Backwards

backwards_clock_aMany startup guides tell you how startups are supposed to be created. You should identify  a problem, create good solution, find markets and reach for success.

Process for creating UTU has been somewhat different.

Late 2011 my longstanding project for Nokia Finance & Control was wrapping up. Suddenly I had some extra time at my fingertips. This was fairly novel to me as I had been fully committed to various customer projects and own product development over very many years.

After taking some holidays my interests gravitated towards startups. I have always been interested on this area, but now I did a focused effort on this and learned many new things.

Soon I was rehashing an old startup idea with some friends. We worked on this idea for early 2012 in iterative fashion and came up with a good plan. Conceptually we were good to go, but detailed legal checks made us realize that the concept had serious legal and business problems. After some pivot attempts we decided to stop this track.

During this process I separately came up with UTU core idea. My earlier as-a-hobby experiments with “balanced flow networks” and other software concepts gave me necessary background to flesh out this idea. My understanding of finance, economics, nature of money and history certainly also pushed me to work on this idea. All this was likely happening sub-consciously. Finally the rough plan and vision just materialized in my head.

As often happens it would have been easy to just forget about the idea, but I refused to let go. The UTU system had fairly intriguing logical and conceptual properties which I thought to be quite unique.

At this point I was mainly thinking on system and platform levels. Potential large-scale benefits and transformative power of UTU became evident almost immediately. It was not however clear how one could actually make all this happen. This has been the major challenge.

My solution is to reverse-engineer from “success vision” all the way back to the “service launch” and “minimum viable product”. Thus we are doing this in quite backwards and somewhat unnatural way. This process has been very difficult, but we are making good progress and I find the process rewarding in itself.