It’s been a few years since I’ve been able to focus on the craft of writing. It was one of my favorite hobbies in high school and college, where I could write under a constant flow of prompts and problems on various topics. Like many smart-but-not-too-smart overachievers, I loved the social sciences and the white space to argue a position on highly complex issues in history, economics, or politics. Getting those As and A+s was a dopamine kick to the dome, especially for someone who had been a C student most of his life.
I was relentless in my pursuit of writing challenges. Even after transferring to a target school, I was eager to write because, for some reason, it let me build something and relieve the pent-up energy of an ambitious young man with minimal downside. It paid off as my grades were always strong and helped me get noticed by my first employer. I also managed to make some money off writing, becoming an academic translator at one point for a professor at a local university.
In the weeks leading up to graduation, my interest in writing started waning for two easily recognizable reasons. First: I overdid it. In my final semester, I pursued the opportunity to complete my credits requirement by partnering with the school of government to write a thesis. Which was painful, to say the least. Why? These undergraduate thesis programs are designed to teach you methods, not truth. And the methods are simply the low-rigor scientific approaches of social scientists. This program allowed me to prove the statistical significance of specific public policies in catalyzing economic growth, which, looking back, I know nothing about. The 50-page assignment burnt off a lot of my writing bug fuel, and I couldn’t open Microsoft Word for weeks after.
Second: I was in the business school. At the business school, we were usually fed lots of case studies on business successes, which after enough repetition, started to lodge an idea in mind to pursue entrepreneurial activity–after all, my translation business had worked out. And midway through my final year, the opportunity to help my dad with a capital raise for the family biz sparked what became my first real entrepreneurial venture. So I had found a nice gap to fill in my void from the writing bug and unknowingly joined the hustle culture.
Starting a Start-Up: Big Ambitions, Medium Traction, Small Success.
In the months after college, in line with my interest in macroeconomics and foreign affairs, I launched Acme Capital (keeping some anonymity) to become a capital raise advisor for small businesses in LatAm, Central Asia, and Africa. I partnered with two college classmates, each specializing in our own regions. We got some initial traction and quickly worked with four start-ups. After civil strife cut off our connection to our East African counterparty, we were down to our assets in Central Asia (RandomStan) and two in a LatAm country (LatAmlandia).
A few months later, our progress in RandomStan stalled due to lack of focus, irregularity, and honestly, lots of distractions emanating from the work-from-home environment during COVID, which I and some of my team approached as digital nomads and enjoyed as “the good days.” Despite many fun times and unforgettable memories, it was not conducive to entrepreneurial progress. I was also starting a new career on Wall Street, which was also quite time-consuming. Did you ever see how Eduardo Saverin got canned from Facebook on The Social Network after his summer internship on Wall Street? That happened to me (except I owned the start-up, too, lol).
Alas, About a year and a half into our project, we were on track to become the first angels in the RandomStan EdTech venture. Also, we had made progress in seeding a venture with a small phone repair shop in LatAmland, looking to expand some of its technological projects. The former eventually became a derelict project, and although we wrote and negotiated the entire funding round terms with the EdTech, we were ultimately cut out of the round because…well—we were amateurs and took too long to pull the trigger.
The latter—the phone repair shop—started sprouting some progress. We brainstormed and jointly developed an automated valuation algorithm and eventually managed to go live with it and deploy it on a website. We built a business model to copy Gazelle/EcoATM, whereby we automated used phone valuations, sellers brought the phones to our partner’s shop, the partner repaired them, and we then sold them for a slim profit on Mercado Libre. We also were pumping out ads and meme-ads to grow traffic and sales. We reached $3000 in sales in our first month and about $10,000 in total. But the margins were very slim. When I built the financial model, I realized the primary driver of success in the business would be speed. And the phones were simply not moving quickly enough.
Pivoting the Start Up (When the Cake Starts Burning)
We hit pause, told our partner to keep using the algorithm at his own discretion using his capital, and essentially use it as SaaS. The asset achieved a top SEO position on Google and flowed through about $9,000 in raw deal value for our partner per month, which was quite the feat. We even eventually beat Apple in LatAmlandia for our phone refurbishment program in terms of SEO.
Over a few weeks, this helped us ideate the next plan: get all the phone flippers in LatAmlandia onto the SaaS. So we went off to the races and built a scalable SaaS on Django, so any phone flipper could create automated valuation algorithms and forms to streamline their inventory acquisition process. I used an outsourced development team which was fantastic to work with. Highly responsive guys. We invested a few thousand into the process and got some grant money from a corporate sponsor. We managed to grow the top of the funnel tremendously, but it frankly just did not stick—WITH ANYONE. We hit the market about two months ago, and it is pretty clear at this stage that this will not work. The problem we’re solving is sometimes not painful enough, not hard enough for anyone to just solve, or simply too painful to get a steady stick stream of customers.
Post Mortem and Returning to Writing
The first three years of the venture left a lot of collateral damage, and during this time, my relationship with my partners and, at some points, even my family deteriorated. At one point, I was deeply invested and worked almost every night until 2AM trying to solve problems and move the ball forward. My team burnt out (one of them at least got into business school using some of the achievements on his personal statements). But overall was quite a painful experience.
Although I’m ready to declare the project dead, I feel like the job is incomplete, which makes me feel queasy about the entire experience. And that is the most stressful part. I led people (partners and customers) along for 2 years and could have done better. A bigger issue is whether I even care all that much anymore. I got into this to explore my interests and try to build a valuable service in an underserved niche. But I feel removed from those pain points since the early days and think a hard reset is overdue.
Why did I go off on this tangent about failed entrepreneurship if this post is about writing? Before I give up on ACME, I will pivot into writing for a bit while I heal my wounds. Even laying this all on paper is a good record to refer back to as I think about what is next. I plan to turn this story into a series where I will continue to reflect on early-to-mature small businesses. I will also discuss some of the epic successes I’ve been lucky to work on as part of my day job, now as a private equity investor in New York. Hopefully I can provide feedback to growing companies and new investors alike (ideally with both the bad decisions that led to entrepreneurial failure, and some good ones that has led to success in the financial sector).
Time will tell. Thanks for reading!
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