Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s fantastic book “skin in the game” explains the importance of exposing information to the external environment instead of just internally developing them. Accounting for all variables is beyond the scope of a single mind.
Overcoming my own perfectionism is hence crucial to enhance the value of the innovations I produce. I always and obsessively overworked concepts in my mind to the point in which I got bored by them and consecutively discard everything.
My perfectionism has become a synonym for procrastination. By now, I understand that, and will counter that by exposing my thought-work as open and public as I can.
An origin story
I am Nikolas Adamopoulos, 29 years old and live in Bonn, Germany. For a living and passion I design fashion, software and business. Currently I work towards my Masters in Business Administration at Warwick.
My father emigrated from Greece to Germany in the 70s and married my mother a week before my birth in 1990. She is the daughter of a German nurse and a Jordanian doctor. Being of Greek-Jordanian-German descent disabled me from having a national identity. Living in Germany, Germans perceived me as Greek. For the Greeks, I am German. And as I’ve no contact to my Jordanian relatives, I don’t know what they’d see me as.
After my father graduated in Geology – he only studied for the Visa, no interest in rocks whatsoever – he started a business to recycle old leather jackets to create new from scraps. After coming to Germany dirt poor, he build a successful business that maintained a good life for our family. A migration success story.
I experienced the ups and downs of his entrepreneurship during my childhood, and it coined me well. Growing up with German friends, I realized that I am lacking that need for stability in a steady job, timed salary and role within an organisation. So I was never afraid of working my ways outside of careerism.
Making ends meet
But as I was a very difficult child and an even more difficult early adult, I moved out home as early as I could. To make a living, I worked thousands of hours for call centers employing market research. It was horrible, but at least I was freelancing and felt independent. And I always had a side project of mine working towards, which made everything feel work the hassle. Building an online store for alternative fashion in 2008 was something I invested hundreds of hours thought into. Alternatopia never released.
In late 2009, I got recruited by a large company that sold insurances and financial products. It was commission based multi level marketing; yet I did well really quick, and it helped me reduce my hours at mind-draining call centers. During that time, I developed the idea of an agency that connects freelancers through a commission based recommendation system for clients and supports their work by matching competency to demand.
Contacts I gathered online and during work helped me build my first team ever for a venture. We build the online information technology necessary, mapped everything, even wrote a manifest for all freelancing partners. But as planning never ended – perfectionism, wink wink -, the team eventually collapsed after about half a year.
Going broke to be a manager
About the same time, one business – a health and wellness center – that I sold financial products to offered me a freelancing job as their head of strategy and personal. They were struggling, badly, and paid crap. But as a fresh 20-year-old I perceived this as an fantastic opportunity and suddenly was a superior to a dozen people.
Against the odds, this naive, uneducated and exploited young me did well. I wrote a business plan, convinced their banks to refinance their absurdly high loans and interests cheaper, revamped their online presence, established branding, marketing, customer loyalty incentives, work time systems, and restructured their entire service and pricing offer. Turnover and customer satisfaction – am still smirking by the memory of me actually taking surveys in the lobby – increased surprisingly rapid.
Also this is the first time in my life I actively experienced toxic management. Their staff was so customer-focused and eager to help people in need of treatment that they accepted to be underpaid, exploited and manipulated. With different motivations, this also included me. After a while being that involved in this business with barely any pay, I had worn off my entire savings.
No income from my finance sales business as I was not working for new clients – so I had to take night shifts at the call centers again to pay my bills.
Are you nuts?
“You should be thankful for all we did for you”, the acting executive of the health center said to me on a rather insignificant issue. But his words echoed through my mind like the sound of shattering glass, as I suddenly realized the full scope of the situation I’ve navigated myself in. Burning out personally, emotionally and financially to please a staff community and some narcissistic manager.
So I quit, and got a mental vacation while increasing my hours at call centers again.
Good evening. We are conducting market research on current political issues. It takes about 15 minutes. May I ask you some questions?
