How I started my ventures with almost 0 capital after getting fired

We all love an underdog story. The kind where you hit rock bottom and then make a great comeback. Honestly, I was never a big fan of those stories — until I lived one myself.

Five years ago, I took a massive hit in my career. It wasn’t just my career that suffered, my personal life, financial situation, and more were all in shambles.

Losing my job three times in one year was devastating. Going broke was horrifying. However, the lessons I learned during this period were invaluable and ultimately pivoted my career for the better.

At my lowest point in my early twenties, with only two months of living expenses in my bank account (money borrowed from friends just to buy food), I decided to take a leap.

After being fired for the third time, I set up DigitSense with zero capital and owning multiple products later down the line.

Here’s how I bootstrapped my ventures from nothing over the past four and a half years.

1. Learn as fast as you can

As a founder, whether or not you have investment backing, you still need to learn how to do things yourself. Management is about understanding what your team is doing and providing them support, not just delegating tasks while being clueless. So, I dove headfirst into learning everything I could about developing software and digital products. Within three months, I had immersed myself in design theory, UX, branding, and product marketing.

If you can’t afford to hire people, you need to become a jack-of-all-trades.

Here’s my go-to resource list:

• Justin Welsh — personal branding
• Neil Patel — digital marketing
• Mind the Product — product management
• Product Hunt — staying ahead of tech products
• Codecademy — coding lessons for dummies like me
• Startup School by Y Combinator — how to get through your first startup milestone
• Figma community — learn UI/UX from real designs

2. Build a strong network

Cold email and LinkedIn outreach to all the startup mentors and entrepreneurs that you aspire to be. Develop a genuine relationship with them is worth way more than investing in another “entrepreneurship degree”.

There are no textbooks for entrepreneurship. All founders learn from each other, and it’s a community of support, learning and growth. Most founders are very willing to share their success and failure stories with you.

Just be thick skinned enough to reach out and learn.

3. Start small and iterate

DigitSense didn’t become a fully-fledged business overnight. I started with small projects, often offering my services at discounted rates or even for free, to build a portfolio and gain experience. Each project was an opportunity to learn and improve.

However, remember the golden rule: “The smaller your company is the more selective you have to be with your clients.” Simple economies of scale. A bad project or a bad client can bring you more loss than gain. Don’t chase revenue, chase profit.

4. Start with services, then products

DigitSense as a services company does not require any capital investment. If you are in the same situation as me, don’t dream about raising rounds of funding when you don’t have a solid foundation of team, product, or resources.

The worst thing about running a startup relying on VC funding when you’re broke is that you will end up with bad deals. The more desperate you are the easier you make poor decisions with onboarding a partner or investor.

Start with pitching projects that’s profit-making, reinvest the profit into building your own prototype and MVP without having to trade a significant amount of equity for angel-funding, especially before you generate enough revenue to bargain for a good investment deal.

5. Leverage free tools

There are plenty of free tools available for startups. I utilized tools like Figma for design, Jira for project management, GitHub, folk, Zapier, and any other tools that allows me to build my business with minimal capital. Put your money in optimizing the production line / operations, this is where your profit arises from.

6. Focus on POC, prototypes and MVPs

Lean and agile are just buzzwords. The whole concept of these methodologies is to minimize your risk of investment and allow small teams to iterate as quickly as possible.

Two major costs that derive from not being agile:

a) Product development cost:
Product development takes time and money. The slower you ship your product to the users, the less likely you will figure out market response. Instead of putting in 1 year / $1M to figure out there’s no product-market-fit, it’s best to figure that out in 3 months / $25K, right?

b) Opportunity cost:
If you have a great product idea, surely there must be competition out there. The slower you get your users and market share, the more likely your competitors will have a head start. You are potentially losing on market share in this situation.

7. Reinvent and adapt

The tech world is constantly evolving, and so must you. Being flexible and willing to change course when necessary was crucial.

I started off DigitSense selling machine-learning projects, way before the AI hype. DigitSense also started off during COVID, which most companies were investing in building digital products and solutions to cope with remote work, commercial activities, etc. Nobody’s investing in the fundamentals of deep technology.

I quickly realised the market needs and pivoted into a software studio developing consumer app products, or in short — anything that helps a company earn money in the digital era.

Know what your customers are willing to pay for. If revenue generation is their focus, don’t pitch them on cost-saving.

8. Communicate your vision

Being a founder is all about communication skills. You need to be able to present to investors, gather stakeholders, communicate your vision with your team, etc.

Nobody knows your own idea and vision better than yourself. Don’t try and put it into intangible presentations.

Instead, create visuals.

People need to see, touch, and interact with something tangible to fully grasp its potential. Presenting ideas with a simple deck wasn’t cutting it.

There were many times that my ideas weren’t translated into the design screens. Something like a dynamic, a prototype that would make my ideas come alive and capture their imagination way better than me putting it into a project brief to my UI/UX designers.

Instead of having to spend more time and resources in redesigning it, I’ve come up with a templated Figma where I can drag and drop to create prototypes myself. I then hand it over to the expert designers to optimize everything.

With this system and design approach, it has made unattainable dreams reachable with limited resources.

I need a product to raise funds, but I need to raise funds to build the product.

Seems like a never-ending chicken and egg scenario right?

If you are starting your entrepreneurship journey and looking to build something amazing, don’t wait for the right investment, or invest into having someone else misinterpreting your idea at such an early stage.

I am sharing with you everything that I learnt about rapid prototyping in a handbook, where you can validate your idea and build your prototype all within 10 days.

Link to my handbook: Product Design 101: Get Your Figma Prototype Ready for Investor Pitches in 10 Days

If you are one of the dreamers like myself, here’s a 50% off deal for you:

Simply enter “IAMFOUNDER” at checkout to grab the limited discount seats.