What I’ve learnt so far about entrepreneurship and failure

At the time of writing this, I am working on a project called Reuni, that has over 500 users but is constantly failing. I’m currently 22 years old, in my third year of aerospace engineering and trying to build a successful startup, but failure is teaching me a lot about myself, relationships and startups; here I’m going to share what I’ve learnt so far in this journey.

First off, I need to introduce our project, responsible for occupying my thoughts for the last year. In Portuguese, the act of getting together can be referred to as the verb “reunir”. Our purpose is to gather people, our vision is therefore to “reúne” them. But since our passion is not just any person, but more specifically university students, we created our own word, “Reuni”, a project that has the sole purpose of impacting, connecting and gathering university students so they can enjoy and remember more of their university days.

Reuni was idealised in November 2022 when myself and another two close friends were trying to find a university party in São Paulo. As we encountered difficulties trying to find a university related event through the ticketing platform, we questioned ourselves on why so. It became clear that the platform wasn’t a marketplace to find events and in reality was just a ticketing site, therefore it didn’t focus on the user's experience of finding an event, just buying it. We thought this was a huge flaw and something needed to change. So at the end of that year we talked to many university students, discussed what we were going to do and how we were going to build a revolutionary platform for university students to find and attend university events.

In February 2023 we finished our MVP and unfortunately one of our co-founders wasn’t there to celebrate our launch since he left in late January to join the founding team of another startup. Myself and my other co-founder were then excited to reveal what we had built. On launch, our product was a failure, averaging around 40 seconds in engagement time and only 25 signups (mostly friends) after one whole month.

But why did we fail? Didn’t we have a solution for a problem? Weren't we making something that users would want? Well, I’ll discuss this later, but at the time, it didn't make much sense. We saw many Y Combinator [1] videos, talked to users, built a simple and intuitive platform, sent messages to all the university group chats we were in, had many events registered on our platform and even spent some time personally emailing and messaging everyone who signed up. We didn’t understand at the time why things weren’t working and unfortunately my other co-founder didn’t stay long enough for us to discuss our failure. He was focusing on his engineering course and had only a few hours per week to immerse himself in our mission, therefore we mutually decided it was best for him to leave; which left me confused and alone, holding hands with a product that was a failure.

Therefore, since the marketplace wasn’t getting much traction, we needed more data to understand why. With the hope of getting more users to test our product, we built a weekly newsletter that would be sent straight to WhatsApp of the best, handpicked events, in our only city, São José dos Campos. Every Wednesday, after putting up all the events on our platform for that week, I would select the best weekly events and include a simple description, time and link redirecting to our event page so the user can then sign up.

Initially, after sending out the google forms to group chats and friends, we had just under 50 newsletter sign-ups. After one week, we sent out the newsletter and then started to talk to users. It was clear that the newsletter was a helpful feature but our platform wasn't getting more signups and we were becoming a bot that would recommend users their favourite events. By all means, it was a helpful bot, but we weren’t impacting the lives of university students the way we wanted to.

Therefore, after about 2 months from our initial launch, a lot happened; I became a solo founder, our marketplace product wasn’t getting much traction and we even launched another feature to engage users and hopefully validate our product. It was clear we weren’t impacting the lives of university students as idealised. From talking to users, other entrepreneurs and friends, we then questioned ourselves if we were in fact building a tarpit idea [2]; something that seems like great solution, non existent, obvious, but in reality maybe is just unresolvable and is just not useful enough to have recurring users and change people’s lives.

To validate our hypothesis, we sent out a survey to understand our potential users' behaviour. We asked them how many university events they attend in a month, why they don't go out more often, how they find where they go, and for them to pinpoint if they are satisfied with the way they find these events, and why. With 137 responses, it started to become clear why we were failing. Only 18% of the responders were unsatisfied or extremely unsatisfied with the way they found these events. This was a shock, since it felt obvious that more people would be genuinely unsatisfied like we were in November 2022, and talking to users beforehand, many were also unsatisfied. But that wasn't just it. The survey revealed another deeply concerning attribute, that most of the university students who attend more events in a month are the ones who are less likely to be unsatisfied with the way they encounter them. Therefore, even if we were to build a product that would help the 18% of unsatisfied university students find their parties, these wouldnt be the students who actually attend them!

