ITMZ

During my second year summer, I was internship-less, I thought I was so cooked. I had my summer courses selected and full heartedly thought I was going. That was until Annie and Harry gave me the opportunity to move to Toronto for the summer and build their dreams with them.

The problem we were trying to solve with this app was overconsumption. 300 million tons of stuff are thrown out every year in America! A large portion of this comes from overconsumption. We built a cross platform mobile app that allows users to track, search and share their personal goods!

Here are some of my takeaways of working at pre-seed startup (i.e we were hella broke):

1. Pick the right people to struggle with, there's beauty in the struggle. I remember I lived downtown in a 200 square-foot room, coming from the suburbs of Ottawa, it was a huge difference. That was until I went to my founders' home and saw they slept on a literal air mattress. Eating kale and cauliflower for lunch! THATS HOW BROKE WE WERE! It was an eye opening experience for me because I had life on easy mode beforehand. This experience really showed what it meant to grind and work hard for the things you want.

2. Build and break things fast. I think this is a given if you follow startup culture but its another thing to experience it yourself. We would ship feature followed by feature every single week. Speed of iteration is how startups succeed.

3. Vision. Especially at startups, having founders that have a long term vision and can express that to the rest of the team and get them onboard is so fundamental to success of a startup.

4. Related to the topic of people is the vibes/culture at the company. This isn't a KPI that can be measured easily but its something you can tell incredibly easily. I remember our weekly friday team meetings at 4:30pm. We would go around showcasing what feature we had built. Being in an environment where your efforts were recognized, valued and celebrated is easily one of the best ways to build vibes at a company. That combined with giving kudos to one person who you thought did a good job that week was some of the best memories I've made in my life and will look back on when I'm older.

⚠️ TLDR: Vibes + Skill+ Hardwork + Frugality + Good Team = maybe success

All in all, this was one of the most life changing experiences I've had in my short life. I highly recommend it to others. (If you think the founders are competent and cool).

Also, don't build your start up on aws, it is so expensive