Entrepreneurship: Sometimes the road to fast growth is a slow one

The past couple of months at Megawatt have been slow. Our pipeline is filled with exciting projects, but having the patience to wait for our efforts to pay dividends is excruciating.

A part of me, in some sick and twisted way, wishes there were something actually wrong with the business. At least then I could pour myself an oversized cup of coffee and dive into an all-nighter to fix it. But patience? Who has time for that?!

The harsh truth is that 80% of startups fail within five years. And of those that make it to the five-year mark, another 80% will fail within the next five years. This means that only about 4% of companies have the patience and perseverance to make it past the 10-year mark.

As an ode to other tormented founders, I’ll share my journey of patience and perseverance with my first startup, DoubleMap—from side hustle to acquisition.

Side hustle

While at Indiana University, my cofounders and I began building software to help students catch the bus—think Uber for public transit. I recognized our project’s potential beyond Bloomington, but my family’s enthusiasm level hovered around a mild panic. They appreciated my entrepreneurial spirit, but they expected me to get a real job—the kind with health insurance and a desk that isn’t built out of milk crates.

Reluctantly, that’s exactly what I did. Upon graduation, I accepted a consulting job and worked on DoubleMap as a side hustle outside of normal working hours. My project took me to Ethiopia, which is eight hours ahead of Eastern time. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that first year.

Product-market-fit

DoubleMap’s bus-tracking tech was deployed at IU during this time, and we were supporting it as a way of giving back to our alma mater rather than charging a fee. This reached an inflection point when IU administrators began asking for expedited timelines for features on their wish list. No problem. We had a development pipeline that included their features and planned to release them over the next few months.

Their response surprised me. “You don’t understand. We have 35,000 students using DoubleMap daily. We’ll have an uprising if we can’t do something NOW.” I promised we’d prioritize their features but explained our limited availability due to our day jobs.

I might not have realized what was happening then, but this is what product-market-fit looks like. Students had become so reliant on DoubleMap that administrators were asking to pay for our se vice. I was ready to hop on the first plane back home and work on DoubleMap full time. My only problem was my nagging day job.

The next day, I walked into my boss’s office, thanked him for a wonderful experience, and put in my two-week notice. His confusion paled in comparison to my family’s response. They were convinced I’d been fired and was using this “bus project” as cover. After all, who voluntarily leaves a stable job?

Ready, set, nothing

Where they saw risk, I saw opportunity. DoubleMap had a paying client, which I viewed through a binary lens. It’s infinitely easier to scale from one client to 100 than from zero to one. I just needed my savings to last long enough to sign more customers.

I had saved every penny while abroad, giving me six months of runway. IU had become a client while I was pulling all-nighters in Ethiopia—imagine what I could accomplish without distractions! I moved back to Indianapolis, bought a cheap Ikea desk, and declared DoubleMap open for business!

Three months passed in a blur. My phone wasn’t ringing, my inbox was empty, and I had zero new clients to show for my efforts. The silence was deafening. What was I thinking when I quit my job?

It certainly gave me an appreciation for why many founders give up within five years. What many first-time entrepreneurs don’t realize is that sales cycles vary by industry. DoubleMap’s cycle took six months from start to finish—good news was around the corner if I had the patience to stay the course.

Conclusion

Fortunately, I kept showing up each day until my phone finally buzzed with an email delivering good news. It was from Butler University, who wanted to use our technology for two Broad Ripple shuttles. Based on my reaction, you’d have thought I had signed New York City’s transit system.

Business picked up steadily after that. We signed eight clients that year, 40 the next, and grew to over 700 clients before being acquired by Ford in 2019.

These days at Megawatt, when that familiar usage to “fix something” creeps in, I remind myself of the paradox I learned while building DoubleMap: The faster I want to grow, the more patience I need. That 4% survival rate isn’t about outlasting others; it’s about outlasting my own impatience.•

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Rekhter is co-founder and CEO of Megawatt.