Shutting down Alumeet: pivot, hard pivot, rebrand, strategic shift, change in customer focus, and platform switch, all at the same time

The write-up below is a slightly modified version of an Alumeet update I sent to friends and family a few weeks ago. It explains my decision to shut down the company. I've received a lot of good feedback and requests to share more broadly. So, here you go!

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Hello!

That headline was a mouthful, right? When a startup project is struggling, it’s hard to admit it upfront.

But I’ll be clear - I’ve decided to shut down Alumeet. “But… things seemed to be moving in the right direction”, I hear you thinking?

Simply put - we haven’t found enough business leaders willing to prioritize the opportunity we’re trying to address, in the way we want to address it. Things haven’t been going wrong for Alumeet, but we needed more things to go right in order to build the right team and the right company.

What didn’t go right?

The thesis behind Alumeet is that companies can create business value by supporting their alumni better. And in our target segment, where most of the revenue comes from alumni, that seems particularly true. The offboarding experience appeared to be a great opportunity to take a forgotten stepchild of HR processes, make it amazing, and create value in a scalable way - and so Alee was born, and progressively became a social “game” which we tested with a few hundred users over the summer.

Issue 1: An opportunity vs a burning problem

Startup 101 states that “good” startup topics need to be both important and urgent. These topics are more easily prioritized by companies, and startups offering the right solution will be welcomed and showered in gold. But Alumeet’s offering was articulated as an opportunity - revenue growth. In the current economy, where industries like management consulting and law firms are generally booming, the promise of long-term revenue growth didn't create urgency. Even with our early adopters (thank you!), we couldn’t ever get to full engagement because of conflicting priorities. So, the topic of alumni is still on the backlog, but unlikely to get prioritized until 2020… at the earliest.

Issue 2: Friction in deployment

One of the key parts of Alumeet’s value proposition is running events - because they’re valuable to alumni, and to the company (case in point: a consultancy signed a contract with an alum the very day after an event). But running events frequently is expensive, and time consuming. So we offered to help and came up with an operational model that made it cost-effective. What we didn’t anticipate is the fact many alumni sponsors weren’t ready to delegate : they were emotionally invested in their personal status as alumni “leader”. That, combined with the fact that this was often their second or third job, really bogged down conversations and progress.

Issue 3: Cultural readiness

Coming back from ±10 years in the US and building a community around Google - my experience is not representative of French corporate life! Pay-it-forward is still nascent here, and most people want to know what’s in it for them before getting involved with a new thing. My rose-tinted glasses prevented me from measuring the scale of the disconnect. And I can’t say I wasn’t warned… Thankfully, things are (slowly) moving in the right direction.

Issue 4: Solo founder

I got excited about the opportunity a year ago and decided to move forward as a solo founder. This is not something I regret, because it probably was the right thing at the time. I’ve received support over time from a great team of contributors and advisors, and have been considering raising funding in order to secure the team full time. But it wouldn’t be right - see issues 1, 2, and 3… As a solo founder, I find that I’m not learning enough from other people. And I definitely have a lot to learn!

So what’s next? Back to basics

So, I started the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong location, and with the wrong setup. Shutting down is hard because it means publicly admitting that you were wrong, unlucky, or incompetent. But now that it’s done, I’m still amazed with everything that happened this past year - and far from ready to throw in the towel.

I’m committed to building another project, this time with a cofounder. We’re working on a topic that leverages what we’ve learned from our previous experiences and we're learning a lot of new things along the way.

We’re hoping to disclose our next project shortly - stay tuned!