Assalamu alaykum, everyone.
In English there’s a word: cringe. Roughly: embarrassing. Awkward to watch. The kind of thing that makes you look away. For founders, being cringe is easy. And it usually means one thing: you believe so fiercely in yourself and in the idea you’re building that you don’t care how it looks. You just put it out there.
I was 17. High school was done. I started working on something called Educator. The name felt big. The idea felt bigger. I had no idea what I was doing.
For three months I wrote cold investment pitches. To Shaha Dolimov, Akmal Paeziev, Jakhongir Po'latov, and dozens of others. I was young. I pitched stronger developers with a 10% offer. In every group or community I dropped at least one ad. That was the cringiest part. The kind of thing that makes you close your eyes and hit send. I did it anyway.
When we launched, I shot the video on my dad’s phone. I edited it on a 4GB RAM Celeron, the kind of machine that made you wait for every preview. Then we went live. That video is still one of my cringiest. I can still feel the heat in my face when I watch it. But we shipped it.
Cringe launch: Educator.uz , About the online education platform
https://youtu.be/WdP91YUXTuU
Here’s how far that 17-year-old’s belief went.
Within four hours of posting the video: two educational centers wanted to list their courses. One investor wanted to get us started. Two teams offered to help with social media marketing. The kind of response you don’t expect when you’re editing on a Celeron and posting from your dad’s WiFi.
When you stop believing in your project, your project stops growing. The engine stalls. The momentum dies. People say the engine of a startup is marketing. At the beginning, the engine of marketing has to be the founder. You. Unfiltered. A little cringe. Fully committed.