Thread: The Beginning Of An Entrepreneurial Journey

Hey guys

I have been lurking around here for a few months. I recently read a few of the progress thread and was inspired to do this myself, especially by JamesF and JackEdwards.

Found this forum in about May of 2011 when I was looking for information about real estate investing/development and a fastlane thread popped up in Google. I quickly got hooked by the forums and bought the Kindle book, but to be honest I havent completed it, even now, a few months after I bought it. This was mainly because I already had a good understanding of what MJ writes about, because I was raised with this mindset. My father is a successful entrepreneur who sold his software company shortly before the dotcom bust and now mainly operates an online marketing service business with a few employees, which is one of the market leaders in the national market. Will come to that later in more detail. Sure a service business aint exactly fastlane in most cases, but he has various sources of passive income from investments and runs his current company with little time put in, so this is where I got the mindset from.

Anyways, I will finish the book over the next few weeks in the evenings as a relaxation from preparing for my university exams which just started and end in mid-february, because I am very sure there are a lot of great learnings for me to soak up.

My background:

I am 21 years old, was born and raised in Germany and moved to Switzerland in autumn of 2010 to study Economics at the university here, which is highly regarded in Europe and especially in the German speaking world, where it is even referred to by some media as the "Harvard of the German speaking world". So one might think I am in a pretty sweet situation - except I dont care about a corporate career anymore .

I came to this university with the goal of becoming an investment banker right after finishing my bachelor degree (3 years). In the summer between finishing school and starting at university I didnt go on vacation, but instead cold called a lot of small investment banking boutiques and eventually scored an interview, drove 300km there the next day, talked for 30min, got the summer internship for 2 months, drove back, moved to the new city with 2 big bags in a carpool drive 3 days later and started on the next day. The experience fostered my interest for banking as I really did a lot of interesting work and got a lot of responsibility even though I didnt have a clue about anything. But I did nice powerpoint presentations and research and got a hang of the financial stuff pretty quick, so the good tasks came flowing to me instead of the other 2 interns with a few semesters at good universities under their belts. At the end the managing director told me they were blown away by my performance and that he thought in the beginning that his colleague was crazy for taking me on for an internship with absolutely no experience. I even got paid the normal intern salary by the way, which was decided after I was 1 week into the internship, instead of working for free, which I offered in the interview (it should be noted that my father of course supports me financially, but despite being financially successful he only gives me a fair minimum amount because he does not want me to get spoiled, which I think is great because its building my character but at the same time allows me to not worry to much about my living costs. however this changed when I moved to Switzerland where living costs are really high and my monthly budget puts me in the very bottom bracket of the society, partly because of declining value of the Euro against the Swiss Francs. More on this later.)

Next step was moving to Switzerland, some partying in the beginning, attended the first classes but then the university's campus recruiting for finance jobs started (about 3 weeks into the semester), which means that all the big IB's (Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPM, Deutsche, CS, UBS, etc) come to university, do a workshop, some networking and interview candidates for full-time and internship positions. I applied to everything hoping to be able to attend the workshops. I didnt even think about internships. A few days later I was invited by a few of the top banks to attend their private dinners for selected applicants (all the others were students in the master programs) and interviews. I studied interview guides etc like crazy and a week later I had an offer for a 3 month M&A internship with one of the top 5 investment banks for autumn 2011.

It should be noted that I had NO grades from my university at this point, not even an exam written and my school grades were ok, but not really IB material, maybe equivalent to a B (maybe even B-) average in the US (I'm lazy at school and university because I think that most of the stuff is useless bullshit). Grade point average for German students at my university is something like A+. My university places a quota on foreign students of which there are about 1500 applicants each year who have to do an admissions test (where youre grades from school are not counted) which about 7-10% pass. I didnt do the admissions test, but instead did the GRE which some of you might know. Its a standardized test, mainly for master study admissions. It was offered as an alternative form of admission if you passed with a high score, which I did. So this is how I got into an "elite" university despite being a lazy bum at school.

From this point on I didnt attend classes anymore (in fact I only attented them in the first week and never again after that) and concentrated all my time on IB stuff. I quickly became an officer in the banking society, organized events, etc. I also attended a spring week held by one of the major IBs in London where I lived for one week in a great appartment which they payed for and was suddenly surround by some of the smartest students in Europe (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE).

