Wrapping Up

A couple of months ago we shut down FrontRow, and are returning the remaining capital to investors. TLDR - the market for hobby learning was way smaller than we believed, and unlikely to support a venture scale business. But that makes it sound way more straightforward than it was. Especially since 2 million people downloaded the FrontRow app and over a quarter of a million people paid for a course.

Which is why I wanted to document the journey. Moreover, a) it might be helpful to others building a startup, b) writing down what I felt on this roller coaster might help get some closure, and c) I want to thank everyone who helped along the way (and there were a lot of you).

So, what happened?

When I left VC to start up 4 years ago, Mikhil was spending time on an edtech idea - helping college students get better jobs. I found it (and more so the idea of working with him) interesting, so we started working on it together. We soon noticed students were pretty unexcited by and almost hated engineering, but were spending a ton of time learning rap, guitar and more. That led us down the hobby learning rabbit hole.

After some very positive experiments and despite slightly discouraging industry conversations, we locked on a simple thesis - help people get better at their passions. We wanted FrontRow v1 to be 101 courses taught by the best of the best, along with a community platform to help people get feedback, take part in competitions, and collaborate. Lightspeed and Elevation shared our excitement, and led a $3mn seed round in early 2020, just before the lockdowns.

Lift Off

We wanted to make everything perfect, so as we closed deals with instructors over zoom, we ran a bunch of pilots for 6 months before launching FrontRow in Nov 2020, with comedy, singing and cricket, along with a few community features. We took way too long in retrospect. Our pace of learning went up exponentially post launch with real user feedback. We did create a product and brand we were proud of, and spending long days breaking down music with Amit Trivedi was fun but it was the wrong call - we should’ve launched in a third of the time.*

Still, the launch went better than anything we had expected! Over the next few months, we saw everything that you’d expect from a (moderately) hot startup - some amazing user love, heartwarming learner stories, site crashes from too much traffic, viral reviews, new competitors, an FIR (long story), inbound VC pings, an absurdly high acquisition offer, and angel funding from a bunch of startup legends (& Deepika Padukone!).

I’ll be honest, I’d never felt what I was feeling then - it was an insane high. We’d gone from a crazy sounding idea, to a real product and hundreds of thousands of users. We were a small team. Everyone was working 15 hour days, and loving it. We were accomplishing what we set out to and everything was playing out better than we had imagined.

That lasted for 6 months. Then it didn’t. 

A bump in the road

We had scaled to $1mn annualised revenue. We plateaued there while our marketing cost ballooned to over 100% of revenue and our course completion stayed below average. We threw everything we could at growth, but it seemed like the natural growth curve for our courses had an initial burst, followed by a low plateau.

We needed to keep our users engaged longer so that they buy multiple courses, so we shifted our focus to the community. We launched a lot of features - gamification, competitions, WA groups, open mics, chat, events, instant feedback and more! I think we’d gone from a strong PoV on what to build to throwing features at the problem, and that showed in the output.* We always hoped the next one would be a game changer but we never got to retention metrics that showed real PMF.

It felt like something was working, but it still wasn’t clear what a real business would look like here. We’d lost faith in community as a driver of value - users said they desperately wanted the features we built, but rarely used them as much. Setting your biases aside, and knowing how good a user call needs to be was a hard lesson to internalise, but one that would come up repeatedly.*

Blitzscaling

We increasingly noticed a few very engaged cohorts - mostly users who wanted to learn more seriously. Their number one demand was deeper courses, with clear outcomes and 1:1 guidance. This contradicted our original focus on casual learning but we decided to launch a few live course experiments. These took off, and we eventually launched a live course subscription priced at $200 for 6 months. Now, this was a much more complicated product, with lower gross margins and likely needed a large sales team. However, the demand for it also seemed to be off the charts. We doubled month on month, and hit $1mn annualised in live learning in 3 months.

At this time, it truly felt like we’d caught lightning in a bottle. We rejected the acquisition offer (which really makes you live the phrase bet on yourself)*, and raised a $14mn Series A led by Eight Roads & GSV. We definitely had blinders on, and went into all out growth mode. We did honestly believe a) we could rapidly improve operations & margins while growing, and b) that a large topline would enable us to raise the next round, and do even more. I’d let myself get carried away and focus on external metrics, despite knowing the pitfalls fully well.*

In another 6 months, we scaled to $4m annualised revenue - it was a herculean effort to 4x that quickly. We solved a massive number of scaling problems, moved from a taped together WA + zoom experience to a real product. We also crossed a million downloads and 200K paid users, and were (suddenly) a 400 member team.

