Time to quit?

You might have been considering quitting the whole startup saga.

Especially during these tough times when all tables seem to be turned against the righteous.

What if you’re approaching your goals the wrong way??

Why don’t you take a lesson from this thread I find extremely beneficial for every builder here who is on my list.

Enjoy, take notes and take action:

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

I'm writing this since I have been dealing with a lot of doubts, un-motivation, and thinking of leaving my own startup.?

I lost completely my motivation, I don't care about the startup anymore and I feel scared about wasting my professional profile and one of my peers. I am thinking about quitting but don’t really know if it is the right thing.

I need support from someone in the startup world since I've been thinking like this for months now and all the people I confront don't fully understand the problem.

As a team of two, both in business roles, we run some market research in order to validate our idea and build a team that can deliver an MVP. I've always been the CEO, the first mover of the team.

Comment by anonymous:?Here's your first mistake. The majority of the effort you put into your project until you validate it with real users is basically waste.

I lost completely my motivation, I don't care about the startup anymore and I feel scared about wasting my professional profile and the one of my peers.

2020:I was very passionate about everything in the entrepreneurship world and I was feeling the fire burning inside me. So I founded a startup after winning a small university trophy. As a team of two, both in business roles, we run some market research in order to validate our idea and build a team that can deliver an MVP. I've always been the CEO, the first mover of the team.

Comment by anonymous: It's probably burn-out. What is the last time you had a break?

2021: We spent our whole year working night and day including weekends in order to get the thing started. We always made the thing look nice for investors, putting less effort into fundamentals like true pricing and the real feasibility of some features.?

Comment by anonymous: You completely over-invested in building something without testing it. You could have tested your idea in a couple of weeks with very little time and budget.

We found a third guy, a talented freelancer in digital marketing, and a bunch of talented developers that allowed to work for us after work.

?In mid-2021 without any traction (and the product under development), we raised our pre-seed and incorporated the company. We launched at the end of the year with mediocre results.

2022: everything went south when looking at fundamentals:

• We blocked our acquisition in February since our cost-per-lead was crazy high due to a major competitor putting 10x our budget into marketing. And from that time on, we have shut down our ads acquisition channel, thus not producing any metrics.

Comment by anonymous: Cost of lead acquisition is typically high at the start. If you are managing to acquire leads, that is a good sign. If you can convert them into paying customers, that's even better. Stopping your marketing campaigns is probably another mistake. All the effort you spent up to this point was done without validating your ideas. You now managed to collect a little bit of data, and your first instinct was to stop that - which is the worst thing you can do. How else are you going to understand what your clients want?

• In March the marketing guy got off the team since has been offered a position in a scale-up and decided to accept. We found a shareholder agreement and a replacement only at end of April.
• From February to May, it took 3 months to deliver a v2 of our product that basically nobody wants.?

Comment by anonymous: Continuation of the previous thread. You're spending way too much time building the product, and little time understanding what your clients want.

• We launched it some weeks ago and it is showing poor performance metrics, considerably worse than the previous product. Unfortunately, all the product is custom-built with tech industry standards, so as you can guess is not quick to iterate in order to find PMF.
• We had some talks with major players that told us that our projected revenue should be cut by half at the best of what we planned (we have no pricing power, unfortunately) and that none of the expected tech integration is likely to be carried out. So our financial model has to be scaled down by half basically.

Comment by anonymous: Don't take advice from competitors. You listen to your customers and pivot. Another mistake. You are not making business decisions based on customer feedback.

• Major discussions and disagreements in the past few months with my co-founder. We are two very different people both personally and professionally, I can write forever about the various problems but in the end, we simply don't get along. We are at a point where is painful to work together, for both of us.?

Comment by anonymous: This is normal, it is very hard to find good co-founders or someone that you resonate with. It's like dating, you have to try it a couple of times before you find a good partner. This is fine. Move on.

• He is much more determined than I in seeing the good in this startup.

Comment by anonymous: Take a month off, or two, or three, and then see how you feel. If you don't have any passion for the industry, product, etc. then move on, you're wasting your energy. But don't give up before you've thought about it properly. You are tired and disappointed, so it's normal to feel despondent at this stage.

• Despite everything, the team can sell the project quite well and the market we are operating in is very big yet with no big players in it. For these reasons (and some others I guess) we have on the table an agreement for 1M$ in seed funding coming in July. It is quite strict, and will basically lock our shares for years, with a 1-year cliff and reverse vesting (if you quit before 60 months, you lose part of the equity).
• 8 months runway left

Comment by anonymous:?Ok so the business is in good shape now.. relatively speaking, for a startup. Now you just need to decide if you want to continue or not. See above.

Now, I feel very bad in general. In 2021 I believed to be the happiest person alive, I was doing what I loved the most. I had vision, I had goals, I had objectives. In the first month of 2022, I graduated after a long stress period and started to see everything from a different perspective and now I am finding myself without any vision, any goal or any objective.

The fact that I am building this company into a little industrialized country and not very startup-familiar, makes the thing worse since our team is above the average in terms of skills, hence we are good at raising funds since all the other startups are doing worst than us.?

I am scared of the fundraising: we are raising lots of money but the truth is that we have no real idea even if the startup can be scaled to a real company or not or if we can meet what we promised in the pitch deck. Still lots of validations to do both with users and behind the scenes with market players.

Comment by anonymous: I think in general you are too focussed on fundraising. Getting people to give you money is a skill yes, but building a business is more important. It sounds like your inner voice is telling you this anyway.?

You have 8 months - validate your business case (after you've taken that holiday).

My gut tells me we are onto a dead end. For sure, the fairest move is to leave the leadership of this company to people more committed than me. By leaving the company, I think the startup cannot onboard the 1M$ funding. If I stay, maybe we get the funding but I don’t think I’ll be the best fit for the company at this particular moment in my life. Plus, I cannot leave right after the raise, since as a founder I would have raised under false premises and I honestly have anxiety / bad feelings when thinking about working on this for the next years. On top of that, I am feeling the pressure of the time running: leaving the train of graduate positions in big corporations is having me thinking of a Plan B before I am "too old".

What should I do? How much of everything is related to “entrepreneurship” and how much to a possible burnout/depression phase? Do you guys have any advice in general?

Comment by anonymous: It's probably burn-out. What is the last time you had a break?

But also, if you don't enjoy the work, then it's also not for you. I've built businesses many times that seemed like fun at the start but they ended up being a complete pain in the ass.?

For example, I build an ISP in the 90s and it was a lot of fun playing with modems and servers etc.. for a young person. But when the business got traction I realised it's 99% helping angry consumers configure their modems, and I hated it. I have many more examples like this.

So, do you like the customers you are dealing with? Do you like the industry? Do you care about what you are doing? Take some time off to think about this. If you cannot find your mojo then move on. You have a long life ahead of you and many more opportunities coming your way.

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

All thanks to the anonymous reader that made the comments.

and please, ignore the typos as my intention is to make the thread as original as it was.

Alright,

This post is already longer than I anticipated but if you’re not quitting anytime soon, you will surely need a pitch deck.

If and when you want to know when I will be available for that,?

This is?where?you can join my waiting list.

Stay Blessed,

Mubarak Oni.