Most stories I read about startups are focused on the successes, and I get that. It’s way more fun to talk about your wins, no one wants to re-live or highlight a part of their life that was difficult or downright painful. There are the odd stories about failed startups, but they’re usually relatively big ones that failed spectacularly. Writing about the small failures or the ones that just fizzle out doesn’t get as many clicks and the people involved often don’t want to revisit them. This unfortunately results in a skew, where people only see successful startups and don’t understand that failing and struggling is part of the process. I am by no means qualified to talk about success, so instead I want to talk about the time we almost quit our startup.
We’d been working on our new startup idea, Flowcast, for about 8 months and we had what we believed to be a pretty good product. We had a small group of early users and we wanted to get it in front of more people. So we did what many early stage startups do — we launched on Product Hunt. We talked to people that had done launches, got tips and advice on the best ways to do it, prepped for a couple of weeks, and stress tested our servers. We were ready!
We finally launched it on the 31st of August, 2016. We’d cleared our day and were ready to deal with the influx of new signups. We started getting upvotes and engagement, and even made it above the fold on the front page. People started signing up and we were feeling good. At the end of the day, we were sitting within the top 10, not great by any means, but not bad. To all our friends it looked like we’d killed it — “Great launch, that’s awesome!”
Yet, after the excitement settled and we looked into the stats, that big bump in signups and all those new users looked great, but only on the outside. Our usage wasn’t significantly higher and after about a week, most people had dropped off.
There was initial excitement about the idea and it looked like the launch had gone great, but at the end of the day it was a lot more “meh”. The launch was in that grey area: not great but also not a complete failure that invalidated our idea.
Now, this wasn’t our first go at a startup, we knew that we weren’t going to hit it out of the park on the first try. We were actually in a pretty good spot — we were seeing drop offs by people that signed up but we had an idea of why they were leaving (some even told us directly) and we knew how to fix it.
Yet, there was still this terrible feeling of impending doom, like we’d failed terribly and no matter what we did, things wouldn’t work. We’d entered the trough of sorrow.
By all measures, we’re still there, but we’re dealing with it a lot better.
Looking back on it all — that terrible feeling, the gut wrenching anxiety — wasn’t only related to our business, or our execution of it; there were a lot of external factors as well. It’s much easier to step back and understand that now, but at the time it felt like the walls were closing in.
In the few months since then, we’ve managed to figure out why it felt like that, and we’ve done a lot to address each issue we identified. But it wasn’t a single moment of clarity, it was a relatively long, and at times painful process.
Before figuring out how to make things better we had to figure out why it felt like everything was going terribly. After a lot of introspection we narrowed it down to three main problems.
First off, we put too much expectation on the launch. In our minds, launching was the end goal, the thing that would get us a ton of users and solve all of our issues. Of course, that didn’t happen.
We got decent number of new signups, some of which even started paying us. However, it was nowhere near the success we were hoping it would be.
In hindsight, thinking a launch would be our saving grace was incredibly naive. Even though we’d read about the fact that publicity almost never results in sustained growth but rather a small bump, we unfortunately had to experience it ourselves to really learn it.
The second thing was that we gave ourselves an arbitrary deadline. If we weren’t making enough revenue to sustain ourselves by such and such date, we’d quit. This deadline was coming up fast.
Looking back, pushing to launch was somewhat of a last ditch effort to make things pick up. As you know, the launch was much more “meh” than we were hoping, and with that it looked more and more like we’d miss our deadline.
There was a reason for this deadline though, which brings me to the next issue we had: we were running out of money.
We’ve been trying very hard to bootstrap Flowcast, and at that time we were living off savings. We were very lucky that we could each still live at home with our parents, so our expenses were minimal. We also had a tiny bit of income still coming in from our previous startup, but that barely covered its own costs. And after over two years of doing this, it was getting pretty tiring and our runway was getting ever shorter.
As I said earlier, this wasn’t all apparent at the time — back then, things just felt terrible. This clarity of what was wrong came only after a couple of months of reflection and many, many long conversations. We only knew something was wrong and we had to find a way to fix it or we were done. So, in a somewhat chronological order, here’s what we did:
The first thing we knew was that we needed money. Our hopes were that launching would bring us enough paying users to solve that. After the launch, it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen. So we set off to find other ways to make money. Eventually, after a lot of searching, we managed to figure that out. My co-founder Haneef started doing freelance web development and I started working remotely for another startup. But even with income coming in from part time jobs and enough time to work on our startup, there were still other problems.
We were starting to feel worn out and there was a lack of motivation to continue working on the Flowcast. This was a much bigger problem than money. If the excitement to work on something cool and the motivation to get through the difficult parts was gone, we were pretty much finished. Luckily, having been friends for 10 years prior to being co-founders, we had a pretty good relationship. We were able to talk openly about things and ultimately decided to take some time off and see how we would feel after we came back.
This was the perfect time since we’d just gone back into private beta. (Wait! What? Didn’t you just launch?? — Yes. Yes we did. But the reasons on why we decided to go back into private beta a month after launching is a post on its own.)
Now, just as we decided to take some time off is when things got really interesting. We got a call from a close friend whose startup was beginning to take off and he wanted to bring us on. This wasn’t the first time we’d heard an offer like that. But unlike previous times, because of where we were with Flowcast and the fact that he was a good friend who we knew we could work with, we decided to consider it. Going through the entire process took a few weeks, but long story short, after a lot of back and forth and some long conversations we decided not to join them. While we think their company will be very successful and have no doubt they can pull it off, it just wasn’t the right move for us.
However, the whole experience taught us something very interesting. We now know that given the right opportunity at the right time, we would be willing to leave our own company to join someone else’s.
After this, we sat down to look at our options. At this point, we’d done virtually no work on our startup for about a month. It was at a point where we could fairly easily shut it all down and move onto other things, but at the same time could pick it up right where we left off. We still believed the problem we were working on was worth solving and that we could do it, but we had pretty much dispelled the illusion that it would be this massive thing that changes the way people do work — and we were okay with it.
After some self-reflection and a couple of long conversations (if you haven’t noticed by now, long conversations, usually over coffee and tea at Tim Hortons are a pretty essential part of how we do things), we made the decision to keep working on our startup.
I think going through all the things we did and knowing we had the option to quit, but deciding to continue working on it anyway, has actually made us more motivated. We’re now working part time, making enough money to sustain ourselves, and building our startup in the meanwhile. This will take much longer, and may ultimately fail, but it’s allowing us to keep working on a problem we believe is worth solving while still keeping our sanity.
If you’d like to see what we’ve been up to and keep up with Flowcast, you can check it out here: https://getflowcast.com
