How the coolest company in The Netherlands helped me setup a SaaS

For four years now, I’m working at one of the greatest companies in The Netherlands. It’s a cloudsourcing company called Intermax. It’s a unique mix of people, service and quality. At the reception there is a web application running on an iPad to register customers who visit our company. In the summer of 2015 my boss and I were talking about turning it into an real iOS application. As enthusiastic as I was I developed it in my spare time. I was thinking about this concept and I actually wanted to sell this product to other companies too, but Intermax had the ownership of this product. So I suggested that we could split costs and profit, as I had developed it in my spare time, and turned this in a new product for the business. Intermax was interested but after a short time of thinking, they decided that app development wasn’t part of their core business. BUT, they gave me permission to release it and turn in to a profitable business all by myself and compensated me for the time I had already spend so they could use it as well. So no hard feelings, I still love to work for them. Months passed by and there was this little annoying feeling that I actually wanted to start the business, but I was too afraid to take the step. Although I was still developing some features around the product…

So you might think, why not just do it? What are you afraid of? Well, there is plenty to be afraid of, of course. I’m still attending school and even though I have enough spare time, I wonder if I will have enough time to do this beside my study. I’m probably not the first person to start a company next to his study. What if I get some kind of huge claim from a company for something that didn’t work, how do I handle that? In my third grade I’d like to go on an internship abroad. Will it still be possible to run the company while I’m on the other side of the world? All those questions ran around in my mind for a long time. At the beginning of this year I started to read more articles on Medium and they were inspiring me. I often read that taking cold showers would increase your discipline and help you achieve goals. So after a subject in school from an inspiring teacher who taught us about discipline, I started to take cold showers to see if this would effect me.

After a while, the cold showers got easier but not so much. When I’m tired I find it difficult to turn the shower to the cold temperature but then I remind myself that it’s just a couple of minutes of coldness. What is the worst thing that can happen to you? Your body heats up the moment you get out. And perhaps all your muscles tense up when you get into the cold water but this is an exercise of mental control and focusing on getting your breath back to normal again. You learn to quickly adjust in an unwanted situation. When you get out you feel a lovely cold glow over your skin and that’s really nice. Yet there is an excuse to skip the moment everyday. Maybe because you already did something disciplined today, or maybe because your tired or maybe because it’s weekend. I call those little excuses ‘cold shower excuses’. And as funny as it is, I recognise this more and more in daily life. I often hear people say, that they don’t have time to go to sport now because they’re to busy with friends or work. It’s a matter of importance and urgency that makes you do something. And when I hear people avoiding something they would like to do but don’t do, I call it ‘cold shower excuses’.

Meanwhile the app was running at Intermax and I maintained it through trial and error as this was my first app for iOS. Every now and then, someone from the sales department told me that customers from Intermax were asking if they could buy the app. And that was something, yet so annoying, yet so inspiring to hear. The fact that there is market interest was nice to hear, but the fact that I didn’t have a company was a problem. And then there was the 21 of April and a colleague of mine was telling me again that a customer was asking about the application. That was the day I was sick of waiting and feeling afraid. Because what can really happen when I start this? So what if I fail for the first time? I’m still young, plenty of time to learn.

So were those reasons I didn’t start a company, cold shower excuses? Perhaps they were and perhaps the cold showers everyday have nothing to do with it, but for some kind of reason a month after I started taking cold showers I also started my own business.

Stay tuned as I try to blog about my adventure of starting a company!