Sheriff has experiences spanning years and he worked with the industry leaders. It's so unfortunate that he's closing down showroom.ng
12 Years a hustler, time to go home
I’m exhausted; it’s been roller coaster for the past 12
years having started my first startup then and ever since, it’s been from one
to the other.
I really felt I could succeed, I have read the right
books, the right blogs, draft right business plan and but in execution I have
fallen short. Maybe it’s time to change things a little, something is quite
wrong I think.
The height of it was last year end, business was doing
fairly well then everything started crashing. Somehow I survived the robbery at
gun point in the middle and rally round to try to make things work, but getting
worse and every now and then the thought will always come around, what if it
all ends here? What if I just have an accident right now (while driving home at
11pm on third mainland bridge)? Maybe it was law of attraction but somehow I
had an accident but in the daytime when I didn’t think about it.
I launched showroom.ng almost 2yrs now and within months
with all the permutation (maybe strategy) we were on a super roll, the dream
roll. I think personally I wasn’t introspective enough as I was just riding
with the tide. That’s super wrong for a CEO, “you don’t just work in your company
you work on it”, so they say. I only read it, I didn’t live it.
I personally won’t attribute the failure to wrong
market, or wrong product. It was a wrong execution.
Maybe this will help
1. Weak domain
expertise: we don’t have that in our team, inasmuch as I tried to learn on the
fly, this will fucking take years of learning, practice before charging people.
I had personally underwrote mistakes from partner or staff 100%, just so you
could make customers happy, but resources are limited we do not have that much
and our products are heavy items.
2. Speed: the
edge a startup has over bigger company is suppose to be speed, yeah for a
couple of our products we were fast but for so many we were terribly late.
Building features, making user experience superb is not my strength, I’m ninja
but in the team we didn’t have either or could afford one.
3. Team setup;
success of any endeavor have a lot of tie to the people behind it. Looking
back, I’d selected those with; domain expertise, better work ethic (than
myself) and complimentary strength.
