I'm tired of all those success stories. Here is my Real Startup Story!!

It’s 2012. I sold my bootstrapped startup, made my 1st mil. I wanna build a unicorn, raise from big VCs, move to SF. One day I meet a guy looking like a movie star. This day is gonna change my life. He makes a pitch: “*Imagine you sit on a couch with your girlfriend, she wants to watch a romantic comedy and you wanna see an action movie. You open this app, that has sliders for each genre from 0 to 100. You set Drama=40, Comedy=70, Action=60 and it shows you those movies magically filtered this way*”. I’m a big fan of movies, I watched every single movie from the top 500 on IMDB, and the guy looks like the next Steve Jobs, so I say: cool, I wanna join, I’ll be your Woznyak. I invest around $100k and join as a CTO/CoFounder. **\[The Mobile App\]** We build this app in a few months and hire a team of people who watch every movie (10,000 movies) and categorize every minute of the movie into genres. We launch the app and it goes viral. Back then the app store was empty, people just find your app when you launch it. We win the App awards, and we get into a 500 startup accelerator. The Startup Founder dream. **\[Monetization\]** After a year, we have lots of users, but we haven’t made a penny yet. We’re focusing on the local audience instead of going global, which later turns out to be the biggest mistake of our lives, which I’ll cover later in the story. **\[Out of Money\]** We run out of investor money and we can’t raise new. The app is popular in the country, but the country is small. We realize that we put so much time into conquering this small market, while our competitor, who was behind us, moves to the US, conquers the market there, and gets acquired by a huge corp. It could have been us. The momentum is gone; there are 100 clones on the App Store doing just the same. We’re going into debt to survive; I put my personal money to pay devs for many months. Little do I know yet that I'll end up selling my house later to save the company. **\[Pivot\]** We talk to cinemas asking for a commission for every ticket purchased via our app. One cinema asks: “Can you clone this app, put our logo on it, remove everything that’s not cinema, and relaunch behind our brand?” It’d be the first cinema in the world to have its own native mobile app. It’s November. Just 3 months until we go bankrupt. They say: “We need the app in the app store by xmass.” For the next 50 days none of us takes a break. We work 18 hours a day, trying to make it to the deadline. We sleep in the office, eat in the office. **\[ReLaunch\]** Dec 24 at 4am we submit the final version of the app to the AppStore. It takes Apple weeks to review the app. My partner calls them on the phone line and literally begs them to approve it and gets it done. We’re live! The cinema runs a huge PR campaign around the app; they get lots of users and PR from all the media for this innovation. They are super happy, they sign a big contract with us, and they brag to the whole cinema world about this. **\[Scale\]** We realize this can be big. We’re the only ones in the world doing it. There is a cinema conference in Vegas in a few months, and this will be the top trending topic there. We buy the ticket. We arrive in Vegas. We’re totally outsiders in that crowd. We’re in our 20s, the rest are in their late 50s. But we get accepted. We get drunk, high, party, see all the famous Hollywood stars, and most importantly, we land lots of new contracts. We have them lined up. We fly all over the world, we meet these rich cinema owners, and our lives turn into a movie. For the next 9 months, we work every day, no weekends and holidays. We deliver them all, and our hearts are full of happiness and hope, it feels like we’ve made it, but our hopes get smashed a year later by an unexpected. **\[Series A\]** Now VCs love us. We are growing so fast, the contracts are huge, the cinemas are the most loyal customers, we have no competition, and everyone loves us. We raise Series A. We hire a huge sales and marketing team. Our dev team goes from 4 to 20. We are not a small startup anymore. We take the entire team to Ibiza where we party like celebrities because we earned this, it’s the first week that we take off since we started. **\[A Crash\]** We get to the top of the world but one day all our dreams crash... I wake up in the morning, take my phone and it shows 100+ missed calls. I unlock the screen and the first message says: "we're hacked, everything is down." I lose my breath for a second, my pulse jumpt to 200. I jump and get to my laptop to see the details. **\[Hacker\]** Our database was self hosted and had no serious protection. Someone hacked in and encoded the entire hard drive. We were young and stupid; we had no backups. All our customers are mad, everything is fking down. I get an email: "I encoded your hard drive, if you wanna decode it, pay me .... bitc0ins." We try to fix it ourself for hours, using the guides we found in the internet. We hire pros who try with us too. Nothing works. **\[Next}** We manage to drop the price, we pay the guy, he hands over the keys. We run the decoding process, and it Fails. We tell him it failed, he tries too and he says: You've corrupted the drive while trying to fix it yourself. So now it's impossible. I literally cry. **\[Solution\]** Me and the team tries more things, we find one article on internet with strange solution that we apply and right at the moment when we were about to lose all hope, we manage to decode it. At this point, it's 48 hours, no food, no sleep. It is up & running again. **\[From here and on, things go great\]** Our TAM was too small to aim for a Unicorn, so we expand it to more verticals. We scale up the headcount & delegate things. We're burning money like crazy, sponsor the biggest conf, book the tickets... but all our plans fall apart **\[COvid\]** Just after scaling our sales team like crazy, paying for all marketing efforts upfront, the world shuts down, cinemas stop functioning, stop buying, stop paying. We have a burnrate from "grow at all cost" playbook, but no new sales. We hope things get back to normal in a month, but it takes almost two years. We're nearing death, but something unexpected happens next: **\[Crypt0 pivot\]** A random friend gets super rich with nfts and needs help with software. We see an opportunity to expand our market, so we take him as a customer. Months later we have lots of customers from this space, making great revenue until the next event **\[The market crash\]** It all crashes, the revenue is gone again. I'm the CTO at the time. The CEO gets burned out, seriously sick, and leaves. I'm left alone, we're losing money, we're one step away from going out of business. **\[Saving the biz\]** I do all I can to save the biz. I sell my apartment to pay salaries. I tell the board we need to cut costs, but the message isn't convincing. It takes me 2 years to convince them and lay off everyone except the devs. I work for no salary myself. **\[Pivot to profitability\]** I drop all non core customers, we focus on one customer segment only. The team is small, the customers are happy again, we finally make more money than we spend. In total, it took me 5 years to do the pivot, I burned most of my money to do this, and I'll probably never get back the prime years I spent on it, all the money i burned and health issues i developed. Tbh, I wish I had given up in 2019. **\[I earn PTSD after this\]** I lose faith in VC-backed-path. I stabilize the company, automate/delegate things, turn it into a stable business. Then I enter the bootstrapped / indie maker world, to discover my real life mission, which I wish I had discovered earlier. But this is a story for my next post. The end.