Adapted from Chapter 2 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns. I had just quit my job as a financial advisor in Poland and had no plan at all.
Several days after I rang the company and told them I was leaving, I found out how strange life is without morning phone calls and targets from above that I then passed on below. Waking up at 10 am, breakfast, coffee and … that was it. Leaving felt like an admission of failure. Floundering in stagnation was even harder.
The almost-miner
I hung around the city, if you can call the Upper Silesian Industrial District a city. When a bus pulls up to a stop, the back doors are still in Chorzów while the front doors are already in Katowice. I drove and walked around and went people-watching, especially the older people. You could see the enormity of the hard work they had done in life, and at a certain moment I realized that I knew nothing about such work. I had only driven around in a sports car and encouraged people to transfer money from one bank account to another. Every second man on those streets had spent half his life digging the coal that gave all of us electricity and heating. I had been selling dreams.
The idea grew in me that real work was this kind of work. Hardship, toil and dirt, and coming home with the feeling that you had done something worthwhile. I would have qualified as a miner, if I hadn’t seen a certain guy at a coffee shop first.
He was probably the first hipster in Poland, at a time when silk scarves and slicked-down moustaches were not even fashionable in Warsaw. He was drinking a soya latte from a paper cup and tapping away at a computer with a shiny apple on the back. Apart from the two of us, there wasn’t a living soul in the café.
“Do many IT guys work in this city?” I joked.
He looked me up and down: well-dressed man, expensive watch. “I do,” he said.
“And you make a living from something like that? Tapping at a keyboard, I mean.”
He sighed. “I build start-ups, man. You can make millions out of it.”
He had used the magic words. I forgot about being a miner and went straight home.
Start-up fever
On the way I opened so many pages on my phone that it jammed. At home, with a headache, I turned on the television and there was a report about Nasza Klasa (“Our Class”), a Polish clone of Facebook. When they said how much the portal was worth, I nearly fell over. Then they moved on to start-ups as a global trend, with a café in California full of geeks on MacBooks, each with a soya latte, each earning millions.
I thought: if these dweebs can do that, I’ll show them that so can I.
In one minute I decided I would be just like them. At the beginning. Later I would overtake them, lap them and then buy them out. I got up and ran to get a soya latte. And a MacBook.
Within two weeks I was an expert on start-ups, at least in theory. I downloaded everything on the subject: first in Polish, then in English, later with Google Translate. I had caught start-up fever, just like the gold fever that broke out in the Klondike at the end of the 19th century. And whenever I had a great idea, it turned out that someone had beaten me to it. I had discovered the subject several years too late. On the other hand, it was exactly the moment when the world was learning to love start-ups, so finding investors seemed easy. You only needed an idea. That’s how it looked to me.
A portal for singletons
At a speed-dating evening I met Kasia, who had organized it and who ran Halves of the Orange, the first company in Poland focused on making sure singles had fun. It worked strictly offline, as an exclusive club. Members paid a monthly fee and left almost no trace on the net. I decided to put on my superhero costume and rush to the aid of these poor singletons deprived of internet games.
It all began with a big gimmick: I introduced myself as an experienced professional who had already had some success. She believed it, because I can be very convincing when I want to be.
“Listen, Kasia,” I pontificated, “there are five million singletons in Poland. Five million people who may want to use our portal. Do you know how much money that is? We won’t be a dating website. We’ll be a portal for singletons. We’ll employ the best journalists and fill the service with content for them. It’s a great idea. We’ll make millions from advertising. Every investor with the IQ of a grass snake will be running to the ATM to get dough for us.”
Dear readers, if you bought this book to find out how to establish a start-up, you can stop reading this chapter here. But if you want to know how not to establish one, print out what comes next and put it on the desktop of your MacBook.
Every mistake in the book
I made absolutely every mistake a big-headed amateur could make. If I had to outline a hierarchy, there was one Major Mistake that brought down the whole edifice, and a handful of smaller ones that it could no longer carry.
The Major Mistake. I started from a thesis based on my own subjective experience: it seemed logical, so I believed it. Then I tried to confirm it. I paid attention to the facts that agreed with me and dismissed those that did not. That is the recipe for a stupid business idea. I wrote a detailed plan resting on educated guesses, and because it looked perfect I put all the money I had left into it. The fundamental assumption was that Poland was full of singletons suffering from a lack of entertainment tailored to them, so we would gain huge momentum. That was clear. A divine wish.
Servers for a success that never came. When TV stations discussed how Nasza Klasa was crashing under its own popularity, I was sure a second one was coming and spent a load of money on servers.
Building for staff we never hired. I built the portal so that tens of journalists could easily add articles, films and photographs. It was complicated, slow to develop and expensive. Nobody ever used the functionality, because we never got to the stage of employing anybody.
