In 2017, I shut down an e-commerce venture after 18 months. It was painful, expensive, and one of the best things that happened to my career. Here’s what I learned.
1. Validate before you build#
We spent three months building before talking to a single potential customer. By the time we launched, we’d built features nobody asked for and missed features everyone needed.
The fix: Talk to 20 potential customers before writing a single line of code. If you can’t find 20 people willing to talk about the problem, you don’t have a market.
2. Physical products are a different beast#
Software is forgiving - you can deploy a fix in minutes. Physical inventory is not. One wrong order and you’re sitting on thousands of euros of unsellable stock.
The fix: If you’re a software person entering physical products, partner with someone who has supply chain experience.
3. Market timing matters more than execution#
We were building for a market that wasn’t ready. The infrastructure, the consumer behavior, the ecosystem - none of it was there yet. Three years later, competitors succeeded with the exact same model.
The fix: You can’t will a market into existence. Read the signals honestly.
4. Burn rate is a countdown timer#
Every month you’re spending money without revenue, the clock is ticking. We had a comfortable runway and it made us complacent. Urgency is a feature, not a bug.
The fix: Set a hard deadline. If you haven’t found product-market fit by X date, make a decision.
5. Failure is data, not identity#
Shutting down felt like a personal failure. It took time to reframe it as information - data points that would inform better decisions. Every successful project I’ve built since carries lessons from this failure.
The fix: Document what went wrong while it’s fresh. Future-you will thank present-you.