Launch a Startup in the open: Get behind the scenes access on our wins, losses, and lessons learned

In 2024 we launched a startup completely in the open — the highs, the lows and everything in between. Here's what we set out to do, and why we'd do it again.

*Rami intro video on building on building our ventures publicly*

Hi, I’m Rami and I’m a co-founder at Mindlace.

We’re a full-service digital agency and Venture Studio. Back in September 2024, we set ourselves a challenge: publicly launch a startup from the ground up, and let anyone join the journey from idea through to scaling, partnership and possibly even fundraising.

This post is the original manifesto for that experiment - kept here as a record of what we set out to do, and why we still believe in building in the open.

How to follow our current work

That first open venture - UnderDawgs - has since been wound down, and its learnings now power the Mindlace venture studio. But the open-building habit stuck. The best way to follow what we’re building now is to connect with me or Mindlace on LinkedIn, where we share regular updates.

*Find customers where they are*

Why launch a startup 100% in the open?

• Weren’t we risking giving away our secret sauce, the roadmap of whatever we did build and just inviting in more competition?
• Well, yes obviously… But we believed the pros outweighed the cons. By building fully in the open we aimed to achieve a couple of key things...

1. More trust with potential clients and venture partners
2. We’re a bootstrapped business. We use the income generated from our client engagements to start our own internal companies.
3. So we needed an effective inbound marketing strategy. This was one of the levers in that journey - showing potential customers that we are actually very good at what we say we are!
4. We could also let customers self-select. Would they think, from this content, that we’d be an enjoyable outfit to partner with?
5. An audience of some of the most talented people on the planet
6. Not everyone we work or partner with would come in the first month or even year of producing content.
7. But the goal was to produce such authentic work that we stick in people’s minds and they come to us when they’re ready - as either a client or a potential co-founder of one of our ventures.

Underscoring this client and audience work is transparency. It’s a massive trust builder. So the only way to go was complete authenticity. Show the wins, show the losses. Show the often painful journey to get something from one’s imagination into reality.

The other things we got out of it:

1. First, by inviting you in, we naturally became better at analysing and improving our own processes and commercial acumen. We wanted to be brutally pragmatic about venture building and not get caught up in blind, wishful thinking. Grounded optimism was the spirit we set out to embody.
2. Second, building a bloody business! It’s easy to get completely caught up in client work. We needed a driver to build our own venture. So our content creation calendar became a flywheel for pushing us to get the work done!
3. Third, we thought we might even somehow find our first customers for the venture through this endeavour. Though that was less of a goal tbh!

We ran the project on our LAUNCH framework - the process we’d developed for taking startups from the ideation stage through to product or service launch, and the foundation of what’s since evolved into Pathforger.

We documented every step of the process, from the early startup ideas, to research, design and finally laying the building blocks of the company - sharing it along the way via our blog and YouTube channel.

And we stayed completely transparent throughout. We didn’t sugarcoat our experiences or pretend that everything was going perfectly. Instead, we shared our authentic experiences so others could appreciate that we all go through that pain, as well as learn from our approach, the LAUNCH framework and the tools we used.

Building a startup is hard. Doing it in the open kept us honest, sharpened how we work, and built exactly the kind of trust we hoped it would - lessons we carry into every venture we build now.

First question we had to answer back then: what should we build? What makes a good startup idea? That’s where we dug in next.

... And no, we didn’t build a compression algorithm and pick a fight with Hooli (if you know, you know) #RIPPiedPiper

*Pied Piper!*

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