Lessons Learned from Starting (and Closing) My 3rd Company in 2024

In early 2024, I co-founded my third company (a Delaware C-Corp), and on December 31, 2024, we closed it down.

We generated $0 in revenue. Each of us invested a couple thousand dollars. I personally spent hundreds (and hundreds) of hours working on it.

And yet, I consider the whole experience a success—largely because of how much I learned, lessons I will carry forward into my future projects and companies.

Here are some of those lessons from starting—and closing—my third company.

Minimum Viable Product or Minimum Valuable Product?

Does the Founding Team Have the Skills to Get Funded?

Build as Far as You Can—Then Know When to Stop

Envision Landing the Plane Gracefully

Minimum Viable Product or Minimum Valuable Product?

Most people I spoke with told me to start by creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea behind an MVP is to build the bare minimum needed to get your first product out there—quickly and cheaply.

But something about this approach never fully resonated with me. It all clicked when I started working with Ziv Tarsi , a brilliant tech product manager who introduced me to the concept of a Minimum Valuable Product.

A valuable product creates value for the customer from the very first interaction.

That shift in perspective landed deeply for me. I wasn’t just trying to build something viable—I wanted to build something inherently valuable.

Eventually, I landed on a concept that fit the definition of a valuable product. But here’s the catch: building something valuable was far more complex than building something merely viable. And with that complexity came significantly higher costs... either with time or money.

Does the Founding Team Have the Skills to Get Started?

Time and money are two key levers. As a scrappy entrepreneur of 13 years, I’ve developed my capacity to learn how to do something myself when I can’t afford to pay someone else.

For this company, we were building a piece of technology—yet neither my co-founder nor I had the technical skills to build the Minimum Valuable Product ourselves.

I spent a lot of time learning how to build an app using no-code software. But eventually, I realized the time it would take to learn to build the valuable version of the product was too great a sacrifice. I wasn’t ready to give up my executive coaching practice for this… I love coaching too much. And even though I could have built a Minimum Viable Product, I knew that wasn’t the right path either.

At the same time, we hadn’t yet raised capital to hire developers.

We were in a pickle. We needed the technical expertise to get to a stage to raise capital, but we needed the capital to hire someone with the technical expertise.?

Looking back, I think the right move would have been to bring a technical co-founder onto the founding team. That’s something I’m still keeping an eye out for—if and when the right person presents themself.

Build as Far as You Can—Then Know When to Stop

Have you ever had an idea that just wouldn’t leave you alone?

I spent two years thinking about this idea before I even started the company. Then I spent another year actively working on it.

That’s three years of mental real estate. Picture pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del on an old Windows computer and seeing CPU usage at 42%. Whoa. That’s a lot of processing power dedicated to a single program.

Since closing the company, I’ve barely thought about it. My mental bandwidth has been freed up. I feel lighter. I feel liberated.

And for me, liberation came from seeing it through.

Envision Landing the Plane Gracefully

When my co-founder and I started this company, we shared our visions with each other of what a beautiful exit would look like.

Money is the obvious answer in these conversations. But we also agreed that a beautiful exit meant maintaining our friendship and our desire to work together in the future.

I’ll be honest—this isn’t easy.

When I left my first company after 10 years, “turbulent” would be the defining word of that landing—not grace.

Navigating the hard conversations that come with closing a business wasn’t always easy, but this time, we landed the plane gently. And let me tell you—that feels good.

We landed so gracefully that, even though we just closed this company, we’re already in conversations about other ways to collaborate this year.

Success, Redefined

Entrepreneurship is riddled with closed businesses, dissolved partnerships, and lost money.

It’s easy to write stories about unicorn startups and dissect why they were so successful. But I think it’s just as important to reflect on and learn from the experiences that don’t end with a traditional success story.

This was one of them.

And it was still worth it.

As always, I appreciate that you’ve take time out of your life to read what I write and think about. If you have questions, comments, or liked what you read, subscribe, tag me in a comment, or send me DM.

Photo: Designed by Dall-E with prompts from this article.