Hang in there, friend.

Letter to a fellow founder.

I recently had a fellow startup founder reach out to me under some distress. He raised a pretty serious seed round (1M +), and his product isn’t quite where he would want it to be. He’s deciding whether to go out and get a bridge round, or shut it down. Here’s my letter back to him:

_____,

I know. I know exactly what you’re going through, and it’s not easy. You embarked on this journey with all of the energy and enthusiasm the world could fit into a single individual, and you’re now sitting there wondering where it all went. Rationally, you’re probably still just as excited about the vision and white space you originally identified, but somehow your heart may not be as into it as it once was. You just know that there’s a solution to the problem you originally identified, and you’re wondering why you and your team haven’t found it yet.

It’s gone from big highs and lows on a monthly/biweekly basis, to massive highs and lows on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Money’s running out, the team has been working hard, but somewhere the spirit isn’t there as it once was.

You’re wondering what the right call is.

Do I call it a day? Do i give up on all the people who believed in me? Investors, Co-Founders, Employees, who put their money, their lives, their energy into this idea. Do I tell them that all of it was for nothing, that we were just another statistic?

Do I pony up and get back onto the fundraising circuit? Do I pitch a story on how good we are at shipping (which we are, now), and how the next few ideas on the white board really are as good as we think they are? Do I get more people behind this and potentially have more to regret down the road?

What the fuck have I been doing. What do I do now.

I don’t know, friend. I don’t know what you should do, but I trust that whatever you choose, that will be the right call.

The thing is, nobody knows your business as well as you do. Nobody knows where the team is at spiritually, nobody knows whether the ideas you have on the white board have a 80% chance of working or a 10% of making it. Only you can evaluate all of those parameters and know what the right decision is based on all of them combined. Sure, the next idea may be the right path to monetization, but is the team going to want to be 100% behind it for the next three years? Doesn’t matter if you make it to monetization/breakeven but the team dissolves because they’ve run out of steam and find the new product direction unrewarding.

The call is all yours.

That may seem like a stressful thing to accept, but it’s actually beautiful. Whatever the call you make, it will be the right call.

If it helps, one of the frameworks we applied at our startup was Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework. If you shut down your business, would you regret not having tried X, Y, or Z while you had the capital and team in place? Look at that list of ideas on your whiteboard, and truly evaluate them through that lense. Would you sit in a bar 10 years from now with one of your co-founders saying “You know, I really wish we had tried X. That idea had legs, we really should have done it, I really regret calling it early.”

At Meeteor, we had an honest moment as founders where we realized that we had no ideas left that would be life-long regrets. We had given it our all, and the call to shut down was the right call.

I hope this helps. I’ve been there, and the good news is you’re not alone in this. Feel free to reach out anytime if you want to work through any of this - happy to help.

Philip

philip dot cortes at gmail dot com