My Startup is practically dead...

notes on how we ended up here and what's next

Jul 01, 2024

That's Ashutosh, our sole Engineer — That's sad Ashutosh, our only team member building all the Tech at Seek

Sorry for the clickbait, these marketers will do anything to grab your attention.

TL;DR
This is not a shutdown note.We're alive, working on a simple plan with a hard reset and a bigger goal.I need your help, continue reading.

I started working full-time on Seek in the second half of 2021, recovering from a COVID infection and a roller coaster of emotions and feelings through the Delta Wave.

Earlier, in June 2021, I announced my departure from Leher to pursue my dream project - Seek, on Twitter.

Around 30 friends on Twitter provided invaluable encouragement and support during those early days, from expressing interest in investment to sharing their thoughts and notes on the space.

It was an incredible feeling, and I still recall the joy and excitement that accompanied each reply and retweet.

The vision was to build a consumer product that helped people discover new brands and earn rewards from the ones they loved - without worrying about being spammed and free from the drama of coins, points, and scratch cards.

Reflecting on the journey so far and why I am writing this today

One important thing in my original tweet was “3 years” - I said it took me 3 years to get back to working on the idea for Seek and build a startup on my own.

Today, another three years have passed, filled with highs and lows - from developing and pitching our first prototype to securing initial funding from friends and angels, and eventually running out of funded runway.

Over the last few years, I must have read hundreds of Founder stories and notes on LinkedIn about starting up and shutting down. I think I’ve personally interacted with at least 20 such Founders going through the cycle of launch → try → failure along with some success stories.

I find it hard to believe that it’s been 3 years - where did these years go?

Giving myself some time to reflect, I believe that a lot of time I wasted was either filled with some form of delusion or exaggeration. Some problems seem too trivial to deal with at the moment ~ (delusion) while others seemed crucial but turned out to be mere time-consuming distractions ~ (exaggeration).

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and lose sight of the bigger picture - you start to enjoy "showing up every day and checking off to-do lists" so much that you may forget your higher-level goals.

I have a lot to share about my learnings and failures in these three years and I’m starting this today to mark the beginning of Seek 3.0.

For now, I'll focus on the important update in this post, and then continue writing about how we’re going to turn this around into a success story.

THE UPDATE:

We ran out of funded runway in December 2023.
We're a 2 member team now - Ashutosh and I, fully committed to the mission.
Supported by Rhutali, my fiancée 🥰 and our newest ~~unpaid intern~~ team member while she builds her own venture.
We still believe in our mission and vision, and we're determined to find a way to make it happen sustainably.

We are actively onboarding new brands and consumers can avail ready-to-redeem rewards worth about Rs. 31,000/- as of now.

Download Seek Rewards

The product is getting better every day and we still ship new releases fortnightly.

We’ve given more than enough thought to decide whether it is time to give up

It's time to refocus on our core mission - helping people discover great brands and earn rewards without the hassle.

What's next and where we need help

This is the beginning of my second attempt at "building-in-public". I want to start sending these public updates out as regularly as possible to compensate for the lack of communication in the past few months.

We need your support in two ways - help us identify the brands you love and provide unfiltered feedback on the personalised shopping experience you want.

Tell us about the new brands you discover

Seek makes it super easy, just share it into the app or send a link to us on WhatsApp or Instagram.

Personalised Shopping

The idea is to give you a shopping experience that you like on any website you visit - more on this later.

I am planning to ask a lot of survey-style questions on my LinkedIn, X and this Substack - take some time out and hit the reply button.

Read my Posts

In the next few weeks, Ashutosh and I plan on shipping a super exciting and rewarding shopping experience built with a lot of internal reflection and feedback from friends and users.

While I build the roadmap for the next three months and years, I want to start writing about my learnings in the last 3 years as a Founder.

If nothing else works, I'm hoping this Substack becomes a long reading list for first-time Founders on the mistakes they should avoid and probably some answers to help decide between shutting down or going big.

In the next few posts, I want to write about:

How I raised my Angel round with a Figma prototype and high-level concept note
Opinion: Founders should not give up project management in the 0-1 stage
Learnings from hiring but not firing at the right time
What to do when your mentors believe you should shut down - see where I'm going with this?

I’m sincerely hoping that I’m able to build a significant audience with this attempt at writing and I want to learn from each one of you. Please leave a comment to help us feed the algo :)