It was all great times, but then suddenly my interest in IB faded, partly because I saw all the tired and unhappy bankers at the event in London. So I researched other fields in the finance realm and came across private equity and eventually real estate private equity which caught my interest because I always liked to look at great buildings, skycrapers and somehow had this in my blood as my grandfather is a highly regarded architect in Germany (now retired), so I had a connection to this world as well.

While researching this I came across this forum and read about the entrepreneurial routes in real estate which fascinated me. So I decided to find myself an real estate internship over the summer to quickly learn a few things. Eventually I got a position with one of the BIG international development firms. Somehow I convinced the national managing director to take me on.

In the mean time I started to look for possible sources of income to save money for my own start in real estate investing and quickly decided to do a web business, because thats an area that I know well. I had my first computer when I was about 8 and started webdesign when I was 10 or 11, building anime/manga fansites, sport sites etc. Nothing big but I kept doing this stuff for all those years. When I was 15 or 16 I started working for my dad in his online marketing firm and did some webdesign stuff for them. About 2 years later I learned the online marketing stuff and managed some of their smaller accounts after school and did some more webdesign. So I have really solid skills in webdesign, some development, SEM, SEO, social media etc.

During this time my father told me that he had a few great domains (5 letter keyword domains, probably worth high 6-digits for domain alone) that could be developed but I didnt take an interest at this time because I was concentrating on pissing my teachers of and getting drunk, so no room for a serious business.

But when I was searching for income streams last summer I remembered this and put up a concept for one of those domains. I asked my dad if I could do this and he said sure. So I worked on a concept, prototype etc for some weeks and loved it. I loved it so much that I actually decided to do concentrate on this and not real estate for a longer period of time. So I canceled the RE internship and got an internship within a brand new startup backed by one of the most prominent startup-incubators in Germany. I figured that I would do this internship for 2 months to learn how to build a successful startup, than do the investment banking internship to drum up some money (would have paid me 2000 euro a month) and then do my startup fulltime after that.

So I started the startup internship in the summer of 2011 but wasnt happy. It was slow, people were not as high quality as I thought, many bad decisions (actually the CEO got fired just a few days ago because of the problems I pointed out at the end of my first week there) and I was working on my own project most of the time, even during work time, so I decided to quit after a few weeks to do it fulltime.

I even decided, after long consideration, to cancel the internship at the investment bank to do it fulltime. The people at my university who looked up to me for beeing so successful with the banking stuff at my age were in shock. But I thought it was the right thing to do and still think so.

To cut this long story short: I traveled to every startup event across the country and beyond, presented my startup to big audiences, build a great team, had a great business plan etc, but couldnt start without an investment because Im not a programmer and dont want to be and I couldnt find anybody to code for equity. So I approached investors, had a few promising meetings but in the end all turned me down. So I sat there defeated and without money.

I decided to withdraw my plan to drop out of university to do the startup fulltime and moved back to Switzerland to write my exams and make a fresh start after I finished them. And this is were I am now.

I'm currently in the middle of my exams which end in the middle of February. After that I will start a (slowlane) business to allow me to save money for either resume work on my startup (unlikely) or continue with my initial plan of getting into real estate (likely). I also have some debt, mainly a bank loan and some credit card debt I had to take on to survive when the Euro declined heavily against the Swiss Franc.

All in all, my net worth as of today is about -7000 CHF. 8600 debt and about 1600 cash money on my bank account.

So what is my plan?

I want to start a webdesign business. I know competition is really high, but I found my niche and am pretty sure it will be successful.

Webdesign prices here in Switzerland range around 4000-5000 CHF for a shitty crap piece of an ugly site with basically no functionality, using mostly really basic proprietary CMS of the agencies. And people buy this at those prices! I couldnt believe it. Keep in mind that the price level here in Switzerland is pretty high, but nonetheless, I think the prices are sick for what they are offering.

So there lies my main advantage: pricing. I'm a student, my living costs are mostly covered, I have debt but its not that urgent to pay off. So I will drastically undercut their prices. But at the same time I will provide very high quality (read: gorgeous design, no basic stuff)

I'm currenty thinking about 2 pricing models, basic and premium, for around 800 and 1800 chf. difference between packages will mainly be the quality of the design and some included services. In addition to that I will charge a monthly service fee for site hosting, customer service, SEO, SEM, etc. which will range between 100 and 200 chf as a way of starting to get some (semi-)passive income.