No such thing as “content for singletons”. The most embarrassing one. A great film review can be read by someone who is single or not. Nothing on our portal made a singleton feel especially catered for. Maybe “Ten ways to pick up girls/boys”. And how much of that can you produce? We would have run out of subjects after five articles.
The investor who asked the obvious question. I had recently persuaded a farmer to pay 10,000 zloty a month for ten years into a financial product. How hard could it be to find an investor for 2 million zloty in the next Facebook? I sat opposite an old marketing ace and promised him hundreds of thousands of singletons and advertisers killing each other to be on our site. He replied: “I advertise on Onet and WP [two major Polish news sites], which have traffic you won’t have for about 500 years. I get leads from equally big partners. Why should I put two million into something new, with no certainty I’ll ever get it back?” I was crushed. Me, the best salesman in the world, unable to sell a product for a pittance of 2 million zloty? It must be because I no longer had the Z4.
Parent syndrome. The last nail in the coffin. I was so in love with my project that I could not see its faults. The idea was perfect; only the circumstances, the clients, my partners, the market, everything else was wrong. Not me. If the facts contradicted this, too bad for the facts. Every sign that I was wrong, I interpreted as false; every sign that I was right I raised to a key argument. The more it fell apart, the more money I put in to fix it.
When the money ran out, so did Kasia’s patience. I learned something about partnerships: they are a bit like an old married couple. You have ups and downs, and if something goes wrong, friendship is the airbag. Kasia and I were not friends. We had nothing in common, so when the business collapsed we fell into an abyss and tore into each other, and our paths separated.
I left without a red cent. The 100,000 zloty I had put in did come back to me eventually, not as profit but as the price of one of the most important lessons of my life. I only understood that much later. At the time I was still a Great Pretender: I wasn’t poor, I was a rich man with temporary financial issues. I couldn’t even cover the rent on my 100 m² apartment, which I should have given up long before.
The friend I couldn’t help
Then something woke me up. In the Katowice branch of the company where I used to work was a young guy called Szymek. We got on immediately. At the time I suited a lot of people but not many people suited me; there was money, fancy cars and parties. Szymek was the one who never wanted anything from me, even though he had very little himself. I had always thought him too good and too trusting. When someone proposed going into business together, he agreed, putting up the flat he had received from his parents as collateral. The business never took off, and Szymek was wondering how to tell his parents.
That was the only time he asked me for help. And that was the only time I couldn’t give it.
One year earlier I could have helped without batting an eyelid, even though it would have cost me half a million zloty. Now I had to tell him I couldn’t do a thing. He had no other lifeline, and mine was ready to snap. I think that was the moment when everything changed. In the space of one moment I gained humility. I understood that it was time to stop swaggering and take a step back. Maybe two steps.
A few days later, I became a barman.
Together with Szymek I went off to conquer Warsaw. The plan was to find casual work that paid something and left me time for start-ups. Szymek went into car sales, starting at a BMW showroom. He took his past as a diabolically effective lesson, turned out to be a great salesperson, was poached by Audi, and later went on to ever better brands, including Ferrari. Now he manages premium showrooms, has a beautiful wife and great kids, and later saved my ass on many occasions. He is a real friend.
I printed 200 CVs and within days had two jobs: weekdays 5 pm to 1 am in the bar of a Warsaw hotel, weekends at a well-known nightclub. By day I worked on start-ups with Maciej Prostak, an old friend from my financial days and one of the best finance people I have met. He had an idea and an investor, and offered me share options and an office with a bed and bathroom in the city centre, on condition I was up before 9 am and left no trace of myself. We built the first price comparison website for financial products in Poland. He did not make the mistakes I had made one after another.
The hotel job went badly. I was bored, and tips came to 30 zloty on a good day. I had also lost all passion for selling anything: I had a vomit reaction to insurance or mortgages.
I was fired from the hotel for disobedience. I hate being told what to do, especially when it is nonsense. My manager kept saying “I’ve been managing this bar for three years and know better.” One day, over which table to seat guests at, I could not hold back: “Yeah, and I suppose it’s no accident that you haven’t been promoted in three years.” It felt ecstatic. I only forgot that she was my boss and not the other way round.
Now I had more free time, and I needed it, because it was then, for the first time, that the idea came into my head to get into the funeral services business.
What I took from it
- Beware of confirming your own thesis. If you look only for the facts that agree with you, the plan will always look perfect.
- Do not fall in love with your project. When every sign of trouble becomes “someone else’s fault”, you are not building a business, you are raising a child.
- Know why anyone would switch. An investor already buying traffic from the biggest sites has no reason to put money into a newcomer.
- Partners should be friends first. It is the airbag when things go wrong.
This is from Chapter 2, “A MacBook and a Soya Latte”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. The funeral business idea, and what came of it, is the story of the next chapter. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.
Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify
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