A founder replied: "€5,000 and I'm so confused"

Hi, it's Sharan.

Two weeks ago I asked you to reply with where you are and the one question you want answered. A founder wrote back from Athens. His app is about a month from finished, and his email had a line in it I haven't stopped thinking about: "My budget is only €5,000, and I can't afford to waste advertising. I'm so confused."

He asked four things in one paragraph. How to get restaurants to sign up. How to make a new app known in his city. Whether to keep his day job during the last month of the build. And whether €5,000 is even enough.

I don't think he's confused because he's missing knowledge. He's treating four decisions as one, and they come apart cleanly once you put them in order.

The job question is the easiest. Keep it. The app doesn't need him until launch day, and that salary is the cushion. In the failures I wrote about two weeks ago, the money ran out before the orders came. A paycheck during the build is not a distraction from the startup. It is runway.

Restaurants next. Nobody joins a platform. Twenty owners in one neighborhood will say yes to a person who walks in at 3pm, shows them a working app, and offers zero commission for the first 90 days. The pitch is not technology. It's "I'll bring you orders from the blocks around you, and you keep the margin the big apps take."

And the €5,000. The honest answer is that €5,000 is a real budget for a neighborhood and a rounding error for a city. Spent on ads across Athens, it disappears in three weeks with nothing to show. Spent inside three square kilometres, on branded rider jackets, printed menus with a QR code, and a launch offer the local Facebook groups talk about, it's plenty. Last week's issue was about riders being the marketing budget. This is exactly the case where that applies.

So the plan mostly writes itself once the order is right. Keep the salary, pick the zone, sign twenty restaurants, put the whole budget inside the zone. Small isn't the compromise. Small is the plan.

This is also why Enatega works the way it does. We hand you the finished app, so your months and your budget go into the launch, not the build.

Now I want to do the same for you. Reply to this email with two things: the city you want to launch in and the budget you actually have. I read every reply, and I'll tell you honestly whether your number is enough for your city, and what I'd cut if it isn't. If your situation makes a better issue than this one, I'll write it, without your name.

Talk soon, Sharan