I will rent a virtual server to get started which I can easily upgrade to more powerful (dedicated) ones. I have yet to see how many clients I can put on a single server but I think I will be pretty easy to place a lot of them on one, because I will mainly target small business that dont have a lot of traffic and then move the ones with a lot of traffic to more powerful servers. Creating a new website for a client will be done in 2-3 hours if they have the content available from an old site, but even with the extra work of creating content for the clients this still has a great profit margin and I wont spend a lot of time on this, because I'm outsourcing stuff like writing, photography, complicated graphics etc.

I will then upsell clients on stuff like article writing for their blogs, social media marketing, SEO, SEM, which I will mainly outsource.

So much for my business concept right now. As my main intention with this thread is to use it as a progress thread/diary I will share more details on what I do and how I'm doing it with my progress posts as soon as I'm getting started after my exams in the middle of February.

I also want to use this thread to share my goals/roadmap for the next few months with you and see if I can accomplish them, in order of time horizon to achieve:

• Get a parttime job where I get paid in CHF. This is nearly done. Had an interview last week for a position with my universities Alumni organization as an IT assistant. It will pay 25 chf per hour, 12 hours a week so would add 1200chf to my monthly budget and therefore DOUBLE IT. I really hope this works out, think I made a great impression at the interview but havent heard back yet.
• Work out. Daily. I'm in bad shape right now, not really fat but a little bit. Main problem is my back is hurting so I want to do exercise to get this right and of course to get into shape and feel better. I did an hour of indoor rowing each day in december but then got ill and couldnt continue, but want to pick it back up now. Also want to do weight training for my back mainly and attend kickboxing lessons at my university 1-2 times a week. I will start this immediately as it will help to balance my live during exams, but at a lower volume due to time constraints.
• I will move to a new apartment after my exams are finished. I'm currently living together with my girlfriend in a 1br and its working out ok, but I need my own space for starting the business, mainly because I will need to work quick and effective. I looked at a nice 1br yesterday and today again and will sent my application for it tomorrow. Its not cheap but freshly renovated and right next to a direct bus station to university (10min ride) and a supermarket, which will save me a lot of time and easily make up for the higher rent.
• Get educated on real estate stuff. I really want this to be my next step after I made some money with my webdesign business to afford it. There will be a big real estate convention in my town in March which is free to attend and I will be there all 3 full days sucking up everything I can and do some initial networking. Furthermore I am thinking about attenting an "introduction into real estate" course at a local "professional-college" with a great reputation. Will be 2 days in May and cost me 240chf, but probably worth it. Will think about it. Further I will of course use my university's library to read up on stuff.
• Be debt free until my birthday in May.
• Buy a cheap used car until summer. To be more flexible, save time when visiting clients, looking at real estate, take my gf to the lake and go sailing sometimes.
• Start to automate my webdesign business to be able to focus on making more money with upsell products and eventually shifting my focus to real estate.
• Holiday. I want to go on vacation. I cant even remember when my last vacation was and I have never done a beach vacation (well I have but it was when I was about 6 or 7). My GF hasnt either. So I want to earn enough with my business to afford a really nice vacation just before Christmas 2012 and even cover some of or all of my GFs part. 2 weeks all inclusive in the Dominican Republic is the goal
• Make enough money and automate webdesign business enough to be able to focus on real estate in 2013. I will graduate end of 2013 or beginning of 2014 and I want to have a few real estate deals under by belt by then.
• Attend 2013 B&P to meet the people that inspired me so much in real life. Maybe extend the trip and take my GF with me to see NYC or other great parts of the US (I have never been overseas, never out of Europe)

Wow. This has become a rather long post. I hope some of you will make it through though and am looking forward to your comments. Like I said I'm in the middle of exams right now so I will not write so much updates in the next 3 weeks, only important stuff, but after that I will try to document the most important steps in my journey at least once a week, hopefully more often than that.

