What I learned when I failed to raise funds from 72 investors

Photo credit: Pixabay.

One spring day, a couple of years ago, I worked up the courage to ask my boss if he wanted to go for a walk. I had to talk to him about something.

We wandered around Madison Square Park in New York City and I told him it was time for me to transition out of my role at General Assembly, a professional training provider.

“Do you know what you want to do next?” he asked.

“I want to make visual, interactive books that are designed for mobile and hopefully start a business around it. I’m not exactly sure what that will look like, though,” I said.

I had no clue what it would look like.

But  I believed that if someone invested a lot of work, time, and love, it could happen. It would be possible to create a totally new way to read, one that would connect with readers’ brains in a deeper way than ever before. It felt so inevitable to me.

So, I quit my job.

Fast forward to June 2017. We built a great product (an app called Hardbound that illustrated summaries of bestselling non-fiction books), raised some money from world-class investors, assembled an amazing team of people that love working together, got featured by Apple, attracted over 1,200 paying customers, and saw the app downloaded nearly 100,000 times and reach over 250,000 readers on the web.

Even more exciting was that our readers had tapped through over 20 million pages of content. And almost every day, people sent us notes telling us how much they loved our product. Honestly, I’ve never been happier working on anything in my life.

But today is not happy.

Normally, when I write, I try to use a cheerful tone of voice. This post isn’t like that because sometimes, things just suck.

Here’s the situation

A few weeks ago, I had to tell the Hardbound team that I needed to start helping them look for other work. We weren’t going to be able to pay them for much longer. Our bank account was running dangerously low and although I had been 100 percent focused on fundraising for a long time, it wasn’t going well. I talked to 72 investors, but I wasn’t able to close the round. We were making about US$2,500 a month (better than zero!) but spending around US$13,000 a month. So, we were a long way from profitability.

Now, everyone has moved on but me and I’m trying to figure out how to move forward.

Why didn’t the fundraise work?

So, what am I going to do now?