Why did I fail with We Speak Digital?

We don't like to speak about failure in our region. We show made-up numbers, celebrate awards we paid for and literally every single business needs to pretend it is only a huge success.

Well, let me break this stigma with this little post. I want to share 3 main reasons I failed with my little startup We Speak Digital. Why? Because I believe, in failure there's tremendous learning and I want to remember al these lessons I've learned.

What was We Speak Digital about?

When we started working on WSD at the beginning of 2020, the plan was to build a membership based platform, where for one monthly fee, you get access to video courses as well as live consultations. This idea of combining digital education and SaaS has been in my head for at least 2 years.

We planned to produce a lot of content in Arabic to attract local audience and to focus on both digital marketing and ecommerce. We planned to run a local (in-person) workshops to create community as the main marketing strategy.

When we launched - in the end of March - it was clear that in-person events is not an option anymore. Also, producing the content was taking us way more time than expected and therefore we launched only with 1 full course and a few smaller courses.

After 2-3 months we realized the membership idea is not working at all. We decided to shift towards simple video courses for a fixed price + live consultations. That worked only slightly better but was absolutely not scalable. The competition that has been there for ages was light years ahead and we were not able to offer any strong USP. On top 100s of similar courses appeared during corona which made the prices drop and user acquisition extremely difficult.

Last shot was our marketing activation program for startups. I knew there is a demand for it but such program was already very far from the original business idea as it was more about consultancy than video learning.

Three different models, pretty much none of them worked. That's why we decided to not burn any more money in the project and put an end to it.

I've made tons of mistakes in every step of that 10-month journey but these are the main ones.

Product and tech-stack were too complicated. That cost us time, money and focus.

Reid Hoffman said "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I should've printed it above my desk back in January.

Was the platform perfect and beautiful when we launched? Oh definitely not. But was it already too complicated and over 15 different tools or plugins involved? Yes, it was.

The whole idea of having membership based platform where users would use credits to unlock content meant that we were looking for tailored-made membership solution.

We ended up using Wordpress and Accessally which was the first crucial mistake. Instead of using some ready made platform (such as Kajabi), we had to hire expensive developers to make those things work together with marketing automation tool Ontraport.

This was not only way more expensive than we expected but mainly, it took a lot of time and focus. Instead of quickly testing the whole model and producing a quality content (which was a key for success of the whole project) I spent weeks tweaking functionality and design of the platform.

Learning? If you're starting from scratch, make sure you test your product with maybe 10-20% of what you think the final product should look like. Don't spend months developing something that people might not be interested in. Build the crucial part, get customers and THEN start adding things. It doesn't have to be perfect from day one but it needs to add value to its customers.

Our cash was draining dry way too fast. And I noticed way too late.

Even after months I still can not understand what made me underestimate the importance of cash flow. Not like I didn't know about it. Not like I have never done cash flow projections before.

But still I realized only in August: we've got cash for only 2 more months.

We've had the business plan since day one. The issue is that I was only looking at revenue. And actually potential revenue. The models were great. But as we kept going without significant income, the recurring cost of team and all the tools were draining the bank account dry.

Looking at it with a little distance now, I can see that 2 psychological things happened here: first, I absolutely did not expect that the revenue might be near 0. Second, when that was happening, I got so much absorbed in the business operations that I was not able to take a step back and admit that we've got a problem. When I did it in August, it was already too late.

Learning? As a bootstrapped business, you need to be ready for weeks or a few months of no income. That means that you have to calculate the cash in your bank account in advance to know how much time you have. Calculate for the worst-case scenario, not the dream one. And repeat this exercise on a regular basis.

We lost focus from what were supposed to be our USPs

As I said before, already before corona distance learning was incredibly competitive market dominated by Udemy which is selling pretty much all courses for $10. It works for them because they have volumes.

Our plan to fight it was to have users on a monthly retainer for which they'd get higher quality content, live consultations and guidance in what course is the right one for them (we called this a learning path).

The problem is that we didn't execute this idea in a sufficient quality.

• Producing a course took way more time than expected. Therefore, we launched with maybe 10 courses in the platform which is not something you'd pay a monthly retainer for.
• None of it was in Arabic, which we planned will be one of our crucial USP in the region.
• None of it was about eCommerce which we knew is a very demanded topic and less competitive than let's say Facebook Ads.
• We had only a very basic courses which, again, was nothing special in the market (while the quality was reportedly above market average).

To summarize it, we lost focus from our USPs and / or our USPs turn out to be not very realistic. We knew at the beginning that those points will be crucial for WSD's success but once in the game, we lost them from our sight.

...and of course, there's much more

In overall, there has been much more to learn from this little fail story. Don't get me wrong - I think we still managed to do hell of work, but things didn't click (mainly) for reasons above.

For me personally, this was extremely interesting period of time. Together with all around corona, it was emotional rollercoaster - riding between excitement of building something that will help others learn digital to drawing in misery from failing with business and losing all the money, time and energy invested into it.

I could have bought myself a nice car but I rather spent it on something I believed made a lot of sense and could help others. It didn't work this time, but I learned so much that any MBA can not really compete.

Do I loose hope about digital education now? Not at all. You will see that I still believe there is a lot we can do to help people learn digital marketing in an easy, practical way. Stay tuned. :-)

Last but not least - big warm thank you to my partner Osama Romoh, who trusted me in this venture and supported it to the end. As well as WSD team and everyone who helped us on the go. I am sorry it didn't work out but we gave it our best and I believe, that will make us stronger for the next time.