8-ish months, 1 startup, a waitlist of 1200+ people... I'm shutting it all down.

This isn't the update that I thought I was going to be making when I incorporated my kind of tech mostly skincare company in January this year. Today we are announcing that we are closing it down. Now, I think that startup TikTok likes to explore all of the exciting wins and ignore the pivots, the restarts, the closures, and basically the horrible side of startup life. But I think that there is real value in those stories. So on that note, the last month has one of been one of the more difficult months of my life, and so I wanted to tell you about what happened and what comes next. It all started in the summer of 2023 with a simple insight. The skincare industry is overwhelming as heck. There are too many products, too many opinions, and too much confusion. I was so convinced of this problem that I largely ditched all of my consulting opportunities to be able to work on this full-time around the summer of last year. I even incorporated the company in Delaware effective January 1 this year. Now, the idea in a nutshell was to use AI to solve the problem of overwhelm by cutting through all the noise and giving people hyper-bespoke product recommendations. And the validation was real. We had more than 1,200 people who were willing to pay to have their skincare dilemmas solved. At one point, I actually had more than one waitlist going and I had accidentally set them up as individual waitlists. We had customers who added themselves to individual waitlists so that they were on more than one waitlist. They were so excited to be able to get access to what it was that we were building. So the question becomes, why would we shut down something that had so many early signs of promise? Two things happened almost simultaneously. One, advances in consumer AI started to solve aspects of our problem in ways that I hadn't anticipated. Or more to the point, the way customers interpreted those tools was things that I hadn't anticipated. The second is that we ran into totally unforeseeable legal complexities that we just weren't equipped to financially solve. As I said before though, ideas are cheap and I already have several ideas that have been bubbling away for some time now that I am uniquely in a position to be able to explore. And this is where it gets good. If you have ever wanted to be in on day one of a new venture, that day is tomorrow. I am going to put everything that I've learned from this disaster of an experience to good use, along with the graduate degree that I have in business research, and I am going to conduct a series of experiments to be able to figure out what businesses to build and what actually works. When I am super successful and there is a Netflix special in my honor, this is going to be where the story begins. So, if you're interested in following along with what comes next and you want to say you were there from the beginning, please follow along. But also, if you are having challenges with your startup, if you are one of the founders out there that is having a hard time and feel like TikTok just doesn't represent, drop me a comment, send me a DM, we are in this together. I am so excited for what comes next and even if I don't hear from you, I will see you tomorrow.