen

René Janssen | Lepaya

What Lepaya does: Lepaya provides soft skill training that combines both online and offline learning.

What has been the scariest moment in Lepaya’s journey till now?

According to Janssen, having a global pandemic hit you when you’re kind of in the midst of raising a Series A was a really scary situation. Not having enough runway, investors seeming like they might back out, delay in processes and an almost certain deal looking dicey, were some of the things that really scared Janssen during the pandemic.

“In a global economy that’s really uncertain, little money in the bank and a lot of people in your company looking at you for direction, that was the moment when we had a lot of sleepless nights.”

What advice would you give to young fellow entrepreneurs to avoid a similar situation? 

Although Janssen says that no one can prepare for a situation like the global pandemic, there were two things that really helped him. “Firstly, having great relationships with our existing investors. So you can really call them and chat with them and see what are we going to do about this. So maintaining strong board-investor relationships, always keeping them up to date and forging a collaborative way of working really helps in these situations. Especially when things don’t go to plan, whether it’s because of you or irrespective of you.”

“And secondly is to act decisively. “we turned around our business in 48 hours, reached out to all the clients, communicated with all our suppliers, and really had a plan on how we would weather the pandemic.” 

“Being decisive also helped them raise their series A about two or three months later. They were able to turn the COVID crisis into an advantage by tapping into the underlying needs of their clients.”

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