How to fail with your startup like a Pro.

Hey Indies, this will be a long one :)

It's my boring adventure on how I started and failed with my previous startup and how you can avoid to do so :)

2017 was the year of hype for mobile apps, everyone was building mobile apps for laterally everything, something like AI wrappers nowadays.

I was building my mobile app ass well for promotion of local business. My girlfriend at the time got the job in Dubai and we moved there from EU.

Tech market in Dubai was pretty non existing at the time and therefore I could only get the job in hospitality industry to survive as it is super expensive place to live. And I am not afraid of any job so I took my first opportunity as a waiter while building my app in my free time.

My free time was almost non existing while waitering tables, so I transferred to work in the kitchen with zero cooking experience but more free time for my app development.

I met my now good friend and ex co-founder while working in the kitchen. He gave me an idea to start new company together and that we should focus only on the hospitality industry as it is booming at the time of us being there.

Just to mention, that would be my 3rd startup, but first one with co-founders. We started roaming around asking questions in our free time to see where we can start and what are the major pain points in the market.

Since we had access to most of hospitality venues because we kinda worked in fancy restaurant kitchen which everyone knew in the city. Mentioning that we work there opened many doors for us to ask questions and talk to business owners.

Basic idea was to build the app where users can discover promotions for food and beverage based on geo location. Very simple mobile app, you open it up and you can see the nearest promotions around you, the more you scroll the further it goes in the distance from your current location.

I started putting MVP together while my co-founder was doing more research and learning about go to market strategy. We started visiting businesses and signing them up for our launch day.

Soon we realized this will require much more time than we expected and my co founder left his job to be on it full time, for sake of having more free time to visit potential customers and talk to them.

Money I was making at the time was not good enough to sustain us, so I started searching for a better job with less working time but better pay. (Trust me it's possible there)

I sent CV to multiple places and got an amazing job offer with a huge pay and less working time. I know, it sound ridiculous... Of course I didn't take the job because I believed we are onto something big.

We had few video calls with potential investors who were interested in our idea. My guts was sayin that in no time we will all sit next to Mark Zuckerberg as billionaires. Instead, I was without job and minimal savings of $2k.

Since we needed someone with good marketing experience, I called up my friend from India who was a marketing veteran and working as a director for big marketing company in Dubai. He cash in $5k initial capital and decided to join us part time while still doing his job.

Now I could say we had a good team of 3 (2 of us jobless) and some tiny capital in our hands. But life cost was too expensive. This was the time to leave my nice big apartment and search for something more affordable.

Next 4 months we ended up sleeping on the floor of my other good friend who was more than generous to let us live in his tiny studio. The app was taking off very slow since we didn't have great marketing budget.

Fortune favors the bold... While I was moving my stuff from my previous apartment, I met one of the neighbors in the elevator who asked what is happening and why I am moving out. I proudly said I am starting a new company, and I am trying to reduce my life cost. He was curious and invited me for a beer to understand what was our startup about. After our casual meeting he decided to cash in $100k as an investor.

Things were looking better than ever, after months sleeping on the floor we could finally rent some tiny space with normal beds and pushing our app to success.

We had decent amount of businesses using our app for free but users are expensive to acquire, so our silent investor decided to introduce us to some VCs. Obviously getting more money is never bad idea. Right?

After several meetings we started losing our focus on the app since it was only 2 of us actively working on it. If you ever raised any capital you know how time consuming it is.

Few dozen VC meetings later we are at the dinner with a prominent hedge fund manager. Few drinks later we are talking cash, few days later we signed the term sheet and we officially raised our first 2 mil.

It was such a relief, you don't have the pressure of thinking about the cash anymore. But now you have 5 people at the table instead of 3 initial founders. 5 people means 5 different ideas on what should be the company's next step.

Since my primary role was development I decided to move development team to India and employ devs there, more skilled people at lower cost. HQ remained in Dubai for marketing and sales purposes as our target market.

The time was passing by, team was proposing more and more useless features in the app. The VC model is: keep it free and scale it to millions of users, than you will start generating revenue.... Yeah right!

My guts was telling me this will go downhill and so it was. High burn rate, less communication with users, lack of focus, expensive marketing, and I would say a lot of pressure from investors was bringing the company down in just under 3 years.

There it is, burned in ashes. Almost 3 years of unforgettable journey and crazy times, from believing that we are next FB to going back to 0. I can't say I was not sad, you read about all those successful startups in Techcrunch and your desire for success become like a drug, you get high on it and you want it to last forever.

But my journey did not end there, I started another small startup from India which turned out to be a decent small business and sustained me for years to travel around the world, meet amazing entrepreneurs and get new friends.

I loved every part of it! Lot's of lessons learned. I moved back to being solo founder and I keep building.

Luckily I took a lot of pictures during this crazy 3 years journey as a reminder to don't make same mistakes in the future and maybe some day I will share it publicly :)

Single lesson learned: Validate, build, sell!

Thanks for reading!