I Tried Building a Million-Dollar Startup That Went to Zero — Here’s What I Learned the Hard Way

I always thought there was only one way to build wealth — by starting a business.

Everyone talks about success, but today I want to talk about one of my most difficult failures and the lessons it helped me learn.

Let me be honest with you, I love learning from failures, but this one literally hit me hard.

No doubt, I have made a good amount of money by creating websites, working with startups, writing content online, selling digital products, and investing in stocks and cryptos.

But for these countable successes, I have made an uncountable number of mistakes.

For instance, in the previous year, I thought of building a startup from scratch, and that’s where I added huge savings, spent a good amount of time writing code, and thought to make a million-dollar company out of that.

But everything failed, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Let’s start with a bit of intro.

From the time I went to school, I thought there was only one way to build wealth — by starting a business.

Even today I think the same.

The best part? I didn’t come from a wealthy family, so the only option for me was to learn, earn, and invest my hard-earned money to build a business.

For that, I worked at startups to learn as much as I could in the shortest time. I also created quality content online to make money. Then I focused on building a startup.

But after a year of spending money, time, and energy, I think it has almost failed.

No doubt, I was working hard 4–6 hours every day to build the best product I could, and thought that soon it would be a million-dollar business.

But it didn’t work as I thought.

However, it helped me learn some tough but necessary lessons that I needed to learn.

Lesson 1: Focus 50% on building products, and 50% on getting traction from day one

At the age of 22, I was very eager to build a startup.

So, along with my co-founder, I started focusing all my energy on developing and trying to make a profitable startup.

As the tech guy with expertise in developing over 50 websites, I felt we just needed to keep building an amazing product.

My co-founder was a product designer. Here are some of his designs.

We were young and idealistic — we thought if we just kept building, the users would come.

For months we poured our savings into development, working long days fueled on ramen noodles and dreams of future success. But eventually, we ran out of money and had to take a hard look at what we had created.

Our product was polished but useless — we had no customers, no revenue, no traction.

We had focused so much on building that we had forgotten to connect with real people to see if anybody even wanted this product in the first place.

I learned an important lesson — no matter how talented your team or how elegant your product is, a startup won’t succeed without understanding customer needs and getting real-world traction.

I wish I had spent less time heads-down coding in those early days and more time networking, recruiting potential users, validating ideas, talking to customers, and gathering feedback.

More crucially, we should have focused 50% on iterating and improving the product based on what we learned from the market, and 50% on getting out there to connect with people and generate interest and adoption.

Now, I believe that traction and acquiring customers should be the top priority from day one, equal in importance to building your minimum viable product.

In short, no matter how talented your team might be, you can’t just build it and expect users to come.

Lesson learned: Focus 50% on building products, and 50% on getting traction from day one.

Note that I learned about this tactic from a book called Traction (not an affiliate link).

Lesson 2: Find a great team with specialized skill

I have to be honest; we wrongly assumed that marketing and sales would be easy after developing the product.

So, we didn’t hire any sales experts (you may call us overconfident or noob). Also, we did not have the skills or time to execute them well during the building phase.

So, after completing the product, we lacked a solid go-to-market plan.

Now, I know that a similar situation occurs with almost every tech founder, and the result is often a failed product.

The worst part? Instead of focusing on our strengths, we found ourselves spinning our wheels, trying to teach ourselves.

The solution? We would have hired a sales expert.

I think I wasted time figuring out promotional tactics from scratch.

No existing funnels to generate buyer interest. Lost sales from slowly optimizing pricing and positioning.

As technical product builders, having partners solely focused on promotion and revenue would have perfectly complemented us and filled gaps.

Lessons learned: Don’t focus on multiple areas and find the right team from the start.

Lesson 3: Network before you need to

From the start, we did not focus on networking with investors.

The reason? We did not want to give up equity before making money. But this was a big mistake.

No matter how good your product is, having funding available is key. It lets you improve the product, hire people, and grow faster when you need to.

Bootstrapping with your own money is best if possible.

But most early startups just do not have enough reserves to fully self-fund. Raising investor money ensures you can expand at the right time.

We went without that funding runway for too long. Even a small seed round earlier could have let us spend more on developers, sales, and marketing sooner.

Pitching investors also builds connections beyond just money. You gain useful contacts for hiring, partnerships, mentoring, and solving issues.

Their expertise can help overcome hurdles.

Especially now with markets shifting quickly — having cash to spend matters. It lets you pivot faster when competitors move quickly. Customers want rapid improvements too.

We limited our flexibility and growth potential unnecessarily early on. The equity given up to investors would have been worth it to scale things up much faster.

Lesson 4: Build a basic MVP

We always thought to create the best product we could. But in doing so, we only focused on perfecting the product itself.

