He raised $1.3M, hit $100K ARR—but failed. Here's the lesson every founder needs to hear. | Tolga Ermis, Founder of PromiseQ
Description
Tolga stumbled upon a problem in the security monitoring space. Motion cameras generated way too many false alerts. So he decided to solve it using AI. He raised over a million dollars and got several customers.
But he always felt he was pushing a boulder up a hill. At one point, one of his large customers churned and went with a competitor. Tolga pivoted, but it was too late.
Now, thinking back, he realizes that one of the main issues is he may never have been solving an important-enough problem. And in my experience that's the reason that 95%+ of startups fail.
You learn a lot from the massive successes— but you can only really know what drives success if you pay attention to the failures as well. So here it is, back by popular demand.
Why you should listen:
- Why learning from failures is as important as celebrating successes.
- Why you need to deeply validate the problem with customers before building.
- How to tell if your product isn't a top priority based on sales cycles.
- Why you probably need to pivot sooner than you think.
Keywords
startup failure, founder stories, learning from mistakes, customer validation, market dynamics, business pivot, entrepreneurship, PromiseQ, AI technology, security solutions
Timestamps:
(00:00:00 ) Intro
(00:02:50 ) What is PromiseQ
(00:11:06 ) Working on a Non-Priority Pain Point
(00:16:10 ) Realizing the Different Costumer Profiles too Late
(00:18:23 ) The Business Model
(00:20:52 ) Why you need to pivot fast
(00:28:32 ) If Things Went Differently
United States
