Struggle, Succeed, Fail, Repeat: My Entrepreneurial Journey | Part 1

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Robert F. Kennedy

This post is for all aspiring entrepreneurs. Maybe you don’t have a business idea yet, but you can feel the entrepreneurial fire inside. Maybe you’ve got an idea and don’t know how to get started. Or maybe you’ve already brought your idea to life and are struggling to take your business to the next level. I wrote this post for you.

For the past few years, I’ve been supporting entrepreneurs building early-stage companies and helped them make critical decisions early on to increase their chances of success. One thing I found is that first-time entrepreneurs have wildly inaccurate expectations of what’s about to happen to them. 

I’m not talking about a fear of failure - nowadays a failure or two is expected and almost considered a badge of honor amongst entrepreneurs. No, what I’m finding is that entrepreneurs expect a linear journey with only one outcome: success or failure.

While that seems reasonable from an outsider’s perspective, anyone who has been through the journey knows it’s anything but linear. There are going to be ups and downs, of course, but what most people don’t understand is that no entrepreneurial venture is strictly a success or a failure, but a fluid journey that delivers plenty of both in varying degrees of intensity. And oftentimes, true success is only possible when it rises from the ashes of failure. 

I started writing this post as a way for me to document the learnings from my experience and develop a resource for people trying to build their own companies, especially for the first time.

This is my journey, unfiltered - from my initial decision to uproot my comfortable corporate life and become an entrepreneur to the heartbreaking moment I dismantled the company I’d built from scratch. I’m going to take you through the unbelievably thrilling wins, the gut-wrenching losses, and everything in between. 

Once I got into this post, I realized there was way too much information to digest in one sitting. I’ve split this story into three parts: The life (and death) of my first start-up; the learnings from that experience; and finally how I’m using my experience to help others.

This is entrepreneurship in real life. I hope you enjoy my story, but I also hope the lessons I learned (the hard way!) make your entrepreneurial journey that much easier. 

Success or failure, you’re guaranteed a wildly rewarding ride. 

From Grocery to Urbery

In 2013, I thought I had it made. 

I was a young, power-hungry, ambitious ‘corporate guy’ working in the fast-paced corporate strategy group of Sobeys, one of Canada’s largest grocery retailers. I was earning six figures and dating an incredible woman (now my wife) who had just started law school (coincidently she’s now a lawyer at GWL, the parent company of Canada’s largest grocery retailer). 

What I couldn’t figure out was why I felt like something was missing. 

While my career was on the executive track in the long-term, my day-to-day tasks left much to be desired. I would spend hours upon hours reviewing data and trends in retail, looking for the slightest insight that could provide a strategic advantage. Then, I would transfer those insights into recommendations, presented in flashy PowerPoints and impressive looking Excel sheets to an executive team I hoped would consider my ideas for implementation. 

Then a project came along that made me realize why I hadn’t been entirely content with my career. That project was Chalo FreshCo and my involvement became a pivotal point in my career and one of the primary contributing factors towards why I became an entrepreneur. 

Chalo FreshCo was Sobeys’ foray into capturing a share of Canada’s lucrative ethnic grocery market. The concept was simple: An entire grocery store dedicated to serving the needs of South Asian Canadians executed in Sobeys’ discount store format. From the ground up, I was an integral part of the team that built this concept. That was the first time I’d gotten a taste of building something from scratch and watching it grow. I realized this was the missing piece in my career - watching the fruits of my labor blossom into a meaningful business.

Nearing the end of 2013, I quit my comfortable, full-time job at Sobeys and started thinking about what I wanted to do. At first, I considered moving to the U.S. (my wife was studying in Washington DC), but then I decided to stay in Canada and build Urbery - Canada’s very first on-demand grocery and alcohol delivery platform. 

Why on-demand grocery and alcohol delivery? At the time there were a couple of other things happening, most notably the rise of start-ups relying on crowdsourced workers including Task Rabbit, Uber, and Instacart. Amazon had also started to make inroads into the retail industry (Amazon would later acquire WholeFoods and formally announce an all-out assault on grocers, though at the time most executives still viewed eCommerce and crowdsourcing as a ‘fad’ that would eventually go away).

Lastly, entrepreneurship was having a year! Shows like Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den were at the height of their popularity and made the whole thing look so sexy… and easy! Nothing could have been further from the truth, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Building Something From Scratch

I have to tell you, I have yet to find anything quite as rewarding as building an entire business out of absolutely nothing. And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. Not only did I lack the capital to start a business, but also any technical expertise - a critical skill-set for a technology-based start-up.

At the time, I wasn’t too concerned about what I didn’t have because I was far too excited about what I did have, which was unbridled potential. Within 16 months of launching our platform, we had built an extremely loyal customer base (our average growth was 40% m-o-m and retention rate was nearly 75%), an incredibly smart team of hard-working operators, marketers, and crowdsourced shoppers, and a $100B market to disrupt.

Even knowing how the story ends, I find it hard to look back at all we had going for us and rationalize how we failed.

It Takes a Village

Entrepreneurs are often regarded as ‘lone wolves,’ coming up with brilliant ideas and working tirelessly to bring those ideas to life. Well, I can certainly attest to the working tirelessly part, but let me assure you, no entrepreneurial venture is possible without building a great team to help you. While history remembers the names of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, neither of these two men could have accomplished all that they did without the backing of great teams. 

