I do a lot of scouring on tech spaces on social media now and then. More often than not, you come across a brilliant startup idea. As they say, success has many friends so its highly unlikely you see an idea that didn’t come to fruition. Most people only identify with the finished product as there is not a lot of talk about the process it takes to get that. This conundrum is what made me take an interest in the Trends.vc newsletter startup when I came across it. Trends.vc was founded in 2020 by Dru Riley. Trends.vc is a newsletter company that helps entrepreneurs discover new markets and ideas. Now, its interesting to note that this was not his first or initial project on getting into the tech space. He has initially got into programming after leaving university and got himself a job as a software engineer. He however found that he needed something more challenging and wasn’t going to settle for the average 9-5 job for the rest of his life. So, in 2017, he quit his job. This is the part that actually got me when reading this story; from 2017 – 2020 (an over 2-and-a-half-year period), Dru was out of the labour market. He used this time to begin exploring other ideas in the tech space while relying on money he had saved up from his earlier job. Crazy right!! A lot of people would not even dream of doing such as the security of having a job and constant income is just too appealing. However, it took him having to go into a “mini retirement” to eventually get that big break. In early 2020. Dru launched his very first Trends.vc report and it took him a few months before he was successfully able to monetize his business and make his first sale. Today, Trends.vc has over 50,000 subscribers and more than 1000 members who are on their paid version, Trends Pro. The journey from the start to this point was obviously not a seamless one. Most times, when people share their success stories, there is a lot of bias towards what worked out and what they did right, which in itself is a good thing. However, I believe people would learn more from the mistakes and pitfalls encountered along the way. This is because sometimes luck plays a huge role in these things and what may have worked for one person may not necessarily work for another of replicated. In a recent interview, Dru says “I did start the newsletter until six or seven reports in. looking back, I would have created my newsletter earlier because its just a faster feedback loop”. Basically, he highlight the importance of customer relations as an important part of any company and something that helped drive his company to greater heights. Of course the usual stuff such as quality content, a wide reach, consistency, even putting on other brands on your content to increase visibility and a whole lot. He also mentions how he has tried as much as possible to avoid the ‘pitfall’ of paid sponsorships as this puts a lot of pressure on the company to please the sponsors instead of focusing on their initial goals. All in all, Dru’s story is a really inspiring one as he took the risk of quitting his job even when he had no clear plan but he knew what he was going for and it paid off in the end. Talk about fairytales.