Analyzing business, finding creative approaches and creating solutions for the health business was fun, though. I wanted more of that. Further I understood how much I liked developing software and designing interfaces for my projects. So I convinced a good friend of mine I’ve worked with in the past to start a business for strategic consulting and IT. He was the programming mastermind, building all these complex back-end structures and making everything work, while I was the design thinker for innovation, function and interface.
But who the f would hire two 20-ish year olds to develop their IT and business? Finding customers was hard. Like, super hard.
We did some websites, got into an interesting project with the DHL, and were exploited for a bit by snarky entrepreneurs. It just wasn’t that successful.
Back to the roots
Eventually I got in touch with my father again and offered him our services for his small business. His company had struggled recently, and was basically a one-man show by the time we got in touch. Still selling leather jackets. Still writing his invoices with a pen on paper in 2011.
He was sitting on thousands of leather jackets cramped into a way too small storage facility – maybe I’ll find some pictures, it was hilarious –, importing from India and Pakistan and selling to some retailers he got as customers during his more successful times.
With all this stock available and the idea of getting family patched up again, I was intrigued – even as he was only willing to pay commissions for the jackets I’d sell through my work.
So I took a digital camera and started to take pictures of jackets. Then more, and more, and even more. One by one, as they were rarely more than one jacket of a type. Afterwards I’d put them on eBay. Eight hours a day, before I headed to the night shifts at the call centers again. My partner – in fear of being exploited by a snarky entrepreneur once more – vanished in the meanwhile.
After a couple of months selling jackets through eBay, we started to produce garments exclusively for eCommerce. And business took off. We hired people and grew nicely. Within half a year I found myself in a steady routine, being the driving part of a growing organisation and benefiting from the emotional system of a family business. My younger brother joined, too. I started to feel as part of something, and I started to accommodate.
Education is important, kids
During this time I met my (by now former) girlfriend. She studied design in Cologne, and I visited her university and excursions as often as I possibly could. Her dean was very friendly towards me, and I am grateful that I was allowed to learn so much about design from him and his BA program. I feasted on her academic material, and loved being engaged in her creative projects.
Not being educated myself was increasingly nagging on me. By chance I found The Open University online – an academic institution in the UK that would accept everyone for studying, regardless their prior education. As a school dropout (did not work well for me at catholic private school) this suited me greatly. So I enrolled in late 2011 and started my BA in business studies as an online course.
After that, it was smooth sailing for a while. Studying was balm for my soul, occupying my mind appropriately besides work. My partner and I reconnected, and together we slowly digitalized the leather jacket operation. Family business had more than doubled, hitting turnover records monthly. I earned good money and felt on top of the world.
Yeiks
In 2014 my left testicle hurt and cancer was diagnosed. I considered to not mention this here, but as even this insignificant post has a chance to spread awareness I’ll use the opportunity.
Self screenings are important. As well as the depletion of shame attached to such delicate topics is. There are no shameful parts to your body. It’s okay to become sick.
Occupying my mind with more work during treatment somehow helped me. I needed one semester longer for my Bachelor’s degree than ideal study time due to my hospitalization – and that bothered me greatly. The memory of how mad I was for missing examinations still entertains me. In hindsight, this was most likely projection.
In 2015, I graduated. One of my weighted modules was Technology Innovation – a brilliant piece of academic work newly introduced by The Open University at the time. It taught me that innovative solutions can be produced rationally. Taught me how you can foster ideas, how you can develop prototypes, and how an idea and an innovation are two fundamentally different things.
The next big thing
My bachelor’s thesis concerned with a mobile app that would help reduce food waste and foster community: the social network Fringsen. The historic figure of cardinal Frings morally authorized stealing to feed oneself for the public. And in post-war times, this was very well received. Hence, in the Rhineland and Bonn, Fringsen was synonymous to petty larceny of food.
I thought this to be a clever name for a food sharing app.
Exited about the unique features of Fringsen, I was unable to stop working on the idea even after I handed in my thesis (my first distinction award – hype). After some weeks of unhealthy obsession I thought that I had pieced everything together for a concept that would beat all existing social media in terms of usability, entropy and value for society.
