Why we walked away from $1.5m funding and shut our company down

Ex co-founder chiming in: lots of good memories and lessons learned from our journey together. Was a great ride. Post goes behind-the-scenes and is worth a read. Nice write-up, @Mden!

Thanks @Mden for such a candid testimony. It takes courage to shut down at such a critical time - but you are 100% right, motivation and belief are everything in the long run and to be able to face the challenges along the way. Kudos to you!

Great read buddy!

This was so good, I really appreciate the honesty.
My cofounder and I were about to launch our MVP for a Proptech startup early 2020 when he told me he just didn’t care about the problem we were solving (unlike me).
We decided to bench it and reading this made me realise we made the right move.

@mik thanks for sharing (and hello from a fellow 5-years-then-quit Xoogler :).

Can I ask what your MRR was when you finally shut it down?

The ongoing doubt about value you describe really resonates - for the first version of my product, it was really something I couldn't shake (and was actually thankful when Covid hit because it forced its shutdown). Now, 2 years in, even with the pivots I've made, I still have doubts around how to get more into the "meaningful category" like you mentioned.

This part really hit home and sums up the real heart of the game:

I spent countless nights pondering the question "how do we create meaningful customer value and what's the feature that will get us there". On darker days the question sounded more like "this idea will never work and we might as well throw everything out the window". To this day I still find understanding customer value to be one of the hardest elements to grasp when building a product.

I also love you talked about the general impossibility of validating an idea without actually doing some form of the idea (sounds about right lol).

It definitely sounds like you listened to your gut (which got loudest when you had term sheets) and steered yourself away from what would have been locking you into a more stressful situation for months / years to come.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I think the mistake was to focus on getting an investment as early as possible instead of looking for the best version of the product—which can be very hard without enough cash, of course.

The fact that you kept asking yourself if you were delivering enough value to your customers shows that you were still at the research and development stage. Once you had a version of your product that you and the market loved you would have been ready for investments.

Eye opening post, thank you for writing it @Mden.
I'm currently navigating the choppy waters of building a startup myself and the need to deliver meaningful value to the customer is becoming increasingly clear.
It's good to know that you grew from (and don't regret?) the experience despite ultimately winding the company down. I just followed you on twitter, please do follow back!

Love candid posts like this. I went through the accelerator experience (with a cofounder and product in place already). So based on everything you went through, I’m curious if you’d build another product requiring investment or if you’d focus on bootstrapping?

It’s such an amazing story and a really great posts in which you really focused on the whole journey and not just in one part. You just gained an upvote and a new Twitter follower :) (now you have 9)

Really fantastic read - the product itself seemed useful too. Think there can be some good innovation in this space. Look forward to seeing what you build next!

This is soooo good reading, thanks a lot! I like that you shared all your doubts, thoughts, and decisions.

The only thing that was not clear for me is : Why were you focusing most on the raising money instead of building ans selling the product? Was it the EF requirement or you just felt you probably couldn't succeed without funds?

Other questions that I would really appreciate you'd answer:

• are working on some other idea these days?
• are you still together with your co-founder?

Thanks!

Funny, I attended Antler (similar concept to EF) and we decided to shut down exactly for the same reasons. I believe this is fundamentally coming from building a business for the sake of building a business but couldn't imagine doing it for 10y+ We also had a few good conversations and signed MoUs but it still didn't feel right... in the end we dodged a bullet and now being a happy and VC-free indie hacker brings me much more joy!

great post! bootstrapping is the way to go :P

Amazing read, thank you! I wonder what insights you would have gained with survey like https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/ (reload the page for removing the popup) - from your last feedbacks, it looks like you was going in a very good direction. But right, still a big need for refining/rebuilding the product, and respectable decision before burning the money.

If this was to build your twitter following it already worked 😎

Thanks for the honest account. Your solution reminded me of one of my clients. For my current product I've adopted a mindset of "this is a project". I hope this helps with cutting the losses, if I need to. I discussed that mindset with my co-founder.

Man, maybe you don't realize that half the companies that IPO aren't useful at all? Perceived value beats actual value every single time.

I'm surprised about your positive EF feedback. It seems flawed by design.

If you have unique insight - you skip EF and raise 10x for the same amount of equity.

EF is good for academics who have no idea how the business works, where EF can push ideas down your throat. So instead of building your idea, you are building something to help them raise the next round.

P.S. feedback from a friend

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