The survey was enough for me to realise that we had spent months building and dreaming of a product that users didn't want. I felt really frustrated and lost. At the time, I was bootstrapping and working alone in a one man WeWork office, and after losing hope in the product, this was the moment I was most humbled by failure in my life.

But I didn't want to give up yet. We believe that university students deserve to be taken care of, that they deserve to enjoy and remember even more this unique moment of their journey. It felt strange to give up now, since our why [3] was so important.

With the product now offline, and still being in the office everyday, these tough times made me spend a lot of my time learning about the world of entrepreneurship and how to build a successful startup. I read a few books, saw many talks and heard many inspirational stories. From Paul Graham essays [4], This week on startups with Jason [5], Lenny's Newsletter and podcast [6], Stanfords course on “How to start a startup” [7] and so much more amazing content available, I kept feeling constantly inspired and eager to become a founder and build something that people would want, love and even change their lives.

After a whole month of intense learning, feeling inspired and ready to build a new product, as I was speaking to a couple of entrepreneurs that are in my university and leading a successful startup, we discussed problems that university students have and how Reuni could come back to life. One topic that was always being mentioned was the idea of connecting these students and making sure they have a great time so they could enjoy more of their social life. Interestingly enough, one of the founders started talking about an online game called Gartic, a place where people connect and enjoy themselves as they create and interact through online rooms. Consequently, he pointed out that he would love seeing Gartic leave the online world and have the “Gartic experience” with his friends from university. Something about making Gartic from an online game into a real life experience fascinated me. The concept of creating an online room and transforming it into a real life experience made me extremely curious to go back to the drawing board.

What could be built? Well, we excitingly discussed the ideal product, an invite-only app available only for university students, that would have virtual rooms in which friends connect with one another and attend Bars. Initially the idea seemed a bit vague, without necessarily a problem that could be resolved, but I felt very curious to go out and explore. Yes, we were going to build a solution in search of a problem, which goes against YC´s advice and I’ll explore that later, but after one month of stagnation, this felt like it was the right thing to do.

After some brainstorming, we found some problems that could fit our solution: (a) University students don't have much money to spend and they go out anyway, (b) Gen-z feel extremely lonely, (c) Bars and events want to bring in more people so they can earn more revenue. Therefore, we then set out to build a platform that gathered university students in groups of 4,7 or 10 in online rooms which then represented bars and would in return earn themselves free drinks and food as they arrived. For university students this seemed great, since they would be able to spend less and at the same time gather their friends for a night out; and bars in hindsight would benefit since they would get more clients in large groups mostly on weekdays.

Scared to be in a tarpit again, I talked to a few university students and bars to seek validation of the product. After the interviews, it seemed clear in my head that we could build an amazing product that they seemed to like and said they would use. This time, I didn't ask questions about the problem since I was obsessed with the solution, and it seemed that everyone who I talked to was also so excited with the solution.

So we pivoted again. But this time we were going to build something that finally seemed like it would impact university students' social lives, it would gather them together and provide real life connections; our value proposition was a fit. We quickly built the MVP and were excited to go back to the bars we talked to and put them on our platform so we could launch.

As I went back to the two bars we had talked to, unfortunately, both of them had just shut down, one started a refurbishment and the other was sold. Since both helped us for the development of our MVP, this felt like a major set back.

