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\n\t\tOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.\t<\/p>\n
Most of what I know about building a company, I learned from the things that didn\u2019t work. And I don\u2019t say that with regret. A big, committed attempt that fails will teach you more than a small, careful one that gets by, as long as you\u2019re honest afterwards about why it failed. The whole value of a mistake is the lesson sitting inside it. Take that lesson seriously, and your next attempt is better \u2014 and you repeat fewer of the same mistakes. Ignore it, and all you\u2019ve collected is a scar.<\/p>\n
Trible was my big, committed attempt. I co-founded it, ran product and operations, and spent about a year and a half on it before we sold the company. Selling can sound like an achievement, but it wasn\u2019t a triumph \u2014 we sold because we no longer believed we could turn it into the business we set out to build. What Trible did leave me with is a long list of things I\u2019d do differently if I were starting again, and a lot of how I work now comes straight from that list. And that\u2019s the list I\u2019m sharing with you today.<\/p>\n
Trible was a no-code platform for creators. Someone with an audience could build their own mobile app, put their courses, paid community and consultations inside it, publish it to the App Store and Play Store under their own account, and sell to their followers directly. The idea we believed in was that millions of small creators could earn from their knowledge without depending on social media algorithms or competing for attention on someone else\u2019s platform.<\/p>\n
There was another company doing roughly what we had in mind, and that gave us a lot of confidence to start. We considered it to be proof that the market for such a product exists and understood how to build a superior product. We were convinced that performance marketing, our core competence, would bring us the users we wanted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The work fell into three phases. The first was the MVP \u2014 building a product that kind of works and getting first clients. The second, roughly six months, was the hunt for unit economics, which meant learning to acquire creators and earning more on a single customer than we spend on their acquisition. By the end of that phase, the math worked out. However, we faced a surprising problem.<\/p>\n
Every product metric we cared about came in several times worse than what we had modeled for a SaaS business. We had unit economics without product-market fit. During the third phase, we pushed for product-market fit but barely got any substantial traction. That left us at an uncomfortable crossroads: Keep grinding on a SaaS where we had almost no real advantages, or give up and move on to start a consumer business we knew how to build. We chose the latter and sold Trible to a different owner.<\/p>\n
None of these felt like mistakes at the time. Each one had a reasonable point behind it, which is what made them easy to make and hard to catch. These are the ones that cost us the most.<\/p>\n
My co-founders and I had very similar profiles.\u00a0 All three of us had business backgrounds, all focused on sales, and we all approached problems from the same angle. Neither of us had an engineering background or ability, and in a SaaS company, actually building the product mattered more than we wanted to admit. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a tried-and-true piece of startup advice about needing a hustler, a hipster and a hacker on the team. Sadly, we had three hustlers and no hacker or hipster.<\/p>\n
We had only one reference, which made us believe that the market and model worked. We never questioned why it seemed to be the only market where a SaaS product could grow purely through performance marketing. We never questioned why there was only one such competitor.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Well, we should have.<\/p>\n
What we didn\u2019t understand was that the people brought in through impulsive, consumer-style funnels behaved differently from typical SaaS customers. SaaS companies normally depend on business-minded buyers who make rational decisions; therefore, they commit and stay. Performance marketing on social feeds attracts people making a quick, impulsive decision, and they behave nothing alike.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t know that at the time, so our one example of a competitor SaaS company growing through performance marketing looked like proof the same would work for us, when in reality it kept bringing in customers who never retained the way a SaaS business model needs. We were wrong about the market from the very start, in what we chose to build and how, and good execution later could not repair a decision made that early.<\/p>\n
When you build for consumers, you can get by without understanding your users very deeply, because you\u2019re a consumer yourself, and you can usually trust your own sense of what people want. With businesses, you can\u2019t do that. You\u2019re not the customer, so you have to actually learn how their business works: how a creator gets an audience and how they turn it into money. We didn\u2019t spend enough time on this.<\/p>\n
We built a platform for publishing courses without realizing how hard it is to make a course in the first place. Creating one takes months of work before you earn anything, and a lot of creators never finish. It also took us more than a year to really understand how creators make money. When we finally did, things got easier. We could see where Trible fit, and once we integrated with the tools creators were already using, our product decisions started bringing in real power users. We should have tried to figure all of this out from the very start.<\/p>\n
App or web, all-in-one or single-use case, beginners or established creators \u2014 any one of those could have become a real business, and we kept all the options open because committing felt risky. The indecision cost us months. The deeper version of this is what I now call building a Frankenstein. Creators typically need help with acquiring an audience, turning followers into clients, creating content and delivering content. <\/p>\n
For a long time, instead of focusing on a single job-to-be-done, we tried solving every problem mentioned above. Obviously, neither worked well. Moreover, we took the retention assumptions of a typical B2B SaaS, applied them to a B2C acquisition machine and told ourselves we were combining the best of both worlds. In my experience, you usually end up with the worst of both instead.<\/p>\n
In the first five or six months, there was only one conversation with a real customer. It happened the day before the MVP launch. We spent our precious time on completely irrelevant things: go-to-market strategy for a product that didn\u2019t exist yet, branding (a common beginner\u2019s pitfall), a future org structure. We once spent five hours discussing\u00a0org structure while being a team of 10. Do you really need an org structure on such a scale?<\/p>\n