AlgoWork Exit Strategy: Shutting Down

Our team was passionate about the work we were doing and each individual contributed a lot to the project. That should have made us sound like a solid team with enough momentum to get our business up and running. We had been offered a seed investment of $300,000 which boosted our confidence in our idea, allowing us to hire two engineers and a marketing person to help build the product and get the word out to our potential market. We were feeling good for the first few weeks, but tensions were starting to slowly rise over time. We wanted to launch the product quickly to start generating some revenue and iterate it according to the feedback we would get, but there were details behind the service such as how the backend system would work and what features we should and shouldn’t offer that the team couldn’t align on. There were some arguments about launching the app version of our product along with the website, but the counterargument was that our website was not fully developed yet in terms of features. The marketer had also reached out to a number of different companies to pitch our service to them so they could get onboard to help out the students, but we were getting a smaller number of enthusiastic responses than we expected.

We were eventually able to get a few companies to agree to the service, allowing us to launch the website, even though some of us still felt unprepared for it. After the launch, meetings became a constant loop of the team discussing what changes we could make, talking to the engineers about the feasibility of those changes for the website, and collaborating with the marketer to figure out the best way to generate more interest. Since our team was so dedicated to getting everything right, we were not only working full-time but also meeting during the weekends. With the lack of work-life balance, our stress and tension levels went up, lowering our morale and preventing any decisions from coming to a conclusion. We had all become so burned out we forgot that one of our first company cultural values would be to prioritize work-life balance. Eventually, we also realized that money was running out fast. After a lengthy discussion on a Thursday afternoon, we all came to the first unanimous decision we’ve had in weeks. It was time to call it. There was no bitterness or regret. We still respected and cared for one another until the end, but it got to a point where we were so burned out and there was not a lot of significant progress that we all agreed it was best to stop there.