It took one whole month for us to get our first bar to agree on using our platform, quite demotivating to say the least. The initial plan was to set out to talk to a short list of bars that I believed our users would love, and as I started sending messages to the bars, I didn't receive any replies. So I messaged them again and again, until I got tired and just eventually took my laptop and went to the bars to find the owners. Most of the time I would get there and the owners wouldn't be there, then I would go back and try to speak to them another day. For our first bar, this whole process took about three weeks, and as I finally got the opportunity to speak to someone in charge, and then asked to talk about my project, i got rejected straight away before I even started talking, as the owner said that her son left and she doesn't want anything to do with me, he deals with it. I left that bar confident enough that I would make them come crawling back to us. After one week, since no other bars were responding, I decided to go back to that bar and leave my ego aside. The son, who was in fact in charge of the bar, loved the project, was eager to get going and we finally had a partner.

At this point, I felt glad our first bar joined our mission, but we needed more options for our launch. I thought to myself that it wouldn't be a scalable product, since bars are absolutely terrible to respond to, but my unique insight was that if you just insist enough you will manage to talk to them, and fortunately for us they really loved our product. Consequently, after a lot of insisting, two weeks later we managed to get another bar as a partner, and one week after that, another. Things were looking great. I was ready to launch with three bars that university students would love; the last bar was so excited with the idea, and passionate about university life that he even offered over R$ 120 of food and drinks if 10 people attended.

So we launched. Messages in group chats, flyers in the university corridors and unique links to sign up and test our product. What happened? Quite a bit of curiosity, over 75 sign ups in one month, but hardly anyone actually tested it out. After launching, I set on a mission to grow our user base and get as many people testing as possible, but to my surprise, people just didn’t really care enough to use the platform. I spammed even more the group chat, put more flyers in the corridor and at one point even made 200 corporate sized cards with a personalised QR code and attended a university event in hopes to sell our vision. Yes, I gave out all 200 cards and almost everyone I spoke to seemed so interested in our product, I was certain that we would finally be getting some traction.

Unfortunately, we were failing again. The cards were a disaster. I personally gave out all of them and saw each and every person put it in their pockets with a smile to their face, but we only got one signup the day after. For things to get even worse, the owner of the last bar, who was passionate and enthusiastic about our mission and excited to be part of our journey, unfortunately passed away a day after we last saw him. Things just didn't seem to be progressing as we hoped. My mood was varying so much I couldn't even make sense if building this dream was worth it anymore.

Well, three months after launching this new project, what initially seemed like could be a great success now seems like just another failure. No retention, no virality and even worse, no impact on the lives of university students.

What went wrong this time? Well, I think it was obvious from the beginning and I kept my eyes shut in hope that things would work out anyway. We had a solution in search of a problem, or as Y Combinator puts it, a SISP [8]. We were not solving any problem, we were just creating a glamorous solution for a problem that we determined later. My stubbornness is the reason that after a whole year we still haven't built something that university students want. It's clear to me today that you really do need to have a problem to be obsessed about, to learn and understand deeply, and therefore create the most adequate solution.

Throughout the majority of this journey I've been a solo founder. I can't stand being alone anymore. I’ve always wanted to find someone else to be my co-founder, someone that has the same values, passion, love and care for our mission; someone who is more skilled, talented and ambitious than myself. It hurts to be alone, you celebrate alone, launch, fail and die alone. I need to be around others, to share my ideas, to listen, create, celebrate and fail.

The last 10 months have taught me so much. From a team of ambitious kids who knew hardly anything about startups but were willing to help university students enjoy more of their university lives, to a solo founder with a bootstrapped failed startup; failure has lectured me every day since the start of this journey. I’ve learnt from many amazing books, entrepreneurs and online content. And of course, became even closer to my friends and family, who kept believing in me even when I had stopped believing in myself.

What happens now? Well, I believe it's the right time for me to shut down Reuni. It feels right to stop and have a breather, even though I thoroughly believe that university students in Brazil deserve more. Maybe in the long term I might find a real problem in the idea space, a co-founder and we might eventually change the way university students enjoy, remember and make the most of this unique moment of their lives. Or maybe I won't find a problem, nor a co-founder and wont make an impact in their lives, but I dearly hope someone does.