2007

Factory Fire, Sales Struggle, Bootstrapping Survival TLTR: Had factory, tech, no sales know-how. Burn rate: €100k/month. A third went to loans for oversized factory. No turning back. Learned bootstrapping the hard way. Chased leads, landed clients. Grit kept us alive. Long-Version: We had the factory. We had the tech. But sales? We were clueless. At 21, I knew code and circuits, not closing deals. The team was the same. Engineers, builders, dreamers. No salespeople. Our burn rate climbed to €100,000 a month. A third vanished into loan payments for a hall too massive for our stage. Too committed to quit. Too green to fold. That year hit like a wake-up call. Bootstrapping wasn’t a buzzword. It was survival. No mentors. No safety net. Just raw necessity. Figure it out. Fast. We hustled cold calls, chased leads, learned rejection on the fly. Military and industrial clients trickled in, drawn to our secure, made-in-Europe edge. But it wasn’t enough. Not yet. The pressure built, nights blurred, doubt crept in. Yet that grind forged us. It turned ideas into action, fear into fuel. Looking back, 2007 was my crash course in real business. Not the glamour. The grit. We kept the lights on, kept building. The goth rebel in me thrived on the edge, turning chaos into creation. Secure WiFi wasn’t just product. It was our fight. Want to hear how we cracked sales or survived the burn?