We shut down our startup

Hey there,

They say 90% of startups fail. So, when in the 3rd year of building Flexiple, we tried to buildd another startup, we were surely pitted against that stat.

That startup was Remote Clan. We worked on it for a good 2 years, got to 2000+ members. And…then shut it down.

It surely wasn’t fun when it ended, but don’t worry, it is not a sad story.

I learnt a ton on multiple fronts. I hope you do too by reading this.

Now, back to the story of “failure” :P

Where it all started

So, even before the pandemic, we believed the future was remote work.

We had already built a side project called “Remote Tools” to market Flexiple. It was a discovery platform to find any tool you need for remote work

Now, our vision was to buildd a network of remote workers. Basically, unbundling LinkedIn for remote work.

We believe(d) that remote workers have many different needs vs. traditional workers. A professional network catering to their specific needs was our goal.

Building it out

For about 2 years before kicking off with Remote Clan, we had already built a remote work newsletter of 4,000+ subscribers.

So, first off to validate our idea we shared a landing page with our audience. We immediately got 500 signups. That seemed like good early validation.

That number steadily increased and we got decent participation. People had genuine questions and our forum helped them. We also initiated a lot of conversations ourselves.

All this till it plateaued…we kept making improvements but each such move only gave a small push. It was slowly but surely becoming an uphill battle all the way.

The resistance

To gain some momentum we made leaderboards, gave prizes, built auto-triggers to nudge members for engagement & more.

We also tried to start monetizing:

1. Ran ads on Remote Tools

2. Began working on a job board for Remote Clan

However, the money we made was just not worth the effort... nor did it match our aspirations. The engagement efforts weren’t yielding proportionate results either.

Till ultimately, we decided to stop working on this.

What went wrong?

Well, we seemed to have followed best practices around building a startup. But why didn’t things still work out?

My thoughts:

1. Remote work → not “sexy”

Firstly, people did NOT want to talk about remote work, EVERY DAY.

Sure, they liked remote work, but were not so passionate about it that they would want to talk & exchange ideas about it each day of their life.

2. We → poor passion for remote work

Got to be honest. We were like our audience too. We really believed in remote work, but just didn’t have a fanatic passion for it. The lack of growth didn’t help either.

Maybe, our audience didn’t show energy because of us? Who knows....

3. Monetization → delayed for too long

This was our 2nd startup and our 1st startup, Flexiple, was making money. So it seems we were comfortable not making money off of the 2nd one for too long.

At the end of the day, the real validation comes only when we make customers pay or monetize in other ways. Till then, it is a fun project.

As a fun project, this succeeded. As a serious business, it failed.

All is not lost

I picked up many new skills:

• Marketing

• Community building

• Newsletters

But from the perspective of a startup mindset, here are 3 lessons I learnt.

Lesson 1: Choose a problem you are passionate about

Your passion for your startup reflects in your audience. So, DON’T choose something you are not passionate about.

Your audience can see through it and you won’t survive the journey either.

Lesson 2: Startups might fail, but entrepreneurs succeed

Sure, it was painful to shut down something we worked on for 2 years. But, I loved the journey and learnt a lot. I’m sure my next attempt will be better.

The startup failed but we succeeded.

Lesson 3: Failure gives birth to new success

While building our startups, we shared our experiences on Twitter & LinkedIn. We enjoyed that so much more. So, did our audience!

That gave birth to our next startup, buildd. I am sure I won’t repeat the same mistakes with buildd :)

Best,
Karthik

P.S. Please consider forwarding this to a friend! It would really help my two startups.

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