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Real stories about startups, gathered to help you recognise the trade-offs, avoid familiar mistakes, and make a wiser next choice.
I'd been building this little app thing for about four months. Nobody was using it. My friend told me twice it probably wasn't going anywhere. I kept opening the same spreadsheet every Sunday night anyway.
I don't know if I learned much. Maybe that I can tell quite early when something isn't working and I just don't want to.
I moved to Berlin when I was twenty four. Came from a mid sized city in Brazil, spoke okay German, had some savings and an idea I had been turning over for about two years. The idea was a marketplace, B2B, connecting small manufacturers with logistics providers. Boring description but I genuinely believed in it, maybe too much. I had done some customer interviews, had a spreadsheet that looked fine, had one pilot customer who was paying a small monthly fee and seemed happy. The office I rented smelled like old carpet and whatever the previous tenant had been cooking. I remember thinking that was a good sign somehow, like it was a real place where real work happened. It probably just needed cleaning.
The unit economics were broken from the start, I just did not look at them properly. Or I looked and then looked away. Each new customer I was acquiring cost more to serve than they paid, and I had done the math in a way that assumed volume would fix that. Volume does not fix a per unit problem, it makes it bigger. I knew this in theory. I had read the blog posts. It is different when it is your own numbers on your own spreadsheet at eleven pm in a city where you moved to prove something to yourself. I think I was also scared that if I slowed down to actually fix the model I would have to admit it was not working yet, and I had told too many people it was working. Friends from back home, my parents, a few investors I had coffees with. Small lies that compound.