Only one said "LUCK" !

I was a noob once.

7 years ago, I was looking for a working student opportunity and I met my ex-bosses.

After they interviewed me and like an old-fashioned ninety kid, I went to the office with a suit and my own laptop.

But there were no office, just two typical hipsters in an apartment. They had a board and a couch and they started explaining what they wanted to do.

That’s when I knew that my bosses were not techie guys, in fact at that time they did not even know what’s the difference between Frontend and Backend.

Three years later, a lot of ups and downs and a team of 15 people, they sold the startup. What a ride !

Since a year, I am trying to build a Saas on my own but it seems like every idea I come up with land on the Failed-Ideas-Basket. I am failing instantly.

With my ex-bosses, I was able to contribute to nearly everything:

- The traffic

- The Presale

- The tech-side

- The Marketing

- The Sales part

- The onboarding

Just not the idea .. they figured that out by themselves, way before I came into the picture.

Long story short, in collaboration with two German Accelerators, I interviewed nearly 45 successful founders (which I will post here in the next days).

Of course I had to ask how they came up with such ideas and all the responses were nearly similar : either a technical plan, a predefined script that they followed or some magical iterations of reaching an audience and filtering the market.

I did the same thing too .. but it didn't work.

So how did my ex-bosses find their idea ?

I had to ask !

They were the only ones to respond with : "Luck".

Yes, "Luck".

No validation or whatsoever, they just started and it worked.

A lot of founders try to make it seem like every little tiny step they did, was a part of a well thought-out-plan and every decision was a very carefully calculated one.Most of the time they make it seem like they were following some magical script, where the only thing they had to do was to execute its steps correctly.

In reality, you can’t consciously know what you are doing unless you’re done doing it.

What I mean by this, is that you can’t really know what plan you followed until you reach the end which in our case is a successful Startup.

So after you reach success, you reverse-engineer what brought you there and it sounds like a plan you was following all along when in fact, some of the outcome of your decisions was just luck.

Now, I am not trying to trash hard work. I truly believe that you can't achieve anything without a good hustle. In my three startup years, we worked really hard, were very data-driven and we didn't rely on anything else.

However, the only thing I am saying here is that sometimes you just need luck..