“We’re going to kill this…” an Interview with Vinny Sabo on Failure

Vinny Sabo is a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) pursuing a degree in Systems Dynamics and Innovation. As a part of his graduate assistantship, Vinny oversees LaunchPad, a student-led organization that empowers the WPI community to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Vinny previously worked with three co-founders to start Partnr, a virtual consulting company in which college students served as project teams for companies seeking outside expertise. He was nice enough to talk to us about his adventures.

The following excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

Thank you for giving up your morning to speak with us. You started as a chemical engineer, so when did your interest in innovation and entrepreneurship begin?

Everything started the beginning of my senior year. I knew that I was not excited about finding an industry job…I didn’t want that, so I was looking for ways to get out of that. Tyler Stone had been working on a company (Partnr) with two other mutual friends, Sean McCarthy and Ryan Baker.

What was Partnr and what were you guys doing at this time?

(Partnr) hosted virtual consulting projects for college students and young entrepreneurs. A company would put their project on our site and a student or a group of students could take on the project for a flat rate. The value to the company was that it was a fraction of the cost that a professional consulting company would charge.

We were trying to get users; trying to get customers. We were reaching out, trying to get anyone, using all of our connections.

It was definitely tough over the summer. We were a little late in our launch for the spring of 2016. At that point, once we were actually getting projects, everyone had already gotten internships and they weren’t (on campus). We launched right after school got out, which was so stupid…

What happened at the end of the summer? You were getting these projects and you struggled with getting students. So, what happened next?

There was company struggle, but there was also team struggle because at this point we were all living pretty far apart. I had also started working nights as a server 4–5 days a week while everyone else worked days…It was super hard to communicate with everyone.

I remember I was having interest issues, too. I started questioning if I really wanted to do this. I was the one on the ground. It was hard to have me on the ground, but also have me be this indecisive weak link. It was tough and it was a lot more than any of us expected.

I feel like that’s common. Everyone jumps in saying, “We’re going to kill this,” and two weeks later, it is a struggle.

During the spring, when we were about to graduate, we were so confident. We thought, “We can get $200K in funding and we can all work full time.” But we hadn’t launched our product, we didn’t have any customers, and we had half an idea. That’s the important stuff that you have to learn.

We’re learning that right now. We think, “It’s been two weeks, why hasn’t this taken off yet?” You feel like you’ve been working on it for a year, even if it’s only been a few months.

It becomes your life. It almost has to. I remember reading a bunch of stories of entrepreneurs — tips from AirBnB, young people who made it. Everyone says, “If this isn’t your whole life then it’s not going to work out.” If you’re not 100% in it, in terms of your passion, then you shouldn’t be in it at all.

So, now to the hard part. What happened at the end?

I was actually the first one out. I bailed the very end of August. I think my exact reason was a loss of interest and a lack of time. I was starting school again, blah blah blah, excuses. Basically, I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Over the summer I didn’t know if I was interested. I was doing all sales, calling people all the time, doing marketing campaigns on MailChimp. I was having this passion crisis. I decided, “I don’t want to put my time into this. I’m out.” About a month later, they pulled the plug on the whole thing and sold the company and all the code to Tyler.

Most people would call that taking an L, as in you guys failed. What was it like going through the process of, “You know, maybe this isn’t the gold mine we thought it was?”

Yeah, I think that the big ‘aha!’ moment, in an ‘ah…shit’ way, was when we were starting to bring on a couple projects. We had one project in the works with The Worcester County Food Bank. They had budgeted $2–3K for this project. It was taking so long to work with them on their end and also on our end to find people to do the project. After the number of man hours we put in for that customer acquisition, we would only make $200 off of that. Our business model was taking a transactional cut off of the project as a service fee for hosting the project. That moment we knew, “This would be impossible to scale with the way we are doing this right now.” Our projections were ridiculous. They were too out of the park.

How did you fight that feeling of “No, we’re going to power through it.” How do you eventually step back and say, “Maybe this isn’t for us right now,”?

To this day, I don’t think it was a bad idea. I think we were just executing it wrong…Anyone can come up with an idea and any idea, if done the right way, can be profitable. There’s a market for everything. There are intricate ways to sell things, but it’s really the team. You have to look at both — how the idea is progressing and where the team is at in their lives. And if those are not lining up, then it’s time to bail.

But I’m not done with this; this idea, or changing the higher education industry. I’m not done.

Thank you to Vinny for giving up his time and sharing his insights.