$91,000 loss ??

Very few people know about my first business and how I lost six figures in that business over two years of stupidity ??

Back in January 2017, my wife & I were on a road trip in New Zealand and we met Kurt, a retired architect. He was our Airbnb host in a small town called Picton. We spent the night in his guest room and had breakfast with him. During our conversation, he said that the last seven years of retirement have been the most rewarding years of his career as an architect. After retiring from his 9 to 5, he started taking independent projects building custom homes, community churches, co-working spaces, and not only has he made more money, but it's also made him feel more fulfilled. Instead of being one of 200 architects working on a 40-story building in Auckland, he gets to be the proud architect of his community church ??

He had just one regret - not quitting his job in his 30s/40s ??

This two-hour breakfast got us thinking. We were 29 and 26 at the time - I was a marketer, Simran a developer - we decided to brainstorm ideas and start Stamplet - a consumer app that rewards people for sharing their receipts. The idea was to harness that data and provide market insights to the organized retail sector ??

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The GOOD ??

Speed of launch: We thought about starting a business in January 2017 (on our New Zealand trip), launched the app in three months on April 14, 2017 ??

Traction: We pitched the business in various competitions and got ourselves into Techstars - one of the biggest accelerators in North America within one year ??

Proof of concept: We scaled it to 10K users in six months and got a proof of concept with one of the biggest mall chains in Hong Kong ??

The BAD ?

Expectations: My business plan was way too ambitious; we estimated $1M annual revenue in Year 2. In real life, we lost $91,000 by the end of year 2 with $8,000 in gross revenue ??

Raising capital: I got sucked into the hamster wheel of pitching to angel investors and VCs. I spent seven months and numerous hours doing it, when the same time could have been spent on the business to make it profitable ??

Product-Market fit: We launched a consumer app in Hong Kong, with a total population of just 7 million, a market that we did not know enough about, and we did not speak the first language ??♂?

Two years later, we fixed #2 & #3; raised capital from a strategic partner (instead of a mindless VC), moved the business to India, and transitioned into a B2B business to recover lost money. We still lost a lot by the end of it, but we learned priceless lessons:

• Fail cheap & fail early - I did the opposite with Stamplet.
• Keep it simple - we made more money selling a stupid potato in a box than this complicated app business (more on this next week)
• Have a mentor who has done this before - Our move to India and recovery thereafter is attributed to Daniel Johnsen , our mentor in the Techstars program - he was the first one who told us "this is not going to work" ??

Why am I telling you this? Just one reason - "you can't win without failing." While you might say, "but Navjot, that's not true - I know a guy who turned his first business into a million-dollar business." I am not saying that the statement is 100% true; however, as a first-time entrepreneur, you have to assume "you will fail" because if you don't set the right expectation, you will never be able to get back up if and when you fail.

It took me two years to recover from this loss, not just the money that I lost (that was the easiest to recover from) but because I did not set the right expectations. If you would have met me at the beginning of Stamplet in April 2017, I would bet my life on Stamplet turning into a $10M/year business in under 5 years ??

I swung for the fences and failed. But that's it - I was still 31:

Broke but young...

Lost but wiser...

That day, I said to myself, one day Stamplet would make for an inspiring story - and that day is today: 4 years, 2 months, and 21 days later ??

Here's an article from our early days of glory at Stamplet ??

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