Idea
Project accounting for capital projects. Make it easier for project managers to keep track of their budget
Background
I started my career at P&G as a Project Engineer managing $1MM+ capital projects
One of the problems I saw was assigning costs from contractors and suppliers to particular budgets.
P&G (as well as other Fortune 500 ) funded projects with specific line items and categories called WBS elements so that the ERP (SAP) would recognize them.
As a project manager, the accounting WBS line items didn’t help me manage the project, I wanted software for me to organize the budgets and costs in a way for me to better organize and manage the project.
Industry
Enterprise software
Dates
Early 2011
How did it work out?
I never created a company or tried to sell it to a company. It ended before it really began but it was a good way to test the waters of a side project.
I talked to a few other project managers about it, they felt the same pain, but they felt they just had to follow the existing tools given to them (making it a hard sale for me)
I wireframed the solution but didn’t fully design of code anything.
It was a short lived idea.
What did you learn
Cold emails work, other entrepreneurs are willing to help / give advice without anything in return, and how arrogant I could be.
Jun Loayza was an entrepreneur I was following and I wrote a cold email message to him on LinkedIn. To my surprise, he responded, and that blew me away. He was the CEO and he took a cold email. Turns out, he didn’t like the name of my idea and I wasn’t good at taking critical feedback and all he said was that it was hard to remember and hard to spell — a light criticism at best, but the comment showed my arrogance.
I thought i was right, I respected this person and they didn’t like my idea. I spent way too much energy concerned what someone else thought ... and I was just arrogant. I worked at a big company with an engineering degree and getting my MBA - doing all the things I was told were the right things to do as an adult, and non of that mattered in the world of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs play by a different set of rules. It’s a world of are you solving a problem, can you sell your solution and will people pay for it and use it.
And I loved it. I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug of this whole new perspective on the world.
I was humbled by the experience, stopped this idea, and began to explore a path to choosing a career as an entrepreneur.
Side note:
You really never know the impact you will have when you respond to a stranger. Jun had a big impact on my career choice (and he was kind) and he probably didn’t even know it. Thanks Jun.