Failing isn’t losing: 6 lessons I’ve learned from my failed startup

Photo credit: Bossfight.co

For the past year, Hello Roaming has been my pride and identity. I’ve always wanted to start my own thing, and I thought this was my moment. As a product manager, I’ve built a few products before, but to me, Hello Roaming was my first real startup—the first startup that made money and was a real business.

As a cofounder, shutting it down has been a tough pill to swallow. It’s a lot like watching your dreams drift further and further away from you until it fades into thin air. This is the final page of my Hello Roaming chapter.

I want share six of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from coming out of it all. This journey would have been worthwhile if at least one person learns and benefits from it.

Here is my story.

How we started

When we started Hello Roaming, our vision was to solve inefficiencies in the nitty gritty of travel—the small instances that stress you out on a trip like finding a local prepaid SIM card when you land.

We wanted to make travel communications cheaper and a whole lot easier by offering a web shop where you could buy foreign SIM cards for your destination. We planned to sell them at affordable prices and have them shipped to your home before you boarded the plane. It was a simple plug-and-play solution.

With a web application running, it wasn’t long until we began seeing results. We had decent revenue, happy customers, and were solving a significant enough problem for people.

We got good feedback about our service and, during those moments, we were over the moon. We did have our fair share of ugly days when nothing worked out the way we wanted it to. But all in all, we were in business, had money in the bank, and were happy. We thought we had validated our idea and that feeling was pretty darn good.

Lesson 1: Winning small battles doesn’t mean you’ll win the war

You know reality TV shows like America’s Next Top Model or Master Chef where the ultimate winner is usually not the person who gets the most “best photos of the week” or the “best dish of the week?” I remember watching Master Chef Australia season 2 thinking Marion Grasby would win the season because she pretty much won most of the weekly challenges. Instead, Adam Liaw won.

Don’t let the early metrics distract you. Startups are hard work, and they leave no room for resting on your laurels. Be vigilant and humble at all times, no matter how much you raised or how much praise you’re getting from your customers. Winning small battles doesn’t mean you’ve won the war. It’s far from over.

Alas, we realised the root of our issue: we couldn’t find more customers who saw value in our product.

Lesson 2: Don’t overestimate your market share

Delivery is a numbers game, and it was to our disadvantage that our product only appealed to a small pool of people. It was expensive to find more of them, and we were weren’t making much per transaction—reselling SIM Cards barely makes you anything.

To add to that, we found out that our target market only travelled about two to three times a year on average. So we had a combination of a small market share, high cost to acquire a customer (CAC), low margin, and an average recurring rate.

Lesson 3: It’s all about the business model

Lesson 4: Go leaner

Lesson 5: Make speed a habit

Lesson 6: Hire the right person for the job

How we ended things