The same is true for Urbery. There’s an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child; I believe a more apt aphorism for the 21st century is that it takes a team to support an entrepreneurial vision (ok, not quite as pithy, but you catch my drift!). I was exceptionally lucky in that I was able to attract a team of amazing individuals who wanted to join us and help bring the Urbery vision to life. 

For everything I couldn’t do, from marketing to operations, I found someone that could. With my amazing team in place, I was able to successfully recruit a fleet of crowdsourced grocery shoppers I called ‘Grocery Gurus.’ 

You might be asking yourself, for someone with no start-up capital and no full-time job, how did you pay all these people? Great question, and one I routinely asked myself whenever payday was coming near! The truth is, I begged, borrowed and scrounged - I don’t think there was a month that went by while I was running Urbery that I didn’t wonder how I was going to pay my rent. I did receive money from a few investors and family and friends, drained my RRSPs (equivalent to a US 401K), and racked up major credit card bills. But things were always a struggle and we, unfortunately, lost a couple of great people because we simply couldn’t afford to keep them. 

In addition, when I first started out, I delivered many of the orders myself. That’s right, if you were a customer of Urbery in its early days, you probably had your groceries delivered by me! Last I checked, I had done over 1,000 orders since the platform launched.

For 10 to 12 hours a day (and keep in mind, Urbery was open 7 days a week), I would receive orders, go to the grocery store and pick those orders, and then deliver them. When I got home, exhausted, I would have to complete my “real work” of marketing, planning investor pitches, strategizing operations, accounting, etc. 

While it’s tempting to try and go at it alone, trust me, building a great team to support you is crucial.

Urbery’s Crucial Pivot

When we first launched Urbery, it was a copy of the Instacart model that had been doing so well in the States. We recruited a team of crowdsourced shoppers that were paid a commission per delivery, much like a driver for Uber, and not a permanent salary. In start-up lingo, Urbery was considered “asset-light” and part of growing the “on-demand economy.”

Customers would place an order through our website or mobile app and we promised delivery within two hours. Amazingly, the model worked and we were able to deliver on that promise, building a loyal customer base. We operated on this model for nearly two years, growing the business nearly 40% month-over-month. Unfortunately, our growth also coincided with multiple well-funded US-based on-demand delivery companies closing their doors, and the investor excitement started wearing off. We struggled to close our next round of funding. 

We started looking for new ways of doing business and making more money. Many large CPG companies had already begun to promote their products on our platform, so we started to leverage those connections. After a lot of work (and negotiations) we were able to close a deal with CPG powerhouse Unilever. The idea was for Urbery to run a special promotion powering on-demand delivery of pints of their Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. We were able to accomplish this by integrating our checkout with different platforms, and then designing and managing ‘micro-hubs’ (fancy word for small warehouses) which were used to store and deliver ice-creams to consumers in under 20 minutes!

This one project was so successful that it changed the trajectory of Urbery’s entire business model. We made a critical decision to pivot from a grocery delivery company to a direct-to-consumer (D2C) fulfillment and delivery platform for CPGs looking to engage directly with end consumers. Our email and phones were buzzing with inbound leads from all the major CPG companies, who were suddenly looking to execute D2C channels. We were getting some major love from the media and even getting featured on internal executive decks across the retail industry. You can read more about why CPGs are trying to launch direct-to-consumer channels in my previous post. 

RIP Urbery 

Despite garnering marquee clients including Unilever, Nestlé and Kraft Heinz, I had hugely underestimated the length of the B2B sales cycle and we were quickly running out of money. Pivoting from a B2C app to a B2B Enterprise company is a significant challenge especially when you have less than 5 months of runway left (I'll cover the nuances in a future post). In fact, we showed nearly all the signs that were famously quoted by Paul Graham as the “The Fatal Pinch”. With the constant stress of finding ways of making payroll through personal finances, constantly hearing “no or maybe” from investors, 90-120 day payment terms from clients, and suddenly having some debt on our balance sheet and potentially going through bankruptcy, I ultimately made the heart-wrenching decision to close down my very first start-up. I did try to sell the business and had some interested parties, but the offers and commitment required were not meaningful enough to pursue these options. 

Sure, I had run out of money. But there was another factor, one I find doesn’t get talked about as much: I was burnt out. After nearly 4 years of working non-stop, 7 days a week, dealing with constant rejections, and taking on the stress of not knowing whether you can make the next week’s financial commitments, racking up significant personal debt - my body and mind had simply had enough. 

I’m glad that more entrepreneurs are now openly talking about the burn-out issue. Here’s my good friend and the inspiring founder of Sampler, Marie, sharing her battle with burn-out.

This is the end of Part I. In the next post I’ll try to provide more details on what I’ve learned from my experience of building Urbery and some advice for early-stage founders building companies today.

If you’re building a company and are at a Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, or Series B stage, and looking to get my thoughts on a specific challenge, I’m happy to connect on LinkedIn. Shoot me a DM, I’d love to learn about what you’re building. If we haven't met before, please add a little note on why you’d like to connect - it makes it easy for me to respond back in a timely fashion. You can also follow me on twitter @moodz.

Cheers,

Mudit