Building and Launching a Startup During a Pandemic

Conventional wisdom says don't start a business during a recession. The data tells a different story. Airbnb, Uber, WhatsApp, and Slack were all founded during or immediately after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Recessions clear out incumbents, shift customer needs, create available talent pools, and force founders to build lean, sustainable businesses rather than bloated, venture-funded ones. The same dynamics apply in 2020, perhaps even more strongly given the magnitude of behavioral shifts driven by COVID-19.

This year, I co-founded InCollab consultancy and launched RateIndicate.com, a platform that would go on to win Best Startup of 2020. The decision to build during a pandemic wasn't reckless optimism; it was based on a clear-eyed assessment of market opportunity. The pandemic created urgent new needs around digital comparison tools and transparent pricing that existing solutions weren't addressing. When the market shifts this dramatically, speed matters more than perfection.

The pandemic also provided unexpected advantages. Customer acquisition costs dropped as traditional businesses reduced their advertising spend, leaving cheaper digital inventory available. Talented developers and designers became available as companies downsized. Potential partners and collaborators were more receptive to conversations because their calendars were suddenly open. If you have a viable idea and the resilience to execute under pressure, a crisis can be the most fertile environment for a new venture.

Building a startup during a pandemic forces extreme discipline around product development. You can't rely on generous runway, easy fundraising, or forgiving customers. Every feature must justify its existence by directly serving a validated customer need. This constraint, while challenging, produces better products than the feature-bloated platforms that well-funded startups often build when resources are abundant.

Our approach with RateIndicate followed a ruthlessly prioritized development process. We started by identifying the core problem: users needed a transparent, easy-to-use tool for comparing rates and making informed decisions. We built the minimum viable product (MVP) addressing that single need, launched it to a small group of early users, and iterated based on their feedback. Features we thought were essential turned out to be unnecessary, while capabilities we hadn't considered emerged as must-haves through user conversations.

Practical lessons from lean pandemic product development:

• Talk to users before writing code. Video calls replaced in-person user research but were equally effective. We conducted 30+ user interviews before building our first prototype.
• Use no-code and low-code tools for prototyping. We validated assumptions with clickable prototypes and landing page experiments before investing engineering time.
• Ship weekly. Small, frequent releases let us learn faster and reduced the risk of building the wrong thing for too long.
• Measure ruthlessly. We defined success metrics before launching each feature and killed anything that didn't move the needle on user engagement or retention.

Every startup depends on its founding team, and building that team during a pandemic presents unique challenges. You can't share a whiteboard in a garage, grab coffee to hash out strategy, or read body language during intense product debates. With InCollab's founding team distributed across countries, we had to build trust and culture entirely through digital interactions, and what we learned applies to any startup building a remote-first team.

The most important ingredient in a remote founding team is explicit communication. In an office, much context is absorbed passively through overheard conversations, whiteboard sketches, and casual interactions. Remote teams must deliberately share context through written documents, recorded Loom videos, and structured meetings. We documented every major decision, its rationale, and the alternatives considered. This practice not only kept the team aligned but created an institutional memory that proved invaluable as we onboarded new team members.

Hiring remotely also opened doors that geography would have closed. Instead of limiting our talent search to a single city, we accessed a global talent pool. We found exceptional developers in markets where the cost of living was lower, allowing our limited budget to stretch further without sacrificing quality. The pandemic taught us that the best team isn't the one that lives closest to your office; it's the one assembled from the best talent available anywhere. For early-stage startups, this geographic flexibility can be the difference between affording three mediocre hires and two exceptional ones.