In May, both of the B2B ideas I had been exploring failed.
That turned out to be useful.
Failure forces clarity. When an idea stops working, you can either spend months trying to rescue it or step back and ask whether you’re solving the right problem in the first place.
I chose the latter.
Part of the reason it took me longer than expected to reach that conclusion is that I underestimated how long it would take to recover from my previous role. When I left my job as a Staff Engineer, I assumed I’d start building immediately. Looking back, that assumption was wrong. I wasn’t starting from a place of rest. I was starting from exhaustion.
A few personal events also demanded my attention and reinforced the same lesson: reality doesn’t care about your plans.
The two MVPs weren’t working. Rather than forcing them forward, I returned to the beginning: talking to people.
It’s easy to become attached to an idea and spend months defending it. A startup’s advantage is the ability to change direction when the evidence suggests you’re wrong. The goal isn’t to prove an idea will work. The goal is to discover what people need.
Zarlu is structured to support that search. I’m the sole investor, expenses are low, and the company has enough runway to be patient. Finding the right problem often takes longer than founders expect.
Which brings me back to where I should have started: talking to people.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been exploring several consumer problems and trying to understand how people solve them today. What alternatives do they use? What frustrates them? What have they given up on improving?
One of the easiest mistakes founders make is falling in love with a solution before they understand the problem. I’m trying to do the opposite. If every idea I’m investigating fails but teaches me something about how people live and work, that’s progress.
Over the next few months, I’ll be slow traveling with a checked bag and a carry-on. Partly for personal reasons. Partly because I want to spend time with people whose lives look nothing like mine.
The original plan didn’t survive contact with reality. Most don’t. What matters is getting closer to a problem worth solving.
That’s the search I’m on now.