Why Losing My Co-Founder Was The Best Thing For My Startup

We were a team of just two co-founders. Back then our startup was a startup who’s mission was to create 3 startups in 6 months, similar to and inspired by levels.io’s “12 startups in 12 months”.

We met on Reddit, Skyped, and began brainstorming. We had a logo, a domain, and two great startup ideas (the other ideas were not great). I was the Developer/I.T. guy and he was the Marketing/Sales guy. It seemed like a great fit.

Our first project was a website where entrepreneurs/startups/companies could create public collections of the tools they used to make their business successful (yes, these are everywhere now). A few months into the project, we abandoned it in pursuit of a much better startup idea that I had suddenly thought of at the time during a completely average day.

An actual screenshot of an MVP draft mock up for our first project idea.

I was super excited about this new startup idea and got on a Skype call with him almost immediately. We spoke about it for a little over an hour and he seemed equally as excited about the idea as I was. We were so excited that we knew we had to drop our current project and pursue this idea before someone else did.

Shortly thereafter, I started development while he cooked up some marketing and sales strategies. About 3–4 months later, our MVP was done, or so I had thought.

That was when, exactly 99 days ago, my co-founder told me that he no longer had time to work on our project(s) due to a new job offer that he had recently accepted. I had a feeling this was coming because, after he accepted the new job, he began to communicate with me a lot less and, to be honest, he was not getting much work done.

Nevertheless, I was devastated.

I was so excited to finally launch the MVP that I had been working on every day after work and on weekends. The MVP was ready but, as a developer, I knew nothing about marketing or sales. How was I going to pitch this to anyone??

An hour after getting the news from my now ex co-founder, I jumped on r/startups, r/Entrepreneur and the Reddit Entrepreneurs Slack chat in search of a new co-founder with a marketing/sales background.

However, I didn’t find a co-founder. Instead, the online strangers I came across gave me the best piece of advice anyone has ever given me: DO NOT GIVE AWAY 50% OF YOUR STARTUP TO ANYONE.

I was taken back because it wasn’t the advice I expected. I asked them, why not? It made sense to give away 50%, didn’t it? I knew nothing about marketing or sales, plus, we were pre-launch so we had zero revenue. Who would want to be my co-founder for anything less than 50%? But wait… they brought up a good point. What about all of the months of development and research I’ve already put in to my project? Am I just going to give that away to a stranger?

That’s when everything changed. I wasn’t going to give away all of those hours and I definitely wasn’t going to make the same mistake of picking the wrong co-founder.

After my one-hour period of complete devastation, I literally did more significant work on that day for the startup than my co-founder ever did during the total time that we worked together. I was on fire.

Here is how I recovered.

I began to connect with other entrepreneurs by being really active in the Reddit Entrepreneur chat (link is above) and learning from them. Somehow, after sharing my closely guarded startup idea with a few others in that chat, I got people excited about it and gained 3 entrepreneurs with marketing and sales backgrounds who willingly offered to mentor me. Win!!!!

Thanks to their recommendations, I read “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, and “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, watched Y-Combinator’s “How to Start a Startup”, and basically learned as much as I could on my own about sales and marketing.

That’s when I realized that I needed to complete redo my MVP because it was no longer a minimum viable product. Our approach to the MVP was totally wrong; the UI was bad, we used the wrong 3rd party integrations, and the backend was not going to work for what the startup needed and my vision for the product. Had I released that version of the MVP, I have no doubt that I would of failed to prove my concept.

I continued learning about e-mail and social media marketing, customer retention and acquisition, how to connect with my audience, and how to sell among other things. Throughout this educational experience, I also learned three valuable lessons:

1. As a Founder, I am the best salesman for my startup.
2. The worst time to look for a co-founder is when you need one (you can also say that about hiring anyone).
3. As a co-founder, you need to be involved in all decisions for your startup, even if they are not of your expertise. If you’re not an expert in that field, become one or at least learn the basics.

Today, after almost 4 months of a complete rewrite of my MVP, I launched my startup as the sole Founder and CEO (yes, I am currently also head of sales and marketing ;)).

Now, as I grow my startup, I have a journey ahead of me that is so much longer than the journey I took when I lost my co-founder. Nevertheless, I‘m incredibly excited for it.

By the way, you can check out my startup at www.vendemomarket.com.

To be clear, I am not bashing my former co-founder in any way for leaving my startup. In fact, I’m thankful, respectful, and appreciative for him because it was a fair and noble decision to make. I wish him nothing but the best.