What The Hell Is A Founder Apprentice

This is the first post in my New York Founder Apprentice series. Six months to share all my insights and learnings with you through this part of my entrepreneurial journey.

Earlier this year I set myself a goal to either live in New York or Silicon Valley and to work for a well funded startup. Fast forward 6 months I now live in New York City (Williamsburg to be precise) working at Greatist as a Founder Apprentice. Boom!

But wait...

What the hell is a Founder Apprentice and why would anyone what to be an apprentice if you're not 16!?

This will make a lot more sense if you know a little bit more about me, so let me give you some context because we haven't formed an opinion on whether it's BS or not just yet.

In 2015 I quit my job to pursue a dream, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and my job in recruitment just wasn't cutting it! I mean coming out of University the only jobs that never seem to run dry are sales roles, plus I needed to get out of my shitty part time job at Carphone Warehouse, so recruitment it was and I did that for 18 months until I built up the courage to leave that too.

When I left, I built an app called Bodypage, a fitness hub that allowed people to share their journeys, read articles on health and wellness and get discount codes on healthy alternative products. I didn't pay anything to build it either as I had a CTO (Rule number one, never pay for version 1 of your product always get a technical partner) . So, I quit, built an app and I thought " well this is easy!" let's just release this get a million downloads, raise money from investors, and then we'll be millionaires

Turns out, our product was pretty ermmm CRAP! Buttons didn't work, design was so bad it was borderline offensive I mean I just didn't really know what I was doing to be honest. Fast forward 8-9 months and we did have thousands of downloads and we were getting some good feedback but we just couldn't quite make it. Then one day after a heated argument with my CTO we met for coffee at Kings Cross to talk about what happened. He decided that he could no longer take the product any further and quit. I was angry but I can't say I didn't agree. I guess that was the first major setback of my entrepreneurial journey (don’t worry many more to come). No money, no developer and no backup, but I still had hope.

I cracked on, and started to look for a new CTO, placed ads everywhere, headhunted, stuck posters up in google campus, I literally littered the internet. Thank God for those 18 months in recruitment, otherwise I would've been screwed! After 2 weeks I had a list of candidates, and I started interviewing. Some were impressive, some were not so impressive and some weren't interested once they found out it wasn’t a paid role. I was about to cave in and pay a freelancer to continue building my dream as I’m pretty impatient, but then, out of nowhere, I received an email from a guy called Trevor...

Telling me how shit my app was!

Even though he was right I was still offended! The email went on and turns out that he had attached a 12 page report not only telling me why it was so crappy but also what he can do to fix it. Certainly had my attention ( in other words, I'm beggars can't be choosers) . We got to talking and after a few weeks of bargaining I managed to get him down from 700 quid a day to... zero hundred quid a day! Haha, he was in.

We pivoted the product to focus on nutrition bringing transparency to food labels as most people struggle to read labels. This was more of a solid mission, something that could really help people and something that people actually needed. We changed the name to Scanbite, put a pitch deck together and I was back in business (although I never felt out of business).

After 3-4 months of trying to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) turns out that that's actually flipping hard to build! Not only that, Trevor is a great developer but he's not so strong in the design department, but design was the least of our worries, we needed a database, character recognition, animation. It was hard. Anyway, I thought maybe if we hand a UX designer it would help so I managed to swindle a UX designer onboard and then a few months later a very talented head of product because it turns out I’m not a product guy.

So now we’re a team of 4:

CEO, CTO, Head of UX and Head of Product... Not too bad for a guy who’s winging it.

By the way, I'm missing loads out but I'll share more about this period of my journey with you over time don't worry.

So, you're probably asking yourself "Phil you have a team of 4, you're making SOME progress why are you a Founder Apprentice... and by the way what the hell is a Founder Apprentice!"

Sure, you're right, what the hell am I doing in New York with this made up job title when I should be back in London with my team trying to find product market fit!? Here's the thing, what I've learned over time and what I've been told by other successful entrepreneurs is to keep learning. The best minds are always learning, that's why they are the best minds. Experts are called experts because they keep learning about a particular topic, it's not that they're smarter than you, they just know everything about their given topic and they keep learning about that topic until the day they die. Now, entrepreneurship is an interesting career because it never goes how you expect it to go. I never thought this would happen when I quit my job, but hey, part of being a good entrepreneur is being adaptable to opportunities. So, I'm here to do what every entrepreneur or CEO should be doing which is learning, adding value and networking. My team is still back in London and let's just say we haven’t given up just yet, plus New York isn’t a bad place to come and talk about your shinny new nutritional app either. 

Myself and Derek Flanzraich (CEO of Greatist) didn't coin this phrase but we're going to run with it as it perfectly describes what I'm doing over here. I'm learning from Derek how he built Greatist to 36 employees and raised a strong series A Round earlier this year. I'm learning how to be more efficient and effective with my time, I’m even sitting in on board meetings taking notes to understand the dynamics and topics. I'm learning from every department on what best practice is from product to design to editorial and on-boarding (HR). I'm adding value ( I hope) to Derek by taking some tasks of his hands so he can focus on other things and I'm adding value to the team by offering support in any capacity possible from QA’ing with product to brand partnerships with the sales team. By just being here I'm networking as I only know my older sister in New York so I'm meeting new people every day as well as getting to know this very cool team at Greatist. But ultimately, it's up to me to make the most of this experience and to make sure I don't leave this city empty handed.

So, one more time... what the hell is a Founder Apprentice? Well, It’s whatever you make of it.

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This is was taken from my blog bicepstobillions.com

You can also listen to my podcast startup handmedowns where I interview founders, investors and thought leaders