I Dedicated 2 Years Of My Life To This Idea

(In the end, we were too early––but what a ride!) 

In 2014, I met someone who had the idea to use discounted taxi rides as a marketing tool for local businesses (Groupon 2.0).

That he didn’t speak German to close these deals became my chance—and formal introduction to sales.

I read “Predictable Revenue” and started dialing for dollars and studying the analytics of my mass email campaigns.

A guy from Fiverr scraped us thousands of leads from Yelp!

It was the first time that I sat in meetings with executives of big car sharing + taxi companies (car2go, DriveNow, mytaxi).

The appetite was there––both from local businesses (not just restaurants) and mobility companies.

This landed us a spot in a transportation and mobility accelerator program in Berlin. Reason for me to drop out of uni for a semester.

In the end we launched a mobile app. I wasn’t directly involved in building it, but learned lots about the design and testing process.

For our launch, I got to orchestrate our campaign on Product Hunt. From a cold message, we got the #2 top hunter on the platform and ranked #7 worldwide that day. We were featured in “Launch Ticker” and generated over 2,000 sign-ups.

(In all honesty, I ran this like a political get-out-the-vote campaign.)

Way too late we found out what we should have done much sooner: ask end users if they were even using mobility offers (taxis, car sharing––at one point even public transportation) to go to restaurants, movie theaters, and what not.

As we learned, Berlin was a bad place for this. Most people used a bike. Using a taxi was a luxury for most due to regulated pricing.

I was crushed. After spending literally day and night on this and ruining my relationship, I was financially in the hole and suffered from burnout depression.

But I didn’t have time to lick my wounds because I needed to pay off my debt.

Ironically, I ended working with local businesses again at Groupon––while looking directly at the building that my now ex-girlfriend and I used to live in. (Yay!)

It wasn’t like I felt my life had ended at 25, but certainly the idea that this was one my one shot to do something bigger.

In the end, it was a humbling experience. Plus: the learning, mindset and network have served me incredibly well in the startups job after.

Though I was a complete autodidact when it came to sales, I now amended it with formal training; thus combining the best of both worlds.

Thinking and acting like a founder has never escaped me. Thinking I’m too good for any task is foreign to me to this day.

(At times, this was problematic in my jobs, because I owned my jobs like a founder––while not getting rewarded but treated like a useful idiot.)

Now that I am working with early-stage founders, I get to do it again, but with more awareness and experience.