How a Missed Ferry Led to a Successful Startup

In the autumn of 2020 I missed a ferry. I was on my way to a friend's startup to talk through some ideas he was stuck on, the next boat was an hour away, and I didn't feel like waiting. Another friend had a studio nearby and had always told me to drop in whenever I was around, so I went there instead.

I had time for detours that year. I had finished university and been admitted to UdK in Berlin to study sound, and then the pandemic kept me from going. I ended up back home, not sure what came next. I was not considering the usual corporate paths. Applying to a big company never felt like an option for me, even when Berlin fell through. What I did instead was visit friends, look at what they were building, and wait for something I wanted to get my hands into.

The friend with the studio did photo shoots and event production. That day there was something new in the room: a glass board with lights, a camera and a screen. He was very excited about it. It was a prototype of a Lightboard, a setup that makes it easy to record and stream educational content online. They had bought a control unit from the US for it, and nobody could get the thing to work.

He knew my background in engineering and project development, so he asked me to take a look. I spent a while working out how it was supposed to run. Along the way I found a piece of hardware inside that nobody was using at all, and I showed them what they could do with it.

What they really wanted came out after that. They wanted to build the control unit themselves and couldn't figure out how to do it locally.

Fixing that one box wasn't really the issue. Their whole idea depended on an expensive part shipped from the other side of the world, and nobody here understood it well enough to fix it. Every new studio would need another one. After some research I was fairly sure we could build our own unit with only the parts the job actually needed, for a fraction of the cost. We agreed that I would design and build it on commission, and they would take care of the rest.

The timing was good. In 2020 a lot of people suddenly had to make educational content online, quickly and often alone, which is exactly what the board was for. We made our first sale in November 2020. I kept getting pulled into things that had nothing to do with the control unit: refining the board itself, sourcing materials, some of the marketing.

Eventually the other partners got busy with other commitments and stepped away. That left me with several pairs of shoes to fill, and most of them were not my size. I became co-founder and CTO and teamed up with one of the remaining members. He took sales, I took technical development and production. We bootstrapped, which in practice meant every bit of money from the first sales went straight back into the company.

In the first year we made about $100,000, with no investors and no accelerator, mostly through our own network. The trouble started when we had to decide how to grow. I argued for rental. Manufacturing was risky, the product was expensive, and a customer needed a room and a person to run it before the board was any use to them. To me those were all reasons to rent the boards out rather than sell them. My partner wanted to sell. We had no investor behind us, so we went with sales, orders slowed down, and we decided to part ways.

We kept the company running until the systems in stock were sold, so we could get our money back. We're still close friends and still help each other out, and I stayed on the board.

If I had that argument again today, I would push harder.