BUILDING A COMPANY FROM SCRATCH
Straight after graduation, Michiel teamed up with former compagnon Julian Venhuizen which he knew from his colleague time in Utrecht. Based upon their experience with survival analysis, they decided to build a B2B subscription churn company, which they were working on next to a freelance message automation project at an insurer. Michiel was responsible for, among others, the training and inference pipeline.
The product, powered by DeepSurv, a deep learning model for survival analysis, was reasonibly performant. They gave several demos at multiple companies. Only during this phase, they found out that similar churn services where offered but then within an entire suite of services. With limited resources, no product market fit, and an offer from Microsoft, Michiel decided to pause its enterpreneurial direction temporarily. Nevertheless, some important learnings kept with him from this period:
- • Do your homework first before starting building straight away.
- • Start the thought process from formulating a problem; not from applying a certain technique.
- • Dedicate your full time to a startup. Don't have a full time job next to it. The chances of success will be higher.