Short Version:

- 21 year old Entrepreneur and student from Switzerland/Germany
- always finding ways to beat the odds (admission at "elite" university, top employers)
- canceled internships at top investments banks and other major players in their respective markets (real estate development, startup backed by major investor/incubator) to pursue entrepreneurial goals while at university
- about 10 years of experience in webdesign (and -development) and online marketing (started very young)
- tried an e-business startup in 2011, but failed because I did not have a programmer that would work for equity only in the beginning and investors turned me down after a few promising meetings
- currently back at university after I ditched my plan to drop out, writing exams and preparing for the start of my new business after they are finished in mid-february
- want to build a webdesign business (I know it is VERY competetive) in Switzerland, where I think I found a niche that I can exploit with my skillset, aggressive pricing and marketing tactics
- use funds from webdesign business to become involved in real estate (long term fastlane goal) and resume work on my 2011 startup (taking more time to bootstrap it instead of looking for investors)

goals for 2012:

- get a part time job at my university which will double my monthly budget for about 12 hours of work each week
- work out more, attend kickboxing lessons
- move to a new 1br apartment (currently living together with my gf in small 1br)
- get educated on real estate (big convention in my town in march, introduction course at local college in may)
- be debt free until birthday in May (current net worth about -7000chf due to high living costs in Switzerland and declining value of Euro against Swiss Franc over the past 1,5 years)
- start to automate webdesign business to focus on RE & other startup, add employees/freelancers till summer
- go on vacation with my gf at the end of the year with profits from webdesign, goal is 2 weeks dominican republic (cant even remember my last vacation, and last vacation on the beach was about 15 years ago)
- make enough money from webdesign to focus on RE in 2013
- attend 2013 B&P to meet the people that inspired me, maybe combine trip with visits to other parts of US (never been out of Europe)

Edit: I cant update my first post for some reason, so if a mod sees this, please add a short note at the top of the first post like "UPDATE: See second post for a shorter version." Maybe this will encourage a few replies . Thank you!

Some good news today, got approved for the 1br apartment and will move in on first of march. pretty happy about that! Also talked to my university's alumni organization about a decision on my application. The assistant didnt know and the guy responsible wasnt reachable as he had some outside meetings, but I should get the decision tomorrow and hopefully it will be positive.

Business progress:
- Set up domains for the business. Registered my business name , which I will try to build into a brand and also use in my other ventures (XXXWebdesign.com, XXXRealEstate.com, etc), and another supporting name (which is easy to remember because it includes the name of the city. registered 2 different notations)
- Set up Google Apps for the business, including DNS settings for my main domain and all aliases. Connected it to my main gmail account by using the external account feature, forwarding, labels and filters, so I dont need to ever log into the Google Apps account and can do everything from only 1 chrome tab (I know this is also possible with multi-login which I of course also use, but I'm not sure if the chrome desktop notifications work with multi-login).
- Set up a virtual server as hosting environment for my main site. Will use this VServer only for my own site for performance reasons.

Also started to do some work on my site today and finished the basic design and code. Will think about a good sitemap structure tomorrow and look for some photos to go along with my content. Does anybody know a good source for this? istockphoto, gettyimages etc are way to expensive for me. Will let you know if I stumble upon something.

Thanks for your reply, Speed+ for being the first .

You're absolutely right, its quite saturated but that doesnt mean theres no opportunity left. Like I said, I will price way below my competition while offering way higher quality. Also, with my system I will be able to create sites really quick and therefore still have a high profit margin to make it worthwhile. I am confident that I will be able to attract customers with this and did my homework: there is enough opportunity around here for me to attract customers to reach my goal of building some capital. It will definitely not be a lay-back business and I will have to hustle hard, but my goal is not to retire from this, but instead make enough money to fund my other ventures.

I cant disclose my concept here in full, but I am not competing against 1000 amazing companies, because I am targeting a different type of customer and offering a different product. Of course you are right if one takes a view of the broad webdesign space. But I am offering a niche service, its not your a-typical full-service web-agency.

I can price lower and offer more, because my system allows me to do this and still get a sizeable profit.

What are your experiences in the webdesign field?

Of course you might be perfectly right and I am wasting my time with this, but this will only become clear after I did this with full focus for a few weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing you in this thread from time to time to proof you wrong .

As I understand from you post you had this great idea for a startup (on your dad's domain), but you couldn't find investors so you are abandoning it to start a web design business. Since you dad is in the internet industry why not present your idea to him, he could give you a little seed money, and he probably has relationships with coders. If not; go to odesk, elance, freelancify and find someone to cheaply code for you. It doesn't have to cost a fortune to get started.

hey HsrJames, thanks for your feedback, speed+!

I think you got the main point, but I wouldnt say I abandoned the idea, instead I just decided to take a step back and not go the investor route right now. I still think it is a great idea and on top, fulfills all the fastlane criteria.

