Helpaka

My first Co-founding Experience

How to Master the Challenges of founding a IT – Startup – Or not… My Journey and Learnings

My Key Learnings:

1. Motivating Myself.

2. Clear Communication and Consequence

3. Understanding my Circle of Concern and my Circle of Influence

1. Motivating Myself:

During school, I didn’t find motivation to learn on my own – It felt like there were no topics that interested me. I lacked discipline and the consistency to achieve good grades.

That did not change during my study of International Management. Especially because I started studying during the pandemic and did not have a lot of opportunities to get to know my fellow students and form learning groups.

Our study programm requires us to do an 8 weeks internship between the second and third semester. During my Hummler Consulting Internship I had the opportunity to meet Manuel Hummler, who turned out to be one of the core founders of Helpaka along with Julia Karel.

Julia had the original idea of creating a platform to find positions for local voluntary work when she didnt find nice plattform websites for searching and filtering opportunities in her city. Furthermore, she thought of a Carepoint system where voluntary work is rewarded by one carepoint per hour worked voluntarily. The team came together in this Hackadon and because we won 500€ we had the feeling as a team to continue this idea.

The idea of the Carepointsystem would turn out to be our unique selling point in comparison to competitors such as GoVolunteer which had to be worked out in more detail. I quickly noticed that the capacity of the team members was very low and there was not much time, motivation or pressure to develop and code the website. I continued working on the business side of things and organizing ToDos and KanBan boards in the workspace software Notion.

As our system required teammember to proactively “pull” their tickets the lack of motivation slowed the project quite a bit and the progress was rather slow. This is when I encountered the concept of leading by example – I reflected and noticed that at times, I was also lacking the motivation to be an example of working hard for the project.

This is when I decided to be as motivated as possible without being pushy – I texted reminders for meetings, asked if things were alright and how work was going. I felt this motivation enabled me to really learn and understand notion well, which in the long term encouraged me to master notion with all its features!

2. Clear Communication and Consequence

During many motivational discipline enhancing books I read, I came to understand that motivation comes from taking responsibility for your actions and trying to do your best and improve.

Another aspect is taking responsibility for everything that happens in your environment. Instead of complaining about noone having time a motivated and disciplined person should be able to find a better solution for collaboration without being time – dependant.

Thus, I focused on communicating needs and possible solutions for workspace setup by analysing the wishes of the team and how they want to structure their work and built solutions to fill to needs.

On the other hand, after building the Boards according to needs of the team, I feel like I was not strict enough to complain about the work not being done although the board should match the needs which were communicated. This is when I learned to be more consequent after communicating needs, finding a solution and then using it.

After a while, we entered a national idea contest called the Jugendbudget, (Yes I am the one lying on the floor) where there was a total of 100.000€ to win for each project area. Our team extended by a few more teammembers there and we suceeded in winning the 100.000€ in our area.

I created a budget plan for the money covering hosting, server, internal organisation, workshop, marketing and programming costs, which was the main cost pillar. We hired people on fiver and also paid normal wages to the programmers on our team. Looking back, I noticed that I did not communicate very clearly what was expected for the respective loan which then did not allow me to be strict or consequential about the performance of individual members.

3. Circles of Concern and Influence

Contrary to the concept of taking responsibility for everything to increase motivation and give a feelinng of security in the team, I learned about the concepts of “Circle of Concern” and “Circle of Influence” shortly prior to leaving the project.

The circle of concern describes topics that we think about and concern ourselves with. The circle of influence describes the things we can change or influence. There are three possible sections of thoughts: The things we think about, but cannot change easily or directly, for example politics; The things we can influence but we dont think about, for example irrelavant things and then the things we think about and we can directly influence.

When thinking about this concept I realized for myself that I cannot make team members prioritize project work over other topics in their life and that my circle of influence was not suitable to match my circle of concern in a way that I could work and progress flowingly.

Thus, I concluded that it did not make any more sense to continue investing energy into the project. After 2 years of being in the project and still not having a finished website I decided to bundle my energy elsewhere, fe. by starting a personal page to document my thoughts, experiences and learnings in posts like this one and potentially finding like-minded people to network with.

My Conclusion

In Conclusion, the entire experience of my first Co-Founding experience was a rollercoaster ride of learnings, frustration and successes such as winning the 100.000€ in the Jugendbudget. I learned a lot about my own weaknesses and how they can affect the project success. I learned that I need to be more consequent about my efforts and stricter when it comes to making a plan and then actually implementing it. I also learned that even though you like your teammembers as people sometimes it the professional synergy is not as good as you would hope and ultimately, sometimes it is better to stop something you have invested a lot of time in to start something new that you are passionate about, fe. getting into Artificial Intelligence – Check out my learnings about that here.

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