Nowadays, we are in a total startup fever, all young people want to own their own company, to not have a boss and to really work on something they deeply believe in.
Startups have a crazy death rate. It is their function: they are the fertilizer of capitalism. 999 entrepreneurs must fail and suffer, to make a large company grow and acquired or explode on the stock exchange.
And that’s okay, it’s the negative side of the market economy. We all have wonderful, incredible ideas and fantastic improvements of what is already there. The concept that you always need to create a startup if you have a good idea is silly. Everyone has good ideas.
A startup must be created only if our idea has a demonstrable market value. Do you really think that people would pay you to get what you offer? Why is the percentage of failures so high? What’s the cause? Is it because of the market? Or because they don’t know what being an entrepreneur entails? To further investigate this trend and understand better I will show an example of a start-up called Sinba. Sinba was an app made by Andrea Visconti and Alessandro Bava, in December 2013. The objective of the business was to return time to the persons, in order that they could do what they love. They conducted their business analysis and reached that their aim was to eliminate the cash desk in the shops and then eliminate the queues, making purchases faster and more practical. They realized that smartphones and the economy app allowed to improve the purchasing process.
Because of this, they developed an app that allowed to scan the barcodes of the products inside the stores, in order to create a virtual shopping cart in the application and be able to pack the products to be purchased immediately. They developed a plan and started to set up the company. In this way it was no longer necessary to go to the cash desk to pay for them, as an alternative, it could have been paid directly using the mobile phone, on which then appeared a code (QR code) that was read by a small totem located in a fast lane of the barrier, which printed the receipt and download in the warehouse. It can be seen similar to an E-zpass, where in order to pay you don’t need to queue, you just go in your preferential lane and pass.
They started to acquire financial partner and source of funding in 2015, at the business talent show, Shark Tank, the co-founders won €250,000 from Gianluca Dettori (dPixel) for the acquisition of 20% of shares in Sinba. Subsequently, H-Farm with 2 business angels invested 115 thousand euros in their project for the 8% of the company. However, when they started to determine the recourses require and implementing the plan they realized that founding’s were missing. Their business was interrupted in October 2017 with a video posted on Facebook and YouTube by Andrea Visconti who announced the closure of Sinba, with a completely unusual style. Being the father of two sons, Visconti narrated the failure of Sinba through the short fairy tale “The magical casket of Desi and Gioi”.
The fairy tale traces the various stages of development of Sinba, starting from the long and risky journey in search of investors who would help them in this venture. In addition, how Andrea Visconti and Alessandro Bava were not discouraged and continued their risky journey even when they didn’t receive shark tank money, but after all of the difficulties, they encountered the company had to close, due to bankruptcy. Before blaming the bankruptcy for lack of funds, they should ask themselves: why we don’t have money? and reflect on how to really overcome the obstacle. Could it be because of their unstable team? Visconti lived in Italy and Bava in the middle of their project went to live in Belgium.
A business is made up of people and if people are not together, it is difficult to move forward and achieve good results, they need to be perfectly organized for synchronic work.
