20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilience and sunk cost fallacy
This is a hard read for me, because I can sense the vision and determination behind the last two years, but there has been some really poor decision making as well.<p>Here are some things that come to mind reading this:<p>* Most people are not cut out for startups, and I would include some of the people you&#x27;ve recruited along the way, by your description. It&#x27;s hard enough to get a startup off the ground without having semi-motivated partners. I think you do need a partner or two, but I wouldn&#x27;t say you have been brutally honest about what exactly you need to be successful yet.<p>* This is partly a Europe &#x2F; West coast US thing, but one thing Silicon Valley does well is create a solid revolving door for entrepreneur types -- in general, if you want to go try a startup, go for it -- even if you fail, ideally, you will learn some new skills not on the big company&#x27;s dime, and come back more seasoned and ready for another round with the big co. I know this is harder to pull off culturally in Europe, but I think some of the paths toward successfully pulling this off involve selling your experience harder, (along with getting broader experience). If you&#x27;re depressed with a year of failure, you will feel like you&#x27;re slinking back. By comparison, I would hold out examples of one of the moviepass founders who bemusedly reports in interviews he&#x27;s in demand for a follow-on startup, despite launching a massive massive crash and burn startup. And it&#x27;s right that he&#x27;s in demand; he got a startup launched with huge scale, brilliant free press and marketing, and briefly shook up an industry. I bet he&#x27;ll be back. Which leads me to point three.<p>* You have picked terrible, terrible markets. Tiny markets. Markets which require public tenders. In tiny countries. Markets where purchase decisions are made nearly infinitely far from those who require the benefits of the purchases. Seriously, these were terrible decisions. You compounded them by not getting some initial sales done first. I imagine that as you read this, right now you have roughly ten reasons why your path made sense at the time. And, I bet it did make sense at the time. But it was the wrong path. If you want US west coast philosophy, I can say that some of the best incubators on the west coast consider maybe their number one core skill market testing -- they work very, very hard at testing out if a product will sell before they write a single line of code for it. To the point that places like Pioneer Square labs are actually turning their product-fit test facilities into SAAS model products in their own right. If you prefer value investing, Buffet&#x27;s aphorism is helpful here: it&#x27;s better to be mediocre at a great business than it is to be great at a mediocre business. You could be a brilliant, brilliant coder and a brilliant, brilliant product person, but it just won&#x27;t matter if you are selling something nobody wants to people with no money.<p>At any rate, my personal advice to you is to listen to your urge to be an entrepreneur, and set your sights both much higher and also much more narrow. Pick a giant market that you care about, pick a niche you can do some damage in, get some test sales in the door, and I think you&#x27;ll find you feel a lot more successful, and it will paradoxically be less emotional work. If you can get a little success that can help aim your company as you iterate.<p>Also, it&#x27;s hard work to write your retrospective, thanks for doing it -- I hope you find some success, and can update so your readers get a feel for what to do on their own paths.<p>In summary, product-market fit is the only thing, and you should get it before you do anything else. If you sell crack cocaine, the world will beat a path to your door.<p>Crack cocaine I&#x27;ve seen this year come across my VC fund&#x27;s desk:<p>* paramutual insurance (merchants want it, customers want it, it&#x27;s cheap to provide).<p>* product authentication which works from factory to distribution to retail to end customer (manufacturers really really want and need this and can convince customers it&#x27;s in their best interests)<p>* defi lending (people want to borrow on their crypto, and want 0 friction to do so)<p>* Instant vendor network credit scoring as the real value add for supply chain management - large cos want insight into their vendor world and early warning of problems, small vendors desperately want cheap financing<p>* high margin trading volatility of all sorts - people love to gamble<p>* home insurance bought by app -- nobody wants an insurance agent, or spammy calls.<p>Most of these could have their own niche spins, but the point I hope to make is that there is a wide world out there of problems, each of the above are giant markets, with plenty of room to be &#x27;mediocre&#x27; and still have happy customers, and generate huge wealth.<p>Best of luck in 2021!