startup nation

I thought i wanted to be an entrepreneur. I thought i wanted to have a brilliant idea, raise funds and sweat blood for ten years to bring it to fruition.

That's why i tried to launch a first project with one of my best mates whilst i was still a student (MUD — feeding black soldier fly larvae with household waste and then selling their excrement to farmers).

It's also why i did two internships at Reveal as the CEO's right-hand man and then PayFit as a growth engineer. I came away with solid groundwork in growth for B2B SaaS.

A year later, at the end of my studies at CentraleSupélec, i tried (unsuccessfully) to launch a growth agency applied to recruitment — a crushing failure that forced me to re-evaluate my startup nation dreams.

deadend

I told myself it was perhaps a bit too early to start my own project. I probably needed to help more companies grow before hoping to grow my own.

As i'd never really stopped freelancing, i decided i'd dedicate myself to it fully and abandon pure entrepreneurship temporarily.

Under the influence of more advanced freelancers than me (like Rémi Lauer, whose work i admire), i got it into my head to package an offer around outbound growth.

The idea was to build a standardised offer, always sold at the same price but which would take me less and less time to deliver.

It seemed to me the optimal way to earn a lot of money.

So, searching for the right offer to package, i took on as many missions as possible related to outbound and wrote on LinkedIn regularly.

At that point, my trip to Asia had been going on for 6 months already and:

i was spending most of my time working
on missions that only half pleased me
without managing to package them properly
for an hourly rate lower than what i get when i charge by the day rate.