And that’s the end: Eight lessons from a startup trying to change the world.

TL;DR we didn’t find Product-Market Fit.

After three years of hard work with really high highs (like landing John Lewis as a flagship client) and very low lows (like not managing to raise a single GBP for our seed round in September 2022), my startup, Kiteline Health, has shut down. I have learned so much during this time, and although I feel battered and bruised from the experience, I don’t regret a moment of it.

Kiteline was born out of my experience with breast cancer in 2015 and 2017 — I had (and still have!) a lot of trouble figuring out how to improve my diet, how to do enough exercise, and how to implement other lifestyle changes I need to make to reduce my risk of recurrence. Kiteline helped people living with long-term conditions do these things through health coaching — an approach that believes people already know what they should be doing, but need help actually achieving those things. Coaches help people prioritise what areas to work on first and identify micro actions they can take.

Photo by Kaylee Garrett on Unsplash

I still fundamentally believe in the problem-area: lifestyle change is a huge area ripe for disruption. No one has cracked this yet. Inspiring people to actually change their behaviours at scale is really really hard. What actually worked well for Kiteline was connecting people one-to-one with our brilliant health coaches. Sadly, this is not a scalable approach and is prohibitively expensive for many. The new wave of generative AI innovations provide a glimpse of a future with virtual, affordable coaching for all — once someone has a big enough data set to start generating meaningful conversation.

There are lots of things we did brilliantly, and of course lots that we got wrong. Over the course of a few months — while I took a well-earned mental break, and also look after my 7-month old Aidan — I published a series called “Startup School” covering the mistakes we made and things we learned across:

1. Product: All the age old tech startup lessons we didn’t listen to.
2. People: How we tried to access the right skills and networks on a startup budget.
3. Luck: Building during a pandemic, cost of living crisis, and multiple personal family crises.
4. Sales: Building a process from scratch; getting distracted by early wins.
5. Content & Marketing: Finding that elusive USP.
6. Funding: to VC or not to VC. And paying yourself properly.

Let me know in the comments which you are most excited to read, and if I’ve left any important ones out you want to hear about.

Before signing off, I just wanted to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of my co-founder, Christine Beardsell, over the past three years. She has been an excellent co-pilot and worked so hard to make this work.

With a broken yet somewhat relieved heart,

Candice