How did I end up here
How I got into starting multiple companies
👋 Hi, I’m Iron from Simple Analytics, and welcome to my newsletter, The Road to 1 Million ARR. Sign up for weekly insights, growth strategies, and playbooks on how we are growing our business to 1 Million ARR. Fully transparent.
I was going to write “I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs”, but when I think about it, I do.
My grandparents on mom’s side were butchers. My uncle took over and turned their business into a large catering company. On my dad’s side they owned shoe shops. So kind of entrepreneurial family. However, my mom and dad weren’t directly. So I didn’t see it up close or feel pushed to be entrepreneurial.
The most celebrated man in our family worked for Deloitte. I was taught that working for a big company is the way to go. Climb the ladder. Have a cushioned job with great “career prospects.” And until I graduated university, I would not have wanted otherwise.
This can’t be it.
So where did I go wrong?
When I think about it, I’ve always felt an urge to explore opportunities that could make money.
The funniest example is that I rented out my student room in Maastricht on AirBnB for $150/night when Andre Rieu was performing. A 25m2 room and a shared bathroom. I stayed at my girlfriend’s place, and she helped with cleaning, towels and making the room nicer. We made around $1500 and funded our holiday.
The real realization came after I graduated. I was ready to become a finance bro (after finishing my Finance master’s) and started my internship in August 2018. I moved to Utrecht to work for a finance consultancy. All suited up every morning to do the most boring work ever, rotting my days away between excel and powerpoint.
My co-workers were nice, but the work was soul-destroying. I told myself “This can’t be it”. I finished the internship, declined the job, and moved back to my parents’ Maastricht to do some soul searching.
Getting started
Back home, I started reading about startups and tech. It sounded like a more interesting space to be in. Move fast, break things. I read TechCrunch, watched “The Social Network” about Zuck’s rise. I was hooked.
This was early 2019.
I just finished my internship. Now I decided I wanted to go into tech. I read about a guy building the number one gig-marketplace in The Netherlands and was also training for an IRONMAN. Since I did an IRONMAN the year before (shout out to me), this seemed like the guy to contact.
I messaged him on LinkedIn, we chatted and he offered me an internship for his new venture. He was leaving the gig-marketplace business he founded and launching a new company, and wanted me involved.
Man I thought this was crazy. This mega successful guy is starting a new business and wants me to get involved. Lets fucking go!!!
The new business had a noble mission: Providing opportunities for African software engineers at top European tech companies. We succeeded initially, relocating multiple African software engineers to The Netherlands and Germany. However, it wasn’t enough, and the company eventually died.
No happy ending, but I’m grateful for that opportunity because it gave me the confidence to start something on my own: Fiks
My first business
I started Fiks with my two best friends. We didn’t really see a problem to solve, we just wanted to start a business. Fiks could have been anything. Since we just graduated and finished our internships, we decided to create a marketplace for internships (this sounds so incredibly stupid when I read it haha).
There were three of us, but no one was technical. Since I was the least technical, I focused on sales while the others learned coding and product design on the fly.
There was literally no need for our product, but we brute-forced it to 100K/year in revenue. We ran cold outreach at a massive scale. I think we sent an email to probably every HR manager in a company with over 20 employees in The Netherlands.
It was hard work. There was no product-market fit. We worked relentlessly to force it.
In the first year, we didn’t make any revenue since we decided to give away the product for free for the first 6 months, hoping companies would pay after (geniuses that we were). Obviously this didn’t happen.
A $30K convertible loan kept us afloat (I have no idea why they gave it to us).
In the second year, we made 50K and paid ourselves $1500/month. In the third year, we reached 100K in yearly revenue, but could only raise our salary to $2000/month. We were working so hard, until eventually I caved.
I decided to leave Fiks in 2022. (The company still exists and doing well without me!)
Timeline:
- 2018: Bullshit finance internship
- 2019: Startup internship
- 2020: Year 1 fulltime Fiks
- 2021: Year 2 fulltime Fiks
- 2022: Year 3 fulltime Fiks - I broke down.
What’s next?
I didn’t really have a meltdown or a specific moment that made me decide to quit my business. It was more like a burn-out kinda thing. I was working so hard and the business wasn’t progressing. Do things that don’t work long enough and eventually you’ll crack (or at least I did).
I think in year 2, I already felt this. After I quit, I didn’t really take time off; I actually started looking for something else immediately. Not a new business per se, but I wanted to meet new people (I just moved to Amsterdam) and see what’s up.
I started going to meetups and here I met Adriaan from Simple Analytics
This guy was earning 10K/month from a really slick product he built himself, alone, from scratch without money. Man, that felt like living the dream. But since he was a lone engineer, there was less focus on growth.
A few weeks after we met, I called him and said: “My G, I think you need a marketing partner. What do you think?”
This is how I got involved with Simple Analytics and became a “late” co-founder/owner.
I’ll write another piece on the details that went into this partnership. For example, I worked for free for 3 months (one day a week) to show Adriaan I was worth partnering with. You gotta put some skin in the game.
There’s more.
After shifting from Fiks to Simple Analytics, I regained my energy. This venture didn’t feel like pushing a boulder uphill. I was picking low-hanging fruit and instantly we saw the company moving forward.
After a year, we moved into our office in Amsterdam. There was space for 8, but since it was just us two, I asked other “Indiehackers” (aka ultra smart people building cool shit) if they wanted to join. Basically turning it into Indiehackers Amsterdam HQ, which later evolved into a whole community of Internet Friends.
The current office dreamteam looks like this:
- Iron & Adriaan (Simple Analytics)
- Dries (UniHosted)
- Mike (Minimum Studio)
- Rosco (Revoke)
- Pieter (PWC….) → Yeah we need to kick him out
- Kent (Ballard Group)
- David (TattooAI)
- Daniel (Ghost + Nomadlist server guy)
I enjoy working with engineers who are 10x smarter than me. It feels like everything is possible. Every idea, every feature, there are no limits.
Imagine working with magicians who somehow need you as well, because to them marketing and growth is magic (or just boring).
This setup (Engineer with vision + me for marketing) felt like a formula for success, so when Dries joined our office, I naturally saw another opportunity.
Dries was one of those magicians looking for an office, and found us on Twitter. He was working for a development agency at time, but also had a side-project. On the side, he was building software to “host UniFi Controllers in the cloud” (wtf? haha).
Without fully understanding it, I saw its potential as a real business. So I asked Dries if he wanted to partner with me and Adriaan to turn this project into a business.
Fast forward, we launched UniHosted, Dries quit his job and the company is doing really well and growing.
What’s next?
No idea to be honest, but I’m pretty happy where I am right now. I have two incredible business partners in Dries and Adriaan (three to be honest, since I’m still close with my first partner, Niels from Fiks).
Simple Analytics is currently hovering around 40k/month and UniHosted around 9k/month while growing fast.
I’m quite certain there will be more businesses down the line. I like this approach of multiple partnerships and businesses. It’s a balance of focus, but I get more energy from this setup than going fully into one. (Yes, against all conventional wisdom, I know).
Maybe this will change in the future. Who knows? But for now I’m good. I’m here.
Life is good ✌️✌️
Cheers,
Iron