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Key Takeaways We sold our first company because we no longer believed we could turn it into the business we set out to build. And it left me with a long list of things I’d do differently if I were starting again.
The mistakes that pushed us to sell the company included a lack of proper market validation, underrating industry experience, low focus and commitment, and not speaking to users enough at the start.
With my current company, I’m making decisions faster, holding a single person responsible, building roles around the strengths of the people I have and keeping my emotions in check.
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.
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