Some context and goals
The goal was to build an engineering company capable of creating value independently of geographic location. We wanted it to work as a learning vehicle across several areas, from sales to delivery, with low operating costs and no need to raise external capital. Vulkan was also imagined as the embryo of a future group of companies, with a revenue goal of three to four monthly clients by the end of 2025, something we never managed to achieve.
The founding team
We were still in university when we decided to move forward. I became close to Bruno and Mazzini through a thermal systems project and through several lunches before that class. In that project, and in the theses we developed, we realized that we had strong synergy in how we worked, in our profiles and in our ambitions.
But the fact that we all had the same background often made problem decomposition harder, simply because our perspective was too homogeneous. To compensate for that, we decided that each of us would use several hats during discussions so we could reach other verticals.
Executing those roles was never natural. There was always a strong engineering bias, but as we got used to it we managed to discuss some things from other angles. In my case, I remember having the HR, marketing and design hats.
A potential solution would have been to integrate people with different backgrounds into the founding team, strengthening the areas outside technical delivery, which was exactly where we felt the most gaps. Perhaps bringing in one or two more people with profiles similar to ours but with different backgrounds would have helped.
The bootcamp in Guarda
One of the decisions we made, partly motivated by the goal of working remotely, was to set up the office in Guarda, with low costs, few distractions, and the advantage of being my hometown, which kept me close to my family and friends.
I think we underestimated the weight of being outside a startup ecosystem. By this I mean that I missed talking about problems, challenges and interests with people who shared the same builder and founder context.
We did a lot of cold calling and had several online meetings, but in-person presence still has a heavy dimension, which to me means actually being there, and it fills a need for socialization that remote work cannot replace.
In this type of project I believe it is very important to have someone to talk to, whether a more experienced cofounder, an advisor or an investor, and that absence creates a feeling of loneliness that limits discussions and, as a consequence, their outcomes.
Looking back, I think we should have taken advantage of EIT Jumpstarter to go to Germany and set ourselves up in one of the most relevant 3D printing ecosystems.
Building a business does not make money, selling does
For a large part of the project I believed that working hard enough would make success inevitable, a belief that turned out to be completely wrong.
The fact that we worked on futile things led to general demotivation. Because we were executing many tasks with no direct connection to the business or the customer, we ended up feeling stuck, but I think it took us a long time to understand that. We lacked agency in the areas that actually moved the engine and lacked urgency to realize that the time we spent building internal infrastructure was time we were not spending selling.
Our model was sales-led growth, which means that without sales we could not validate the service, and without a validated service it became even harder to sell, especially when we were talking to people with as many years of experience as we had years of life.
When we closed the first client, we did not even have a basic sales system, which made us completely underestimate go-to-market. But if that was our engine, what bothers me is why we did not give it the proper attention in terms of KPIs, and whether we were somehow victims of how easy the first sale felt.
I remember one episode where a proposal that included free services was rejected, and that was part of our upselling strategy. Today I have serious doubts about zero-cost offers because, in many cases, the perceived value associated with the product or service disappears, something we learned the hard way.
The mistakes that are particularly mine
On a personal level, I made several mistakes that had a direct impact on Vulkan, many of them connected to the fact that this was my first company and that I took ownership of tasks I had never executed before.
At some moments I struggled to structure and explain my reasoning, something that has followed me since I was young and that I am actively working on. I also repeatedly fell into the trap of looking for a level of depth that was not necessary, when there were moments where I should have been more pragmatic and simply moved forward, something connected to the definition of done.
I also have to mention that, at times, I was too blunt when giving feedback, because I do not like euphemisms, which led other members to delay conversations that should have happened earlier.
In the end
Finally, and for me the most serious point, I know we looked too much at the technical and financial problem and too little at the human problem. I believe we should have talked more with our customers' customers to directly understand the problems we were really solving and the consumer feedback.
After reflecting, I realize that many of these mistakes seem small and easy to solve. However, I have to say that in some of these situations it feels like our vision is limited to a tunnel, because it was the first time we were facing this type of decision. Even though I was quite sad, I have to recognize that these are valuable mistakes and that I am proud to have made them.