And it was a good idea. I pitched it to my partner, and the next month he moved from Berlin to Bonn to fully commit (I really love you, man). The landlord of the industry park our family business was operating in was a super cool guy, and he gave us an empty factory hall to work in for our project.
TOIIO
It’s 2015, we had a large, empty factory hall, driving scooters through the building, being creative, hosting friends and engaging supporters – it was fabulous. I felt like we’d bring that Silicon Valley start-up vibe to Bonn, and that we’d change the world through our laptops.
Every day after a hour reduced job at the leather jacket business, I’d walk over to our factory hall and work on our next big thing.
Transformation Of Input Into Output is at the core function of all organisms and organisations. Hence the acronym TOIIO was great fit for an application that would provide the first social operating system to society. We were hyped. Even months of wearing work, the lack of weekends and financial shortages could not dampen our fire. Overcoming technological boundaries and employing top-notch systems on a regular basis made us feel powerful. We thought we’d deserve the success.
Yet we had no idea about developing a system of that scope. I failed as a designer, as I was constantly adding features. Wanted more, and more. “People also need this, and this, and that”. I was trying to embed an entire economic system within, ffs. My megalomania knew no boundaries.
“Design is reduction” the design dean taught religiously. I applied it in designing the micro of interfaces, but not to the entire scope of the product we were developing. I got lost in detail again.
Let’s get some funding
After more than a year, we had a barely working prototype full of half-baked features. But we became tired. In order to finish the app and market it properly, we decided that we needed funds. And after one meeting at a large German bank which would ‘not finance mobile apps as a company policy’ (what), they immediately liaised us to business angels they were working with.
But they all wanted ownership shares of the business – without paying for it. They’d only offer loans tied to shares. So we’d had to pay back the money with interests and also have an alien investor on the board. Yeah, we wouldn’t do that. So we politely declined and just continued working.
Punished by the harsh free market
I will never forget the feeling when a friend send me the link to a well produced video trailer for a hyper local mobile app. It advertised some features similar to ours. Uncanny similiar. It felt defeating and numbing. A quick research put to light that this app was not only developed in the neighboring town, but also from a developing agency sitting in the very same street as one of the business angels we turned down.
They already offered a beta version to check out. But luckily, it was crap – a pre-pre-pre-alpha, at best. We realized that they fought the same technological boundaries we hit more than a year ago, but also misunderstood the functionality of the concept.
I am so glad we never handed over our feature explaining business plan to anyone: as the way the business angel tried to reproduce our idea can be considered as a boomer’s (sorry) watered-down approach of using some of our features to reproduce Facebook.They failed.
Failure academy
Yet we realized that we still had a very long way upfront and would face competitors the minute we’d release. Further, family business started to stagnate and rightfully pressured me to fully work with them again. So my partner and I put TOIIO on pause in 2017 and decided to make good use of the technology and skills we had acquired during app development.
We founded the web developing agency GDFO. For our first project, we decided to develop an inventory management system for the leather jacket business – as none of the existing solutions could match my requirements for operation. Within half a year, we had the fastest loading web shop in the world running (still in 2019 ;)) for the leather jacket business.
Wawit slowly replaced all processes and information systems of my family business. We carefully tested our system on a daily basis in action, and consistently developed it bit by bit.
This entrepreneurial venture was more successful. The GDFO developed management software for an university, networking systems for large trade fairs, and sophisticated eCommerce solutions (e.g. for automatic generation of article descriptions, 360° product visualization, etc).
Status Quo
Our family business is running better than ever, and we are introducing our first textile collection this year. I learned to translate my design thinking to fashion – and became a fashion designer against all my expectations to life. We are blessed to work with great people within and outside our organisation. The GDFO is fully focussed on Wawit to finally wrap up this sophisticated piece of tech for release in 2020. I was admitted to Warwick business school and just successfully finished my first semester towards my MBA.
For the first time in my life, I enjoy a healthy structure in my work. 20 year old me had never guessed the value of this continuity. We produce and experience so much. And this blog shall help me document and transition through all of this. With the introduction settled by this lengthy read, I am now exited to formulate my reflections regularly.
Writing this in one flow was already 4 hours very well spend. I enjoyed pinning down my personal history very much.