My dad is already involved. He gave me a lot of feedback on my investor presentation, businessplan etc before I went to the meetings with the investors. Our deal is that he gets a percentage of the to be formed company in exchange for the domain name and will of course be an advisor along the way and probably be on the board of that company. I also asked him for seed money, but he does not want to do this. Reasons are: initially I planned to use outsourced coders in Eastern Europe who where referred to me by my IT advisor/interim CTO (who was and is CTO at very successful startups, very experienced). We changed that to domestic coders (friends of him), because this would be more efficient going forward, because it would ne easier to have direct meetings with them (at least they were based in the same country). As my dad has himself used outsourced coders in the past (and even build an outsourcing company himself in Eastern europe) he was not happy with this and said that it would not work and only burn (his) money. He wants me to bootstrap it (and maybe fund with MY money) and than see where it goes, which, after some time, I also realized to be the best thing I can do.

The problem with my project is, that it is very complicated to code.

Basically the idea is a content aggregation service for everything local. News jobs, classifieds, restaurant recommendations, social media stuff, check ins etc. You get a stream of everything that is happening in your city, your suburb or within a radius around a point on a map and then you are able to filter it according to your interests, so for example you create a stream for football news in your town, or a stream for reviews of asian restaurants within 10miles of your home. Those streams will be partly created automatically on sign-up with the information from your facebook profile (likes, interests, location, check ins, etc). This is part 1.

Part 2 are company profiles. A local business, e.g. a restaurant gets a profile, where everything that is linked to this restaurant is shown, so reviews from different review sites, photos, checkins from all checkin services, news, daily deals etc. Users are able to follow companies and get everything related to them easily accessible in a "favorites" stream or similar.

Monetization options are wide. Think ads, revenue shares with partner sites (e.g. daily deals, reservation services, lead generation for local businesses) and premium versions of the company profiles with more functionality, the ability to place ads on the non-premium profiles of nearby competitors and without ads from nearby competition.

To achieve this the site has to connect to a wide range of APIs (Google maps, Google places, yelp, facebook, twitter, tripadvisor, news feeds, etc etc) and import the information into our own database. This creates a big problem as the data formats from the APIs are not equal and have to be transformed. Many use JSON but still its a pain to get them all to connect. Second problem is database design. We cant use a simple mysql database because of the massive amount of data that is updated every few hours, so we decided to go with MongoDB. Wont get into more specifics here but you get the point. This is a massive backend development effort. Frontend development (either PHP or rails) will be a piece of cake compared to his. We projected cost for backend development alone at around €30'000 (not including all APIs, only the necessary basics to cover every type of content). Frontend development probably €15'000-20'000.

And even if its finished there is a lot of marketing effort to do the get this out to people. SEO wont be enough because of strong competition so I will have to use adwords, facebook ads etc to get enough people on the site to fuel viral growth through invitations etc.

What will really help with this is the domain. Think local.com in Germany, its a huge asset.

What I want to do now is to make some money with webdesign and reinvest it into the company. Instead of offering all content types from the beginning I will go step by step. First news, then events, then reviews, etc. I should be able to bootstrap this after I got a few initial customers with my webdesign business to pay my coders. Webdesign and marketing I can and will do myself, front-/backend development I will need to pay for.

What do you guys think? Looking forward to feedback on the project and the steps I want to take with this. If somebody is experienced in the types of technology I mentioned above I would love to have a chat with you.

Great news today, finally got a positive response from the application for the job with my university's alumni organization . So I will have a lot more flexibility with my monthly budget in exchange for a relatively small amount of my time. Tasks include helping with building a new online career platform for students and documentation, conception of new online services, IT support for the regular staff etc, and hopefully I will be able to make a few good contacts through this role. Certainly not fastlane but at least I will give me some additional income to save and use for my fastlane efforts .

Caught myself getting sidetracked a bit today while reading a few threads in the blackhatworld forum, thinking about setting up a few niche websites. But I got back on track pretty quick and I'm determined to give my webdesign business a shot of at least one month's fulltime work and will reassess my progress with it at the end of March. More updates to come and looking forward for more feedback to my thread . Reading TMF right now.

a quick update: I just started the process for registering a UK Ltd. for my company. will have a branch office in Switzerland. this saves me a lot of money compared to registering a Swiss limited liability company ("GmbH") and has the same benefits.

Hey theag, will be interesting to see your webdesign idea come into fruition. Keep us posted on the progress. I've subscribed to the thread.

Any updates? Did you come closer to your goals yet?