Though we were improving, a double click beyond the top line showed issues. We had a -250% contribution margin (180% was S&M, 70% was operations), and renewals weren’t nearly where they needed to be. Most worrying of all, we saw early signs of plateauing. Growth solves all problems, but we weren’t able to figure out the next lever of growth despite predicting the plateauing early. I now understand that while blitzscaling is a valid strategy it only works if you either have a) undeniably massive demand (e.g. social media or quick commerce) or b) profitable unit economics.* We’d made ourselves believe we had the former and a path to the latter but now needed to prove it.

Course Correction

This was mid 2022, the market had started turning and (correctly) valuing metrics beyond growth. Our runway hit the 18 month mark, which was an alarm bell. We needed to change, and quickly. We parted with 40% of the team (and revenue), and focussed fixing the unit economics. We stopped all moonshot experiments, and spent the next 4 months ruthlessly optimising every tiny piece of the business. We hit our mark and got to breakeven at a $1.5mn ARR.

But it didn’t feel like PMF anymore. We didn’t feel the pull or demand, even at that scale, let alone at 10x that. This was honestly a very tough truth to accept. Everything sucks till it doesn’t - you get used to just treating every bad metric or month as the next challenge to overcome, and it’s very hard to switch that off. We easily took 6 more months to do it than we should have.* But we eventually felt that despite still believing in the market, we had not arrived at the right solution.

Failing

In October 2022, we let go 90% of our team. That was the most emotional week I’ve had at work. There were many tears, and a deep permeating sense of failure. For 2 weeks, the whole team re-oriented towards helping everyone get jobs. I felt numb, and was pretty much on auto pilot - picking up any work I could. It was oddly amongst the longest hours I’ve worked. I think I needed the distraction, and couldn’t really stomach my thoughts wandering.

It was my first real failure. I’d failed before but never in such totality, and with such impact. I’m not still not sure how I got over it (or to be honest, whether I have), but the overwhelming support from the team (even the folks we had to let go), our investors, friends and even strangers in the ecosystem was a big part of it. I got multiple texts and voice notes from founders I’d never met just saying it was okay, and relaying stories of when their now successful companies went through similar moments. This was the moment that really made me understand and appreciate the special ecosystem we’re a part of. 

A small aside, I do want to mention - there were also many “I always knew they’d fail” or “I told you so” posts. We always used to have a few and I’d never let them get to me, but that week each one of them made me want to scream and punch someone. This experience quite strongly changed how I express opinions on ideas and failures - you never know what’s really going on. I’ve regretted so many comments I’d made in the past, and I increasingly remind myself to send that random appreciative or supportive message to someone (particularly folks I don’t know) more often.

In November, we went back to a small seed stage startup exploring the idea maze around hobby learning. We took a week off, went on a 3 day planning trip as a team and set the stage for what we called FrontRow 2.0 (though arguably it was maybe the 4th or 5th version of our thesis, depending on who you asked). It did take a big push (and sleepless nights) to get back to actually launching stuff. it was completely my co-founders’ and team’s belief that helped me get there - they stuck around through the worst, and if possible were even more determined.

One tough decision we had to grapple with was whether to do a hard pivot - explore a completely different market. We decided against it, even after a last ditch thought of doing it in parallel with hobby learning. We still believed in the problem, and felt that hedging would be a distraction and set up both paths for failure.

One Last Hurrah

Over the next 9 months, we worked on two problems in hobbies a) online learning for adults, and b) offline learning for kids.

For adults, we felt our initial TG of a casual learner was a bad idea - hard to satisfy with a low willingness to pay, so we focussed on a) users looking for useful entertainment and b) serious career-oriented learners. We got a very muted response from the former. I now had a higher bar on the initial user love needed but even ignoring that, feedback was significantly worse than our early experiments. In hindsight, what we’d seen initially was a lockdown false positive, when time for leisure had massively expanded. Now, hobbies had gone back to being low priority. We had better luck with serious learners but as we tried to grow we kept realising how small an audience that was, so we dropped the adult hobby market.

Our offline kids classes were doing well - we were at $100k ARR (and this time it was real recurring revenue) with low CAC and high NPS. This was definitely a real business. However, it was a very different beast. It was purely offline which made it low margin and operationally complex. Also, it worked only for a very affluent audience which was still quite small. Hence, we felt it would be near impossible to build into a venture scale business. We considered running it as a steadily growing business but just couldn’t get excited about it - it wasn’t what we wanted to do with our lives, nor what the team or investors had signed up for.

