Knowing when to fail.

This week, after a lot of soul searching and deliberation, we pulled the curtain on our efforts with Mobula, and with it, both Grabble & Popcorn will go down sinking with the ship. It's been a tough call, but we know it's the right one.

Our mission was to reimagine and redesign how Mobile Commerce should work; enabling small to medium size brands to have best in class E Commerce apps, without the huge cost and time sink. Using insight we learned from building Grabble & Popcorn; 2 high flying apps with millions of users, it felt like something we could pull off. Grabble & Popcorn were to be merely examples of products in our team's portfolio, demonstrating our abilities. To that end we used our platform to build Popcorn in a day (a process I wrote about here).

If we could solve that problem technically, we could change the entire pricing model behind it, at a point where E Commerce on mobile was growing rapidly. It seemed like an obvious opportunity, but the ambition behind how we wanted to approach the challenge is one of the key reasons we've had to pull the plug early.

How to spot if something isn't working

The reality with a project of this scale, is you have to hit your targets. We didn't. Funding provides a very clear idea of where you need to get to, and by when, and from a technical point of view, we simply missed too many of these. Having raised a substantial ￡1.6m round in December to build Mobula, it was clear where we'd need to be by July. In reality, with the technical set backs we've had so far - we were not going to get there 'til at least December/January, and with a high burn rate to solve a complex problem like this, we would be trying to fundraise for a Series A without the data & customer validation required in time.

To continue, we would be purposely lying to ourselves, sleep walking into our own demise. As founders, we asked ourselves the question:

"If this was our money, would we continue at this point, knowing what we know, and how far behind we are?"

Respect the money

We both said no. And at that moment, we had our answer, and knew what we had to do. We know how hard fundraising is, and as an Angel Investor myself, I know how hard money is to come by. If people trust you with their investment, whether VCs or Angels, you have a moral responsibility to treat it with respect. Yes moonshot. Yes be irrationally confident you'll get out of a sticky spot. Yes ignore what everyone tells you. But don't lie to yourselves.

The amount of times on our Grabble journey that we defied the odds, pulled through each time even when we had no money whatsoever, means that we as Founders have experienced enough of those moments to know when the opposite is true. With Grabble we grew like mad, but we were unable to make the business model work efficiently so we knew we had to come up with something new that investors could get behind. Out of that came Mobula.

Moonshots are hard, but accepting failure is harder.

With Mobula, we had the team, experience, industry insights and ideas of how to tackle this technical challenge, but ultimately we were trying to create something that even Shopify had spent $10m trying to crack, and failed, as they posted earlier this year. We made it clear to the team in March that being so far behind targets meant we would need to pull a rabbit out a hat by May. That never happened, and by July, my business partner and I simply couldn't see a way forward.

It was agreed with our board that having failed to get to where we needed to, collectively, it would be irresponsible to 'throw good money after bad' so to speak. From our point of view - we love to build, test, iterate, learn, lead and grow as people - but we also want to get a return for our investors. That does motivate us. Once we realised we wouldn't, it was time to accept this reality, and move on. As hard as raising money for a moonshot idea is, calling time on it and accepting you simply wont achieve it, is even harder.

And so, on Friday 13th, we came into the office and let go of our whole team. It was painful, of course. Feeling like we'd let them down, and ourselves, especially 2 of our colleagues that have been with us on the entire journey from day 1 - Mei and Sarah. Fortunately, we had always been really vocal about our targets since January, and the proposed consequences. I just didn't think it would happen.

Never give up, until you do.

Grabble and Popcorn had millions of users, & winding these down this week is very painful. We topped all the app charts, won all the awards we could, and fans loved us. We never ever accepted that Grabble would fail, and we got so many get out of jail free cards that it ended up being our party trick where no one else actually believed this day would come.

Instead - this time has come in a totally unexpected way. We always thought running out of cash would be our cause of death if anything. But in the end, it was a failure to deliver results and launch a product, and taking the responsibility that comes with that.

On to the next one

So - the reality is we now have to come up with something completely new and use the remainder of the funds (a considerable amount) responsibly on an idea we can execute and get behind. We don't know what that will be, or when this idea will just fall out of our heads - as you would imagine - the HR process of letting a team go and the weekend spent creating an inventory of your office supplies to put on Gumtree doesn't create the most inspiring setting for new ideas.

I guess from an investor's point of view - it's a mixed bag. The shares still exist, the company still exists - on paper it's basically a very well funded product with no idea. It's an unusual position to be in, but as a mission led founder, and employer, it's a failure as we go back down to 0.

Our investors have been incredibly supportive on the most part, I think they recognise that we are in this game to build something great - but of course, we need to deliver on that promise.

I'll be posting some more thoughts over the coming weeks on lessons learned in the hopes it's helpful to others, but for now, back to gumtree. And besides, I've done what my dad would have wanted at a time of stress and failure; laugh.

After all.... Laughter. Builds. Resilience.