The outcome?

We spent far too long building early iterations. We exhausted substantial capital by simply developing the software when funds were already tight.

Lesson learned: We spent excessive time perfecting early versions instead of launching a basic MVP quickly to gather user feedback.

Frankly, no early-stage company has the luxury of endlessly refining products internally. Revenue to sustain that comes much later.

Capital should be focused on testing core value propositions through a functioning prototype — not overly engineering an idealized product for hypothetical customers.

A much better strategy is pushing out an MVP with the minimum features to address a real need, even if rough around the edges.

Yes, there were bugs, performance issues, and missing capabilities we could have fixed. But it’s more important first to validate you’re even building something customers truly want.

With an MVP in hand months earlier, we could have pitched and demoed the concept more concretely to investors and customers.

Their input would have guided crucial product and company direction decisions when it was most malleable.

The irony is that endless product tweaking is counterproductive to even creating an excellent product someday.

Lesson 5: Build in Public

I always know that building a product in public helps.

But we were obsessed and stressed that let’s focus on building a great product first and then showing it to the public. And that’s the worst mistake that we’ve ever made.

Lesson learned: Always build in public.

Building in public not only keeps you accountable for making continuous progress, but it allows you to validate ideas and get feedback from real potential users throughout the development process.

We worked in secrecy for over a year without releasing even an MVP.

If we made our work transparent and documented our journey publicly from the start, we likely would have realized much sooner that we were over-engineering features users didn’t want.

Potential customers could have guided our product roadmap. Instead, we wasted resources on the wrong priorities.

Making incremental improvements based on user feedback is far better than trying to release a theoretically perfect product.

By developing in the open, we could have course-corrected early when things were going off track. We denied ourselves that visibility.

Now I know that sharing your struggles is important too. Being transparent about failures can help others avoid similar mistakes.

Engaging with the public ensures you deeply understand customer needs. Next time I won’t wait — I’ll build in public from day one.

Lesson 6: Forcing people to adopt new habits really stacks the odds against you

We have talked with more than 20+ customers.

And let me tell you, customers rarely said no to us because they liked our product’s design and features.

But the real reason was they didn’t want the difficulty of switching from their current app. You could call them lazy. But this taught me something important.

Once people get used to using something, they don’t want to change — even for something better.

We had to do more than just sell the quality of our app. We had to tackle the huge challenge of getting them to change habits. And that’s really hard.

This showed it’s smarter to make tools about new technologies that don’t already have popular apps rather than directly compete with existing companies.

If we had used cutting-edge AI, more people might have been curious enough to try our app.

The ideal approach is spotting needs that no app currently meets well.

Then you can design for that demand rather than fighting user loyalty. But it’s rare to find those totally unaddressed needs.

A more realistic option is combining trendy new tech like AI with features people know.

People want the latest things but also familiar functions. Adding AI to project management would make us seem innovative yet reliable.

Simply put, we learned the hard way forcing people to adopt new habits really stacks the odds against you.

Either catch onto low adoption technologies early or modernize entrenched products. That’s how you can best get users to switch over.

What Am I Doing Next?

I know I have made several mistakes from not choosing the right team to jumping in a competitive market, to not networking.

But I think it’s ok since I know you need to fail more to succeed more.

Also, I am only 23 years old right now, and I have learned crucial lessons thanks to my failed startup.

The only thing I need to keep in mind is not to repeat the same failures in my life.

Now, talking about what I am doing next — well, I won’t be joining a 9-to-5 job.

But if someone wants to work with me so I can help them based on my skills, and learn more about the workings of a startup, I would love to join. My main preference is to work for an AI-related startup.

Also, if someone wants to collaborate, invest, or work on something interesting, please contact me here. I would love to talk with you.

Other than that, I have different side hustles, and I am exploring new opportunities this year.

Just to let you know, I work with several companies related to content writing, writing on Medium, selling digital books, creating and selling UI designs, consulting on Topmate, and working with companies to create websites for their needs.

So, a couple of months from now, I plan to dedicate more time to my side hustles and save a bit of money to start something new.

I have a product ready, and now I am planning to launch another product in the AI space. I don’t want to rush this time in making decisions.

I will spend the next couple of months learning more about what I need to do. I want to connect with investors who can invest in my startup. I aim to be more precise this time.

I also plan to prototype my next product in the MVP stage and pitch to investors way before I think I’m ready, taking feedback seriously rather than dismissing criticism, as I’ve been prone to do.

No more charging forward based on brute confidence alone. This time, the market will validate my assumptions before doubling down.

Hope you like it.

That’s it — thanks.

Don’t forget to subscribe to me on Substack for a thrilling dive into AI, tech wizardry, money hacks, side-hustle secrets, and beyond. Your adventure awaits.