Why my startup failed, and how I knew when to quit

Yesterday I got an email — “Your domain registration has expired”, and finally said goodbye to my startup that failed long ago. Here’s a look back at that, and what I learned.

I’m 24, and I don’t have any kids but it sure feels like I’ve had a baby before. That baby was a startup, Aquaponos, that I tried to launch in college. As you can infer by the title, it didn’t work out — and that’s okay because we learned. I remember sitting with my co-founder Chandler while on a trip to Silicon Valley for our startup. I asked him, “Why are you doing this?” We both decide that we were there to learn. Aquaponos was a grand experiment for us, and an idea to make the world a better place — we were learning as we went. Does that make a good business model? Probably not, but here are the results of our experiment.

You actually need to sell things

That sounds pretty obvious right? But it wasn’t to three co-founders with engineering backgrounds who were obsessed with their product. We essentially ran an R&D business and spent all of our time building. What we really needed a more diverse skill set as we would have benefited from someone who was just as obsessed with sales or business…