Learned the hard way: your mission doesn't pay the bills

Introduction

In the past decade, I have started a handful of companies. Some of them turned out well, and some didn't. I have learned a lot. In this post, I will share how my sole focus on my company’s mission led to its downfall.

Moving to San Francisco

In the summer of 2017, my girlfriend and I left our native Switzerland and moved to San Francisco to start an education tech company. I wasn't new to the entrepreneurship game: I had started and sold a small ecommerce company when I was 22 years old, and then started another company that’s still running and making millions each year.

For reasons that I might get into another time, I decided to leave my successful company that summer of 2017 to start a new one. My previous company had a mission somewhere on our about page, but it was certainly not the main driver of our business. I wanted to work on something where the mission was more important. The new company was called Humbot, and it was extremely mission-driven: We wanted to improve science education for kids and teenagers.

I have no idea what I’m doing

The reality was, I didn’t have any experience in the education industry. I had never worked in this field and didn’t have any friends who did. On top of that, the problem we were trying to solve was very broad. Our mission was ambitious yet naive: If we can improve science education, the world will be a better place (of course, that in itself might not even be true).

The first iteration of our product was a mobile app that let users browse bite-sized explainers for different topics from physics, chemistry, and biology. While (I thought) the content was good, it was hard to distinguish our explainers from all other explainers that existed out there. Furthermore, it was impossible to monetize it.

Waking up

We later realized that we need to tackle a real, specific problem that people is ready to pay for. We pivoted to other concepts, from chatbots to tutoring apps - unsuccessfully. We were living in expensive San Francisco, and our savings and loans were going down the drain fast.

After two years, we left San Francisco and moved back to Europe (never back to Switzerland, though). I went back to my previous company to be able to pay the bills (part-time) and we continued working on our EdTech company. In the end, we were close to burning out and sick of living in debt and with so little money. After fighting for three years, we had lost the motivation to chase our mission.

Hindsight is 20/20

The moral of the story is: It’s great that you care about your mission, but never forget that to reach that mission, you need a strong foundation for your company that makes money. For that, you will need to solve an actual problem people have. Instead of setting your mission and rushing off like I did, try to find and validate a solution to a specific problem first. Only then might you have a realistic shot at making headway towards your mission and making a positive impact.

Today, I’m taking a less all-in approach to entrepreneurship. During the day I make money as a freelancer, and in my spare time I work on three projects: Fugu, a privacy-focused and open-source product analytics tool, Mapzy, an open-source store finder, and Ravioli, a reusable shipping box system for ecommerce. They all have a mission, but primarily they solve a real problem I myself had.