‘People who haven't built a company don't understand how tough it can be to get rejected'

BEFORE I DECIDED to set up my own company, I was a management consultant by trade – but I always had the entrepreneurial sickness.

Thanks to that bug, I’ve set up two companies in my time, the first of which was a graduate recruitment website called IrishGradJobs.ie.

It was 2008 and I was still in my early twenties and had a little bit of arrogance, which can be a good thing, but the real problem was I didn’t really have anyone to keep me in check. That was the first tough lesson I learned.

Going into any business, it is so important to have a partner because you need to have someone to corral you and keep you in line.

The company actually started quite well, but the timing wasn’t great. The website fell flat on its face due to external problems, namely the economy going south, but I still learned a lot from it.

After that I couldn’t look at a business page for about a year afterward and went back to consultancy to lick my wounds. Then about five years later, in 2013, I got bitten again and started an event booking application called Usher.

The idea came to me when I was in London. I found it tough to find out what was cool to do in the city and that gave me the idea to create an app that would act as one central location to find interesting events to go to.

I decided to move home to set it up because I had only been in London for a little over a year, so setting up a startup over there would have been madness. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that you need a support structure when you’re setting up a company from scratch.

Usher founder Karl McCarthy

So I came back to Ireland, hired a few technical leads to look after key parts of the business and we pulled together a minimum viable product quite quickly.

Our business model was quickly validated, but we hadn’t actually launched on mobile. Instead we put iPads into hotels and hostels with our app pre-loaded and people could use the platform to find stuff to do in Dublin.

The decision to run with iPads rather than a costly full-blown mobile app and launch proved to be a wise cost-saving decision, and before we knew it we were in over 50 locations across Dublin.

Didn’t work out

After the first year, we figured out that Dublin wasn’t big enough to keep the app full of content and it was a bit of a scramble to pivot the business.

Looking back now, I found it quite a lonely experience despite having a skilled technical team around me. I felt like I needed someone to talk with, especially when it came down to teasing out who were the right people to hand Usher over to when I decided to sell up.

I spent a few months negotiating with a high-profile Spanish company about buying Usher, but I knew in the pit of my stomach that they were not as interested in the company as I thought they were at first. But I was so determined to get the exit I was burying my head in the sand.

In the end it all worked out, with another company called Beletto coming in to take on Usher, but we wasted four months of our time in talks with the Spanish company that ended up launching in London instead. A partner could have told me they were tyre-kickers after a month. You need that second perspective.

Shirking sales

I’ve landed on my feet coming out of Usher. I’m now a founding employee and head of expansion at Irish events software startup Tito.

The company is going through rapid growth at the moment and recently passed the 1,000-customers mark, which is a big milestone for the company. However, since there’s over half a million events worldwide, we’re only really scratching the surface and that’s why I’ve joined.

We are a small team of four and the guys were happy for me to come in because they needed someone else on board to actually start picking up the phone and getting in front of customers.

It is tough for them to do it because they are so close to the product and have thrown themselves into building the company, so the rejection of a sales call can be too much to take sometimes as an entrepreneur. Trust me, I know.

Web Summit use the ticketing app Tito for its series of events worldwide

When I was trying to build Usher, I was in an incubator and there were a lot of us working on different projects. We all had one thing in common, we hated sales.

There was a lot of naive ‘build it and they will come’ attitudes going around in that incubator and that’s not how it works. You need to be out in people’s faces and picking up the phone and take the rejections in your stride, but it’s not that simple.

A lot of people who haven’t built a company from scratch don’t understand how tough it can be to get rejected when you’re out looking for sales. You take it personally.

When I was working with Usher and IrishGradJobs.ie, I would rather do anything than pick up the phone and ring someone to sell. I know it sounds silly to avoid such a fundamental part of a business, but the rejection can be too much to take.

Lonely life

As I mentioned, life as an entrepreneur can be very lonely. On a Friday, your friends are probably out having pints and you might be sitting in an office looking at sales figures and going, “oh shit!”

Those are the times when you wonder is there light at the end of the tunnel and, in those moments, having a good family support structure is essential.

After those two experiences with Usher and IrishGradJobs.ie, I don’t think I’ll be jumping into another venture any time soon. I have found my home with Tito and it genuinely feels like the real deal.

I know it sounds cheesy, but you don’t realise that until you’re in it.

Karl McCarthy is the ‎founder of Usher and now head of expansion at Tito. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on business mistakes and what can be learned from them.

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