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Most of what I know about building a company, I learned from the things that didn’t work. And I don’t say that with regret. A big, committed attempt that fails will teach you more than a small, careful one that gets by, as long as you’re honest afterwards about why it failed. The whole value of a mistake is the lesson sitting inside it. Take that lesson seriously, and your next attempt is better — and you repeat fewer of the same mistakes. Ignore it, and all you’ve collected is a scar.

Trible was my big, committed attempt. I co-founded it, ran product and operations, and spent about a year and a half on it before we sold the company. Selling can sound like an achievement, but it wasn’t a triumph — we sold because we no longer believed we could turn it into the business we set out to build. What Trible did leave me with is a long list of things I’d do differently if I were starting again, and a lot of how I work now comes straight from that list. And that’s the list I’m sharing with you today.

What Trible was, and what happened to it

Trible was a no-code platform for creators. Someone with an audience could build their own mobile app, put their courses, paid community and consultations inside it, publish it to the App Store and Play Store under their own account, and sell to their followers directly. The idea we believed in was that millions of small creators could earn from their knowledge without depending on social media algorithms or competing for attention on someone else’s platform.

There was another company doing roughly what we had in mind, and that gave us a lot of confidence to start. We considered it to be proof that the market for such a product exists and understood how to build a superior product. We were convinced that performance marketing, our core competence, would bring us the users we wanted. 

The work fell into three phases. The first was the MVP — building a product that kind of works and getting first clients. The second, roughly six months, was the hunt for unit economics, which meant learning to acquire creators and earning more on a single customer than we spend on their acquisition. By the end of that phase, the math worked out. However, we faced a surprising problem.

Every product metric we cared about came in several times worse than what we had modeled for a SaaS business. We had unit economics without product-market fit. During the third phase, we pushed for product-market fit but barely got any substantial traction. That left us at an uncomfortable crossroads: Keep grinding on a SaaS where we had almost no real advantages, or give up and move on to start a consumer business we knew how to build. We chose the latter and sold Trible to a different owner.

The mistakes: Where it went all wrong (and why)

None of these felt like mistakes at the time. Each one had a reasonable point behind it, which is what made them easy to make and hard to catch. These are the ones that cost us the most.

Three hustlers and no hacker:

My co-founders and I had very similar profiles.  All three of us had business backgrounds, all focused on sales, and we all approached problems from the same angle. Neither of us had an engineering background or ability, and in a SaaS company, actually building the product mattered more than we wanted to admit.

There’s a tried-and-true piece of startup advice about needing a hustler, a hipster and a hacker on the team. Sadly, we had three hustlers and no hacker or hipster.

No proper market validation:

We had only one reference, which made us believe that the market and model worked. We never questioned why it seemed to be the only market where a SaaS product could grow purely through performance marketing. We never questioned why there was only one such competitor.  

Well, we should have.

What we didn’t understand was that the people brought in through impulsive, consumer-style funnels behaved differently from typical SaaS customers. SaaS companies normally depend on business-minded buyers who make rational decisions; therefore, they commit and stay. Performance marketing on social feeds attracts people making a quick, impulsive decision, and they behave nothing alike. 

We didn’t know that at the time, so our one example of a competitor SaaS company growing through performance marketing looked like proof the same would work for us, when in reality it kept bringing in customers who never retained the way a SaaS business model needs. We were wrong about the market from the very start, in what we chose to build and how, and good execution later could not repair a decision made that early.

Underrating industry expertise:

When you build for consumers, you can get by without understanding your users very deeply, because you’re a consumer yourself, and you can usually trust your own sense of what people want. With businesses, you can’t do that. You’re not the customer, so you have to actually learn how their business works: how a creator gets an audience and how they turn it into money. We didn’t spend enough time on this.

We built a platform for publishing courses without realizing how hard it is to make a course in the first place. Creating one takes months of work before you earn anything, and a lot of creators never finish. It also took us more than a year to really understand how creators make money. When we finally did, things got easier. We could see where Trible fit, and once we integrated with the tools creators were already using, our product decisions started bringing in real power users. We should have tried to figure all of this out from the very start.

Low focus and commitment

App or web, all-in-one or single-use case, beginners or established creators — any one of those could have become a real business, and we kept all the options open because committing felt risky. The indecision cost us months. The deeper version of this is what I now call building a Frankenstein. Creators typically need help with acquiring an audience, turning followers into clients, creating content and delivering content.

For a long time, instead of focusing on a single job-to-be-done, we tried solving every problem mentioned above. Obviously, neither worked well. Moreover, we took the retention assumptions of a typical B2B SaaS, applied them to a B2C acquisition machine and told ourselves we were combining the best of both worlds. In my experience, you usually end up with the worst of both instead.

