My Startup is Collapsing, and I Can’t do Anything About It

This was written three years ago.

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3.5 Years… That is the time we dreamt of building something that would disrupt the world. It’s all coming to an end now. We ran out of money three months ago. We had to fire the whole business team, and Only 2 guys from the dev team are still with us.

Ups and downs are part of a start-up journey, but I don’t think we will be able to come back this time. Some mistakes are just too serious to come back from. Maybe You can understand why after reading the whole story.

Ideas are easy…

It all started at the end of 2017 when we graduated from the university. We were 5 friends, and all of us were from CSE. All of us were enthusiastic and ready to change the game.

We started looking for an idea we can build upon and soon enough a friend of ours comes up with a good one.

The idea was simple. There was nothing like that in our country. Also, it’s a security-related product and security is a big concern in our native country. So we all thought that we just hit the jackpot there.

How Little did we know!

We hit it hard

Things were serious. We took an office with 3 rooms. We brainstormed and polished the idea. We decided to build an Android app first.

We missed a crucial part of any business. We didn’t do proper market research. We searched online for solutions like ours and found almost none. We wondered how no one else thought of creating it yet?

So we powered through. We worked day and night for the first 2–3 months to build the MVP. We didn’t take it to any of our potential customers for review even. We were very confident that that was precisely what people want!

This simple mistake hurt us poorly for the rest of our journey. But we were so young back then!

More people got on-board

After 3 months and an MVP, we pitched the idea to some angel investors and among them, 2 got really interested. They promised us 1.5 years of funding along with a vast office space.

We jumped at the offer! We were new to the game, and the idea that someone else is going to pay our rent was enough to get us hooked! They wanted 25% of the company for that, and we were happy to give them that.

The Investors were like our elder brothers. They were too good to point us our mistakes. I must say they believed in us and went with every proposal we came up with.

This gave us a huge boost, and we started thinking that whatever we do is good because there was no one to correct us.

We hired some more people for development, and 3 of our friends went to the business side.

Power of technology in the wrong hand

I have to admit that none of us had the slightest idea of how to architect a complete solution. We thought we knew everything and tried to use every hot technology we could find.

Although we needed an SQL solution, we chose firebase as our backend as it was hot back then. After developing for several years we learned more about these topics and realized that we messed up badly.

We had to re-write our whole codebase with NodeJS and PostgreSQL. NoSQL was not for us. But we realized it very late. I wrote about why We had to abandon firebase in a separate story.

It was a significant setback. We already had some customers with us, and we almost lost their data. Converting the NoSQL structure into SQL was another nightmare.

Best practices are there for a reason

We wrote our codes mostly with Android and React. Like all other noobs, we first cared about whether the damn thing works or not. Because we had to struggle to make even the simplest things work.

I still find it amusing how little we thought about the code structure and best practices. After 1 year, we found ourselves in a mess. By then some other developers joined us, and changing anything was causing a lot of trouble.

But it was hard to re-structure everything as there was pressure from the investors and customers for new features. And we went down the spiral way to codebase hell.

Still, we got customers.

Yet after all of these, we got some early customers who were interested in our product. But in order to fulfill their need, they wanted features to their liking.

To fulfill their need, we tried to modify and customize every feature. We were desperate to keep our customers, which caused even more problems.

Because we had to hire more developers and the technical debt was rising day by day. On the other side, cash was burning at a very fast pace.

Investors were not happy

We failed to generate any real traction even after 2 years. The product that we built was average at best. We had to learn almost everything from scratch. So everything took a long time to execute.

Our investors grew increasingly annoyed with us. So we had to think of some shortcuts to earning some money.

We started to build an e-commerce store in the COVID pandemic just to sell some oximeters which had nothing to do with our business. These decisions eventually caused us to lose our focus.

The beginning of the end

All good things come to an end. We ran out of money 3 months ago and had to let go of almost the entire crew of 28 people. We the founders are all that is left now.

I don’t feel motivated about my own start-up now. even if we secure some more funding I am not sure we are going to do anything better than before.

Because it’s hard to come out of a deficient culture. But nevertheless, I think it was a great learning opportunity for me. I learned the importance of following of best-practices of any technology. I learned how to architect a whole system even if that’s not that good but these lessons are hard to come by as a fresher.

This is the story of our start-up. I don’t blame anyone. It was meant to be like this. Most startups don’t do good anyway. And the opportunities I got from working on a project like this were invaluable to me. So I take this positively.

Why did I write this?

Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe some of you can learn something or maybe not. Maybe I want to read this story after 10 years and remember the struggles. Maybe something else. I don’t know.

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