$91,000 loss

Very few people know about my first business and how I lost six figures in that business over two years of stupidity 🤐

Back in January 2017, my wife & I were on a road trip in New Zealand and we met Kurt, a retired architect. He was our Airbnb host in a small town called Picton. During our conversation, he said that the last seven years of retirement have been the most rewarding years of his career.

After retiring from his 9 to 5, he started taking independent projects building custom homes, community churches, co-working spaces, and not only has he made more money, but it's also made him feel more fulfilled. He had just one regret — not quitting his job in his 30s/40s 😱

This two-hour breakfast got us thinking. We were 29 and 26 at the time — I was a marketer, Simran a developer — we decided to start Stamplet — a consumer app that rewards people for sharing their receipts.

The GOOD 🚀: Speed of launch — we launched in three months. Traction — we got into Techstars, one of the biggest accelerators in North America. Proof of concept — we scaled to 10K users.

The BAD ❌: My business plan was way too ambitious; we estimated $1M annual revenue in Year 2. In real life, we lost $91,000 by the end of year 2 with $8,000 in gross revenue 🥲. I got sucked into pitching to investors when the same time could have been spent making the business profitable. We launched in Hong Kong, a market we did not know enough about.

Lessons learned: Fail cheap & fail early — I did the opposite. Keep it simple. Have a mentor who has done this before.

Why am I telling you this? Just one reason — you can't win without failing. As a first-time entrepreneur, you have to assume "you will fail" because if you don't set the right expectation, you will never be able to get back up if and when you fail.

It took me two years to recover from this loss. But that's it — I was still 31: Broke but young... Lost but wiser...

— Nav