Why My Startup Failed Before It Even Launched

"You ask, what if I fall?

  Oh, what if you fly? "

-Erin Hanson

‍This is an honest and true story about one of my failures. We read and hear a lot of success stories, but not enough about failed ones. Failures are just lessons in disguise.

This is one of the lessons I learned...

Jumping Right In

In 2019, I was in my first year of college at UCSD. I always had a knack for entrepreneurship, so I knew I was going to take advantages of the resources available at university to start a company. It is commonly said that the first step for a startup's success is to find a problem people face. Solve the problem and iterate based on user feedback. I was too eager to look for problems, I wanted to build a product and launch. This "jumping in" attitude led me to a company that didn't really have a good market fit.

The Idea

I noticed students in dorms and apartments don't get their groceries delivered (not a real problem, just an observation). I figured it must be easy to be able to deliver to college students. Just group all the orders from one residence hall and deliver it all at once. Save money on delivering and students don't have to find transportation to buy groceries. It's important to note that Instacart did exist, but it's valuation was 5% of what it is today. Instacart's service simply didn't cater to colleges in my mind.

I was going to create a service that allowed you to order from grocery stores as a group (dorm, res hall, etc.). The bill is automatically split among your dorm members. I thought it was genius!

Everyone says NO

I started to mockup some designs and tried to reach out to grocery chains. I was ghosted by every grocery chain, so that didn't help my idea. I decided I would do the deliveries myself. The idea was I would get an alert, drive to the store, pay for the groceries, and deliver it to the customer. I essentially became the "Instacart driver." I didn't need partnerships with grocery chains, so it didn't matter if they didn't respond to my emails. As I scale, I would hire more drivers and keep growing. To me, this was a simple and effective solution. However, I forgot one major aspect, the students.

I took my designs to students to learn if they would use my service. I stood near the library, bus stops, the on-campus Starbucks. Wherever I could find students, I would run up to them to talk about my idea and show them the mockups. It was difficult, time-consuming, and meant I had to skip a lot of lectures. Regardless, the thrill of finding customers was totally worth it!

After talking to over 100 students, I found no one would use my service. The feedback was consistent. "neat idea, but I don't really need it." I was devasted. I spent all this time figuring out the solution, talking to students, and letting my grades slip just to find out no one was going to use my service. I scrapped the project and went back to class.

Failures are Lessons in Disguise

My startup was going to be called UniCart (yeah I know it's really similar to Instacart), but it failed before it even launched. While I may have been disappointed at the time, I leaned a lot from this journey:

1. Find a problem that people face
2.Talk to your customers to find out what they really want
3. As you develop, find those early customers who will try out your product
4. Launch an MVP. Be scrappy.
5. Always look for customer feedback and iterate on it as much as possible.

It is my strong conviction that failures are lessons in disguise. UniCart didn't work out for me and that's okay. I gained so much insight from trying to launch my startup and still apply these lessons to my work today. My message to all student entrepreneurs who might be afraid to launch that company, Make the Leap. You might fail or succeed, but the journey will always be valuable for the rest of your life.

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