When my startup was failing, I couldn’t accept it.
Not to my investors. Not to my team. And most dangerously, not to myself.
And because I wasn’t being objective and honest with myself, I didn’t know how to read what was right in front of me.
And the signs were obviously there.
The math didn’t work.
We were spinning, not scaling.
Every round of funding we chased required a little more creative storytelling.
But I bought into the mythology of startup success, the same one so many founders do. I started to believe that if we looked successful long enough, reality would catch up.
And if we just held on a little longer, maybe - just maybe - we’d become the thing we were trying to be.
As I often write, that’s the dangerous part of startup culture. The world doesn’t reward founders who raise their hand and say, this isn’t working. It rewards the ones who walk on stage at the big conferneces and talk about their vision, their growth, their “traction.”
Ah, there’s that word. Traction.
Traction is the most abused word in the early-stage startup vocabulary.
And because we had no clear definition of it when I was operating my adtech startup. We let traction mean whatever looked good on a slide. I used everything I could find to build the story that we were moving forward.
We were in an accelerator. We had press hits. We had meetings with big names. We’d won some startup competitions. We had corporate pilots lined up. We had meetings with big publishers.
None of that - and I mean none of that - meant we had a business. These are the things we cling to when we need to keep the business story alive.
We celebrated awards from pitch events where the judges didn’t understand our industry and handed out trophies like party favors. We post the badge, we use the quote, we pump it into our deck, and we move on. That award becomes a signal - but it doesn’t pay salaries.
We were proud of our pilots, speaking about them as if they’re booked revenue, when they’re really just companies letting us play in the sandbox. Twenty pilots? Maybe two of them will even reply to your email three months later.
We talked about big meetings. Exciting meetings. With logos that make people nod their heads. But we don’t talk about how few of them turn into actual signed contracts. Or how easy it is to read interest as intent.
We told investors that we had tens of thousands of users, but we don’t say how many of them opened the app more than once.
We’d wave around signed LOIs like they’re revenue. We'd share screenshots. We project out our revenue model based on an other-worldly conversion rate.
We’d take booth selfies at major conferences and talk about all the “energy” and “conversations” and “interest.” We’d leave with a stack of business cards and zero deals.
We’d build and talk about waitlists for future products. We'd boosted vanity metrics. We’d pay for growth and call it traction, even though the second we stop spending, the numbers fall off a cliff.
I did all of that. And I got pretty good at it.
I used those signals to convince others. And then - far worse - I used them to convince myself.
The truth would’ve required admitting something I didn’t know how to process: that we had failed. That despite the years, the effort, the sleepless nights, the investors, the press, the buzz, we didn’t have a real company - we had a story held together by faux-momentum and hope.
Eventually, someone asks to see the books.
Eventually, you run out of people to impress.
Eventually, the illusion breaks.
When that happened to me, it wasn’t a soft landing. I landed in front of a judge, where I heard something that I’ll never forget:
“It looks like you just didn’t know how to fail.”
Boy, was she right.
I like to think that if I had known how to be objective about our story, I would’ve had the courage to wind it down. To say, “We tried. It didn’t work.”
I’m not sure. Maybe.
The worst part is that real traction isn’t that complicated.
It’s recurring revenue. Daily active users. Net revenue retention. Low customer acquisition cost. Organic word of mouth and a good viral coefficient. It’s usage. It’s cash flow. It’s something that doesn’t disappear when the ad spend stops or the press cycle ends.
It’s not sexy. It’s not loud. But it’s the only thing that matters.
So if you’re building something, please check yourself.
Strip away the fluff.
Ask: if I removed all the free users, all the pilots, all the LOIs and soft commitments and PR buzz, what would be left?
If the answer is “not much,” that’s your signal.
It’s not failure.
It’s honesty.
And if you can be honest and objective, you still have a shot to learn and build something better.
You’ll live to fight another day.
