My first business

Like I said, this all started with a phone call between Héctor and I. Not much thinking.

I'm really glad that we didn't think.

Lesson 1: This doesn't apply to every scenario in life but, particularly in this case, it is sometimes better to not think too much about the difficulties of starting something.

Had I anticipated how hard it would be to build Volumetrick and I would have never event started it. So, as long as you are not being too impulsive, trust yourself. Start something and figure out solutions while you face problems.

One little detail that I haven't mentioned yet is that Héctor and I had a third partner, a 40 year old father, director of a medium sized company and also student of Aerospace Engineering. You may wonder how could he have time for studying at the same time that he had another job and a child to take care of, even more, to start a new company meantime. I wondered that too 😂. The answer is simple: he's the most energetic man I've ever met, by far! He was a caffeine addict. Also, I would be lying if I didn't mention that more than once I though he took more than coffee.

I remember him coming home asking for a coffee, and finding him in the kitchen with not one but but two cups, and drinking them both immediately ☕☕.

Why did we need him?

Amongst all the qualities that he had, the most important ones back then were two things. First of all, he had money and we didn't, and he said he would put money on the business when things started to get better.

Lesson 1: This makes no sense, but poor Dani back then was foolish. Partners need to have equal commitments, and you should never expect things from people in the future just as an act of good will. Especially if we are talking about money. So, if you partner with other people and their strength is that they have more money than you, have them put money in the beginning, not when things get better.

The other thing is that he had already founded other companies, and thus knew the procedures that had to be done in order to legally create a company. The thing is that here in Spain it isn't as easy as in other countries, and we felt we needed him to go faster.

Lastly, he told us he had experience with machinery, and that he had done a robotics course, so on paper, he was a very valuable asset.

He really is a clever person, but as you'll realize later on, he gave us more problems that help.

Finding a name for the company

If you ask me, deciding a name shouldn't have been a priority, but as a first time entrepreneur I really wanted to have a name that represented what I was doing. The only real reason to decide a name is that in order to register a new company you need to have a name.

This is a picture of a notebook I had where I was trying out different names and checking online if the domain was free.

The name we decided for the company is not in this picture, but I couldn't find other sketches. We decided to go for: Volumetrick.

We loved it and we still do, it's not only a thing of the past, it's part of me.

Constitution

We finished final exams on late June, had the idea with Héctor during early July and a bit later spoke about it and made an agreement with the third partner. We finally made it all official on the 25th July 2014, less than a week before August came and it was too late to do the paperwork.

Funny story though, when we finally had a name in mind, they wouldn't accept it as the name of the company, so the company was registered with the second name in our list, Cubiprint.

We all got a 33.3% of the company.

Finding an office

We now needed an office, or at least we though so, and we applied for a business acceleration program that could give us offices for free during 9 months. The end date for applying was the 31st July, so we had to prepare a business plan very very quickly.

We were also speaking with a possible client that was going to pay 1000€, so we told that to the accelerator when they asked if we had already made any money.

I can't find exactly when it was that we were told that we got accepted, but I imagine it was between the end of August and the beginning of September. What a nice way of starting things out! :chartwithupwardstrend:

In the following picture you can see our offices with three 3D printers and a lot of cables and other stuff. On top you can see the plastic spools in a metallic frame. There's even a book from our university for a lecture called "Aerospace Vehicles". The best part of this picture is the one that is more hidden, the sofa on the left. There was 2 sofas like this one, very small ones, but I can't count how many nights we slept there... Too many! I will explain this in much more detail in a further post.

Pride and regret

Getting in contact with the third partner had its pros and cons.

In one hand, it's true that he ended up leaving the company, but in the other hand, nothing would have started if he had not trusted us and joined the project. Héctor and I were two kids and having the support of an older man gave us energy to go forward.

Registering Cubiprint also had its pros and cons, and while having the third member onboard for a period of time is irrelevant now, the constitution of the company still is a reality now (it was never shut down). The real reflexion here is wether it is worth or not to legally constitute a company before you make any money.

In Spain, to be the administrator of a company you need to pay a tax of 300€ monthly and you also pay an agent that manages the taxes for you , so you can see that you better make some money early, or you will burn your savings very fast. Thankfully the third member already payed this 300€ for another company that he had (and you pay only once for as many companies as you have), so in the notary we signed that he would be the administrator of the company (like a CEO) and Héctor and I would have the same powers that the administrator has. He didn't need us to pay a proportional part of this 300€, so we were saving a lot of money thanks to him.

We never made enough money with Volumetrick to compensate the cost of having a company, but we used Cubiprint to invoice other project's earnings without having to create a new company for the other projects.

The real reason why I don't regret constituting the company again has to do with the compromise that this represented. Legally being part of a company made it very real and serious, and this made me commit 100% to the project.

So all in all, I'm pretty happy with how everything started, and while now that I'm older I would never constitute a company before it makes money, in the context of a teenager that has never done anything before, it was worth the risk.