Founders & Investors - Book On Building Startup In Real Time
I’m the founder of Enerium Health, and I’m also an author. Until recently, those two parts of my life existed almost separately. I’m a professional nutritionist, so I know how to write about nutrition and turn complex physiology into something people actually want to read. I’ve also written a children’s book, where the challenge was completely different: talking to children about health through a story rather than a lecture.
Now Enerium is going through the Health Founders Estonia accelerator, and somewhere during the first sessions those two parts of my life unexpectedly came together. I found myself wanting to write a book I had never planned to write: a book about what it actually looks like to build a company while you are still building it.
I don’t want to reconstruct this story years later, if everything works out, when mistakes have become lessons and hindsight has arranged the chaos into a convincing strategy. Enerium is still at an early stage. We have a working product, users, our first paying subscribers, a team, and ambitious plans, but I genuinely don’t know whether we will build a global company, raise a major investment round, or what Enerium will look like several years from now. That uncertainty is exactly what makes me want to write now.
I want to capture the journey as it happens: what we believe today and may discover was wrong tomorrow, how mentors change the way we see the company, which questions from investors force us to rethink our assumptions, how the team evolves, and how a product gradually becomes a business.
The working title came to me while writing the first chapter: Conceiving a Unicorn. There is something fascinating about writing a business story without knowing whether it will ever become a success story. I don’t have the luxury of hindsight. I’m writing from inside the process.
I would also love to bring other perspectives into the book. If you are an investor, founder, or entrepreneur who has seen companies grow, pivot, scale, raise, fail, or start again, and you would like to contribute your experience, please write to me.
The first chapter, “A Good Product Still Isn’t Enough,” is already written, and I’m sharing it here for anyone who would like to read it.
And a special thank you to John Collins. His first lecture at Health Founders Estonia made me question things I had taken for granted about Enerium and unexpectedly became the starting point for this first chapter.
I have no idea where this story will end. For now, I’m building the company and writing the story at the same time.
https://lnkd.in/ezZpFeWn