A hard pivot was also an option. We had enough capital for a large seed, and our investors were supportive but I really felt it was set up for failure. My number one takeaway at that point was only build a company when you really believe in the market. Yes, Slack-like pivots happen, but they weren’t for me. I was not the kind of person who would get excited about throwing darts and hoping one sticks.* Moreover, I felt I couldn’t force the love for a new market, and I didn’t want to put a deadline (even a long one) on locking it. When you start something from scratch, you need an unusual force of will and belief. Strong enough that it’s infectious. Honestly, I’m not sure whether this was just how I rationalised that at the time I just didn’t have it in me, but I knew I didn’t, whatever the cause.

So, pretty much exactly 4 years after I left my job, we shut down FrontRow.

What did I learn?

Well, that was some ride. I’m going to talk about learnings because if you write 3000 words and don’t, your startup ecosystem pass is rescinded. More seriously, I learnt a lot about businesses, people and more importantly about myself. I’ve marked a bunch learnings above (see the *s) but expanding on a few more. Some may seem obvious but I want them here almost as reminders for myself.

Really believe in the market. Only build a business when you’re sure you want to spend at least 5 years in the market, even if shit keeps hitting the fan repeatedly. It might sound like too high a threshold but it’s what the bar should be. When everything goes wrong, and believe me at some point it will feel like it has, the market is what you hold on to.

Choose what matters to you and ignore everything else. Don’t care about external metrics or external validation. The only metric that matters is how well you believe the business is working. This sounds easy and obvious, but it’s so easy to be lured into shiny vanity metrics and fundraising goals, particularly when you’ve grown up in the venture backed startup ecosystem.

There is no silver bullet. Give me a piece of startup advice, and I’ll give you three data packed examples of where it was amazing and three where it was absolutely incorrect. Take all advice (including mine) with a grain of salt, process it and take your own call.

Find truth tellers. Find a small set of truth tellers who keep you honest, and whose opinion you can’t just sweep under the rug. Make sure that’s how your board operates as well (as long as you can), which means keep it small and ensure high ownership. I’m grateful for the pushes I got throughout, and I should’ve looked out for more of them.

It’s hard. Startups are way harder than I’d thought, despite being surrounded by founders. They’re not technically hard (usually), but they are psychologically hard. I’m not someone who shies away from challenges, but the emotional roller coaster in building a company is at another level and can be very lonely. I hated hearing this when I was in VC, but you really need to have gone through it to empathise.

Giving up is confusing. Lastly, the dichotomy of giving up is very weird. You’re wired to be optimistic, to think of every problem as a challenge to be solved, and you get used to shitty days. I still don’t know how to truly know. This year was the first time I’ve woken up and felt sad about going to work. This lasted for over 6 months, despite trying everything to fix it. That persistent feeling was the trigger which led to a deeper process - obsessing over all the numbers, talking to every type of user we’d had and long dinners with board members. Eventually the inputs almost blurred, and I realised my default optimism turned had into default pessimism (or in other words, a loss of conviction) which ultimately led to decision to shut won.

And now?

I don’t think it’s possible to neatly wrap this journey up. I’ve honestly been confused whether I should (or want to) focus on learnings, regret, or gratitude? Should I be apologetic, or celebrate? Should I feel confident, or humbled? The truth is I’ve felt every one of these things (and more) over the last few months. This is new for me - I’m usually pretty zen, for better or worse.

A part of me wants to just think of this as the abyss in a hero’s journey. Or to write a post about “my learnings from building” or even more on the nose “5 ways why my failed startup set me for success.”, but that’s not how I feel today. I have of course grown (a lot) but I’m also left with conflicting emotions, and some conflicting takeaways. And though I would of course do many things differently, I have no regrets. I’m also grateful for everything that we did accomplish, and do want to celebrate that!

In 4 years, we helped millions get better at their passion - 2.1 million people downloaded the FrontRow app, 270K people enrolled for a paid course and over 100K learners attended a live class. Hundreds of people believed in our vision and joined our team, with a number of them trusting us in their first jobs out of college - and I’m proud of the incredible work they did! Our investors took a leap of faith by entrusting us with millions of dollars and worked alongside to build FrontRow. Our celebrity instructors opened their minds and hearts to us, and 750 amazing teachers helped learners improve every day! And I’m thankful to every one of them - we wouldn’t have been anywhere without them.

Most of all, I truly felt that I was creating my life’s work, to the point where it didn’t feel like work at all. That feeling and drive is incomparable. I know that that’s what I want to feel for whatever I spend time on. I also know this is the best thing I have ever done. I can’t wait to top it!