Barely speaking to users at the start:

In the first five or six months, there was only one conversation with a real customer. It happened the day before the MVP launch. We spent our precious time on completely irrelevant things: go-to-market strategy for a product that didn’t exist yet, branding (a common beginner’s pitfall), a future org structure. We once spent five hours discussing org structure while being a team of 10. Do you really need an org structure on such a scale?

What I’m doing differently the second time around

It took me just three weeks to start again. Today I run , a self-improvement app based on expert knowledge, built to turn doomscrolling into growth-scrolling. The market and the product are new, but I’m that same founder who made those mistakes. Luckily, I learned my lessons and changed the way I run my company, which has reached 80+ people in a little more than two years.

The lessons above changed how I run marketing and product. Trible also changed something deeper: my leadership style and practices. Those changes are harder to attribute to specific vivid events with clear impact on metrics. But they make a difference all the same, and that’s why they’re the ones I set out to get right the second time.

Deciding faster, holding a single person responsible:

At Trible, we could spend a month aligning on a financial model or the goals for a funding round. Now that takes a day. A lot of that comes from being clear about who the single decision-maker is, and that the CEO holds a veto, instead of trying to reach a comfortable consensus on everything.

Less process, more action:

We spent a lot of time designing responsibility zones, goal-setting systems and retrospectives. Now I start from the business problem and the decision it needs. I build roles around the strengths of the people I have instead of forcing them into a structure I set in advance, and I let strong teams organize themselves.

Keeping my own emotions in check:

At Trible, I could be very emotional, often in a negative direction, and I underrated how much the founder’s mood sets the temperature for everyone else around him. When I was tense or discouraged, the team’s performance dropped instantly. I now treat managing my own state as part of my job, because I’ve seen how much my behavior and example move the company more than any goal, task or carefully worded announcement.

The keepers: What worked well enough to bring with me

Not everything from the Trible days was a lesson in what to avoid. A few things worked well enough that I carried them straight into RiseGuide, my current venture.

Choosing the right audience:

How people behave within a product, and how satisfied they are with it, comes down to the relevance of the audience more than the so-called “quality” of the product. With Trible, the same platform produced strong retention and real earnings for one kind of creator and almost no value for another, and the difference was who had signed up.

Once that was clear, we stopped chasing sign-up volume and started qualifying people on the way in, scoring users and filtering for the segments the product could actually benefit. Being deliberate about the audience proved to be one of the most valuable things we did, and it’s a practice I carried over.

Prioritizing customer feedback:

My default instinct is to find the strongest competitor and do what they do but 5% better. It’s a reliable way to build when you have someone to look up to. Trible had exactly one direct competitor, and we surpassed them quickly product-wise, so that crutch disappeared, and we had to learn what to build by listening to users directly.

After a full day as COO and CPO, I’d take a “night shift” until two in the morning, selling, onboarding and supporting creators myself, and pulling product feedback out of every conversation. It later became a weekly meeting where we went through everything users had told us and adjusted the backlog fast. RiseGuide has no direct reference with the same offering or business model, so it was one of the first things I set up here.

The engineering team and its culture:

We had an unusually strong engineering team and a culture to match. The engineers were business-minded and pushed back on product and design instead of just closing out tickets. We ran without separate project managers or dedicated QA, which kept us fast and made the decisions better. The proof is in where everyone landed: Almost every engineer from that team now leads his own crew. It worked well enough that I brought both the CTO and the whole approach from Trible to RiseGuide.

Support that earns loyalty:

Support teams are too often treated as a commodity: outsourced, barely trained and run on a low-ambition service-level agreement of slow replies and canned answers. We did the opposite. We hired carefully, in-house, recognized the agents’ contribution, and brought them into the life of the team rather than keeping them at the edge of it. A lot of users stayed with us for fast, empathetic help they received even when the product sometimes had gaps. At RiseGuide, we are keeping the same high bar.

Why I’d make the same bet, even knowing how it ends

There’s an irony I’ve had to sit with. We sold Trible because we couldn’t find the fit, and then the fit arrived anyway, later and on its own schedule. Our top-earning creator showed up organically about two weeks after we’d stopped acquiring users. She published her app a month after we handed the business to its new owner, and went on to make around $45,000 from it over the next eight months. In total, creators on Trible earned roughly four times what they had spent on our services. The community kept going for months after we left. So it worked, just later than we expected — or had the patience to wait for.

I’m not sure an earlier breakthrough would have been better. We might simply have prolonged a business that would teach us less than its ending did. What I am sure of is that the attempt was well worth making, mistakes included, because I came out of it with the experience that is now foundational to my next business’s success.