Startups are hard.

Startups are hard.

I’ve learned this first-hand over the past few years. It’s been a whirlwind of highs and lows and pivots and bugs and running out of money and focusing on the wrong customers and discouragement and celebration.

• We began working on Uptrends (then called Babbl) nearly 4 years ago in 2020.

• Through most of 2021 we attempted to bootstrap a crude MVP that could track trending stocks and online sentiment. Maybe a few hundred people used it. Made $0

• In 2022 we hired a dev, built a slightly better (but still crappy) version, got it to maybe a thousand users, went through BETA (MN’s local startup accelerator)

• By 2023 we went out and raised a pre-seed funding round, mainly from friends and family. We closed more than $500K and went through gener8tor’s NMotion program. Got to 10K users and a few $$$

• Then in 2024 after fundraising we rebuilt Uptrends to focus more on AI event detection and sending email alerts. We got to 20K users, maxed out around $1K MRR and haven’t been able to get much past that since.

All the while we were entirely focused on trying to make B2C work. We stuck to our guns when we didn’t see much product-market fit. I made the mistake of saying ‘were just one feature away’ a few too many times.

We overbuilt, underdelivered, didnt validate, and couldnt scale.

And in many ways it sucks. You want your product to succeed, you want to feel like you’re doing the right thing. You want to make your customers happy, your investors happy. You want to feel smart and accomplished. And we haven’t made it work.

Now we have 4-5 months runway in the bank, cant afford to pay ourselves, and we’re in the process of pivoting from B2C and towards B2B, like we probably should have done sooner (hindsight is 20/20).

In many ways it feels better. I’ve learned so much over the past few months, what feels like decades of learnings and perspective.

It seems you learn the most when you fail. And that’s the reassuring piece for me. That seems to make it all worth it. Scary, but worth it.

When I quit my day job in 2022 I made the conscious decision to go out and try and do the damn thing. Because the worst that could happen was that the startup would fail (odds are it *would* fail) and I’d come out the other side with more knowledge than I could have gotten any other way.

Looking towards the last ~3 months of the year, we’ve told ourselves we can either make it work before 2025 or we’ll call it quits and go try something else.

Like Elon says, building a startup is like chewing on glass while staring into the abyss.

But something makes it all worth it. I think its the pursuit / discovery of something novel.

I was born too late to explore the world, and too late to explore the galaxy, and just in time to build micro-SaaS AI wrappers to help business professionals improve efficiency by 1%

Maybe tomorrow I’ll dive into my top learnings and takeaways from the past few years.

For today, my time is up. Back to work!