Second year of college, I came up with my first business idea: to build an app to book sports venues online. I called up my homies to our usual COVID hangout spot (one guy's parents' basement), pitched the idea and went straight into building. After 6 months of coding, we launched.
The first few weeks were magic. We put up posters on every empty wall of the city. Talked about it non-stop among friends and peers. Went to the venues in person and promoted it among the players. Enlisted a couple of football turfs and tennis courts and got our first 50 bookings. Yay! We became a hot topic in the town, it felt great overhearing about us from random social groups. Things seemed promising.
Three months in, the math caught up with us. Our commission-based pricing in INR couldn't cover our cloud server cost in USD. Unless we scaled this to at least the entire state and acquired promising usage, we wouldn't be able to equate the operating cost over revenue. Moreover, we had a well-funded competitor who had already sacked up the best venues in the city. We were bleeding money we didn't have. And finally had to give in.
That was 2021. Over the next five years, I'd repeat this cycle five more times.
I've built stuff ranging from software apps to a seafood auction setup. Made a couple of bucks, and lost a ton. Sometimes I ran like a maniac, and sometimes crawled like a worm. I bounced back from each with doubled energy, and went head on to the next. Fast forward to today, I'm 24 years old, and I'm at the brink of my 6th startup going bankrupt.
There must be some common traits among these fuckups.
When I think about it, I realize it's more to do with me as a person, than it is about other factors of a business, like the idea or market or partners. It fundamentally comes down to my mental state. The clarity in the decisions that we make, where we make them from—out of love for what I do, or out of fear, or anxiety. Each decision is in fact the lego blocks making up a successful enterprise.
I was overruled by my own certainty, and I usually skipped the market research. And went straight onto execution. And at the end of that road awaited the harsh realities of the market—that the problem was never there in the first place.
Two years back, we built Follo.site—a personal portfolio builder. Even though several website builders are out there like Wix, they were all sophisticated, and involved many steps to get a working portfolio up and running. We thought of an abstract approach of a 'personal portfolio in 3 simple steps'.
Within a few months, we built the product with a few templates and launched. We thought of a pricing strategy of one-time payment of $10 (since we were targeting college students/grads, we assumed they couldn't afford a monthly subscription). But it was too cheap and would need a considerable amount of customers to match our expense. At the same time, there were exactly similar portfolio tools out there, and most of them were free to use. Unlike the competition, we couldn't afford a free plan, nor wait to monetize them. And eventually we parked the app and gave in.
I'm a builder. I love building. But selling? I avoided it. Deep down I knew marketing mattered, but I hid behind the idea that 'a great product sells on its own'.
BrainwaveAI, a Shopify app we built, proves this point. It was an AI sales analytics tool; Shopify merchants could chat about their sales metrics within the admin page. It was during the start of the GenAI hype and GPT-3 was the most capable model at that time. I genuinely believed we solved an actual problem, but the product was not perfect. Early models were off sometimes, which caused a lot of inaccuracies with the numbers. So we were obsessed over its perfection and kept building. Completely avoided the idea of marketing or getting customer feedback. We waited for shop owners to discover us by themselves in the app stores. Outcome? Zero customers, burnt all our runway, and shut it down after 8 months of building.
This is an enemy in disguise for me for a very long time. Usually I go into my cave with an idea and build it (myself or find people who can) for 6+ months straight. Even though we go for an MVP, I was never satisfied with the incompleteness of the idea and presenting the half-baked result to the world.
Uniteam was this on steroids.
An all-in-one communication tool for teams. The aspect of 'All-in-one' was our real threat.
We put all the tools that a frontline team would need into one platform, which, especially with a small engineering team, took us 8 months to build a so-called "MVP".
Since then it was a never-ending cycle of feature after feature; plan, build, ship, non-stop. It went on for the past 2 years, without a breather, or to see if what we built was actually being used. But the fear of not "shipping fast enough" consumed us. Now we are at a decisive phase, learning from our mistakes, and looking for a new direction for our company, with a more focused core product with actual customer validation.
I'm not done failing, but here's what I know now:
Validate the idea: Do not build until I have at least 10 prospects eager to buy it. Go out and talk until you find enough critics and "this sucks".
Market the bare minimum: Build the bare basics and go full on to reaching as many people as you can. Talk about it non-stop, and wait for some traction and early signups.
Don't try to do everything: Once the basic solution is ready, only iterate based on customer demand. Otherwise direct that energy and resource towards marketing.
Now it's time for me to stabilize with a job and keep building at scale. But I'll be back to entrepreneurship soon, can't help myself.
Six failures taught me these lessons. I'll probably ignore half of them on the next one and learn new painful truths. That's the game.
If you're on a similar path and want to commiserate or share war stories, hit me up.