My startup died due to hesitation

I started my first company GrowthClub in Helsinki, Finland. Good business coaches are very useful for entrepreneurs but very expensive. We wanted to make business coaching 10x cheaper. The idea was to connect random startup founders in weekly 1–1 video calls so that they coach each other and therefore arrive faster at a product-market fit. It was like LunchClub but designed for serious conversations and debugging each other’s startups. We were very inspired by this vision as we both strongly believe in life-long learning and non-stop self-improvement.

We got initial traction pretty quickly but soon started doubting if founders really needed coaching. But they just didn’t use in-call coaching features for some reason - coaching agenda, challenge-setting, and accountability. They simply wanted to have serendipitous conversations and networks.

I started to doubt our peer-coaching vision but at the same time couldn’t let it fully go and pivot my startup to a new direction. I couldn’t make a strong decision. I couldn’t allow to let all my customers go and start from scratch, from those founders who truly believed in coaching, and redesigning the product from scratch. And neither I have the guts to fully give up on the vision and pivot the product towards networking or emotional support that existing customers longed for.

I have spent a year like that going back and forth. Growth stalled, and I was getting demotivated. I was pushing hard but pushing everywhere, in all directions.

And then I burned out. I found myself stuck in the bed, unable to even cook myself lunch.

It is the middle way between ‘works’ and ‘doesn't’ that kills you by getting you stuck. Getting unclear feedback on that coaching vision from the customers, I started to have doubts but I couldn't fully commit to the vision (and e.g. restart with a new user group) or pivot toward the needs of the users. The hesitation virus grew like a tumor. Hesitating, I lost that decision-making momentum and without a decisive leader, GrowthClub was already doomed 4 months in.

You can read my full post-mortem here