# neap.co, my first business, consulting for first-time founders

> My first company, an IT consultancy for first-time founders and early-stage start-ups, from 2016 to 2019. Six products built for founders, and the lessons that only running a business teaches: cash flow, sales, negotiation, and choosing the right customer.

- Client: My own company, privately incorporated in Australia (Start-up consulting)
- Role: Co-founder, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Closed. Our businesses
- Capabilities: Entrepreneurship, Lean start-up, Product strategy, Business management
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/neap-co/

## Outcomes

- A consultancy founded and run end to end: sales, marketing, contracts, delivery and cash flow.
- Six products for founders, from proofs of concept to an app on the App Store and an MVP that shipped.
- The business lessons Cloudless Labs was built on.

## The idea

neap.co was my first business, founded with two partners: an IT consultancy for first-time founders and early-stage start-ups. The offer was to take a founder's idea to a product the lean start-up way, with customer discovery, fast iterations, and only as much software as each step needed to learn something.

## What we built

Six products, for founders in six industries:

- A [property marketplace for homes not yet for sale](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/property-marketplace/index.md), serverless on AWS.
- A [geofenced social app](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/geofenced-event-app/index.md) with face recognition, published on the App Store.
- A [weather-data product for insurers](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/weather-data-for-insurers/index.md), which shipped its MVP.
- Prototypes for [food catering](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/food-delivery-prototype/index.md), [second-hand fashion](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/fashion-marketplace-prototype/index.md) and [crypto inside superannuation](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/crypto-super-prototype/index.md).

## What running it taught me

Building the products was the part I knew. Running the business was the education:

- **Cash flow is everything.** With healthy cash flow, you can afford to build trust and experiment. With tight cash flow, you make desperate decisions. We learned it by losing about $20,000 on a client who never paid.
- **Negotiation and scope.** A good negotiator can get $25,000 of work for $5,000 from a hungry supplier. We were that supplier, once.
- **Pick the right customer.** First-time founders were the wrong market for us: their budgets were too tight and their runways too short for the lean iterations they needed. Many gave up before reaching the market.
- **Marketing and sales are a job,** not something that happens between projects.
- **So are accounting and admin.** Bookkeeping, tax, insurance, contracts, compliance: as a first-time owner, I had no idea how much of the week they would take.
- **A good employee isn't automatically a good business owner.** I assumed that being good at my job would make me good at business. I couldn't have been more wrong. An employee is judged on doing their part well. An owner answers for every outcome, including the ones nobody sees: the cash, the risk, the client who doesn't pay, the decision to stop. It gave me a new respect for every employer I'd had.

## Why it matters to you

It's why, when you work with Cloudless Labs, you're dealing with a business owner, not only an engineer. I've managed cash flow, written contracts, chased invoices, and sat where a founder sits. I understand what a technology decision costs your business, not just what it costs to build.

## Built with

- Lean start-up
- Customer discovery
- Prototyping

## Related

- [Cloudless Labs, the business behind this site](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/cloudless-labs/index.md): a related project
- [FairplayTech, a website platform for recruitment agencies](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/fairplaytech/index.md): a related project
- [Every project](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md)
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)