Steve Blank - written a lot, learned even more

Before alugha, I had an other startup with about 200 employees worldwide. In the end, I unfortunately fell so deep that I still felt that pain 12 years later. I had never been the type of person who blamed others - although there had been partners who did have 99 % of the fault in the view of others - and this for a good reason. What happens is always my fault... I only need to go back in time long enough to see that I started it all. 

At alugha - more than a decade later - everything should be different. I wanted to be prepared, but without university degree in this area and no special education in business development and entrepreneurship, or some kind of studies at Stanford, Harvard... and however they're all called... this would be hard to realize. Researching for alugha I found the videos from Steve Blank and was hyped from the first minute. I learned a lot and understood where I always made the same mistakes - like an absolute beginner. So I started writing these things down. Of course, I could have written it down on paper or in a text editing program, only for myself. 

The videos are a real enrichment not only for me, but for many people out there. This is why I decided to reduce the language barrier to his videos to reach more people and show them how to avoid mistakes. With every video I realized that there are situations from my business, he's talking about and I wanted to share my experiences... sharing it with myself, but publicly. I wrote about my experiences to every topic of each video and how I developed a strategy, what I learned and how it turned out. 

 

 

With every article I wrote (and there have been over 60), I noticed how I changed. An interesting example is: we always prepared a project for our customers before we approached them. This had cost time and money which stopped us from doing other important things. We were convinced that multilingual videos would speak for themselves. However, most customers didn't see their gain in value with our product. We had the wrong approach. Thanks to my - I like repeating myself - articles written for myself, I understood that my strategy was wrong. I adjusted it and with time things went better. 

When I had the idea to make this series one of the colleagues approached me and said that she liked the idea and would like to write the articles. I replied that there wouldn't be a large profit. She's a great journalist, but I'm the entrepreneur, the CEO, the boss of a startup, the person on the front line. From day one I was convinced that this should be about what I can learn, which value would I gain for myself? My days are filled and I often work 7 days a week with rarely less than 280 hours a month. I knew I had to optimize, I had to learn, avoid mistakes, create a value contribution for my team and this is only possible if I do it myself. 

Finally, I can say that it has been a very informative time for me and my great team, special thanks here to Helena and Jonas (who most certainly give my thanks forward to all involved like Núria, Andy, Rosi, Anna, Meike...) who supported me realizing this series. Now that everything is done, I say: Hey cool! I would do it all over again.

My final advice to you out there: Do something. Don't wait for others. Do it for yourself, no matter what it is or how many will read your stuff. You're the main character in your own book, which you write for yourself. You'll learn always more. And now? Well, I'll be in the fast lane! I still have a lot on my plate with alugha aiming to become one of biggest platforms worldwide. You'll read more from me in the future.

 

 

Until then, have a great time!

Bernd

 

#alugha

#doitmultilingual

#everyoneslanguage