How I royally screwed up my startup and the lessons I learned from the collapse

Photo credit: Pexels.

The previous month turned my whole belief system on its head. I realized that I had never been so wrong in my entire life. It was a rare incident of reflection that will stay with me forever.

“Make the car run before racing it on a race track.”

Vijay Anand of The Startup Centre gave me this brilliant piece of advice when I just started Zeading in August 2016. Because of my tragic influence on myself, I chose to unconsciously ignore it and, worse, gravely misunderstand it. I had already failed spectacularly working on my previous startup three years back while I was still in college. I thought I was already aware of and was an expert on the mistakes entrepreneurs generally make.

And that is where I was wrong.

Never ever think that you’ve nailed it

Zeading was meant to be a blogging platform that was supposed to make traditional reading obsolete. With our flagship feature —the Zen Mode—I had invented a way of using Javascript to present articles in an animated video-like interface. With HTML5’s SpeechSynthesis API, we had added support for voice over as well  so it could literally read the whole thing for you. It was an immersive way of reading stories, and our demos did well in our beta run.

Our single ambition was to become the YouTube of textual content. It was an ambitious goal that stemmed from my own problem. I suffer from amblyopia, a rare condition in which one eye has a dimmer vision than the other. It gives me a headache trying to read anything on a screen, whether with my glasses on or not. My eyes are very prone to strain. As a solution, I imagined our text-to-video interface, a strain-free way of absorbing textual content on a screen. Once it was done and initial reviews were encouraging, it was time to capitalize on it —or so I thought.

Zen Mode played stories like video.

We had a fairy tale startup launch. On the day of the launch itself, we had our first 100 registered users. In the next 30 days, this number had crossed 3,000. On the 31st day of our operations, it was already 4,000. My team and I could not have been more amused. People were publishing on the platform left and right and we had a lot of encouragement from our early adopters. In some ways, our first version had all the green ticks of a successful MVP. We also already had our first influencer that helped us transcend the boundaries of our own social networks. A bunch of very experienced people were also guiding us from time to time.

It was like the celebratory champagne scene from the movie “The Social Network” in my apartment ,  which also doubled as the headquarters of our little venture. We strongly believed that, at this point, absolutely nothing can ever go wrong.

But we jinxed it.

Product-market fit does not grow in a farm