Introduction

This is the introduction to Kommon: A Startup Story, a set of key lessons for first-time founders told through the story of the successes and failures of my business.  

This story started as a project for me, not for you.

It was early 2023.  My co-founder and I had just decided to close down our startup, Kommon.  After various failures we had created a product which customers loved, but we couldn’t see a way to scale the business into a company we wanted to run. 

It was over, but I also knew that the three years we’d been working on Kommon were some of the most formative of my life and career.  So as we brought Kommon to a close, I wanted to capture what I’d learned most from the experience. I felt like I should wring everything out of the company that I’d given so much to.

So I began writing down some of my reflections. What I thought would be a couple of pages of bullet points, turned into several pages of notes.  And then when I added our customer and sales data in, it grew even more.  And then as 2023 rolled on, Kommon had a triumphant coda as we sold part of the business.  A happy end to the story, but one that also led to more notes.

As I read back my notes, I realised this was the story that I wish I could have read before I got started.

I would say that.  It’s my story, my mistakes, everything I wish I’d known.  But I found it hard to believe that there wasn’t at least one other first-time entrepreneur out there who wouldn’t also take something from it.  

This has been recently validated when I’ve been asked to mentor a small number of startups. I have found myself repeating much of what I’ve written here and I have been told the advice has been helpful. What has been interesting is that this advice seems to be as applicable to me building a SaaS startup three years ago as it is to a founder building an AI company now. 

So, if you’re a first-time founder in the early stages of starting a company, this became a project for you too.  

But why read it? There’s already millions of words that have been written on exactly these themes.  

I think it’s one of the truisms of running a startup for the first time that you can get all the advice in the world, but you will still make the wrong decisions. To establish your convictions you have to feel your mistakes and burn with the frustration that it will never happen again. So while you might read a blog post on how to avoid the worst product mistakes, you probably won’t absorb its lessons until you’ve seen them play out in the context of your own work.

I hope that situating my lessons in the narrative of my actual company - our processes, customer insights, decision-making, everything - will bring them to life. I want you to be able to avoid mistakes, take opportunities earlier, and move faster.  I’ve reached back into my emails, calendars and documents for anything which I think could be useful.  If I can make you feel my highs and lows, maybe you’ll remember them when you’re in the same situation. 

There were definitely lows as well as highs. I’m a far better founder now than when I started Kommon but the flipside of that is the poor practices I’ve improved at. I wince at reading back some of the things I did and the choices I made.  But that’s the good stuff that you’re probably going to learn the most from, so I’ve left it in this story. 

Not everything is in here.  To capture every decision, moment, and learning would be a book. Moreover this is just my perspective, not that of my technical co-founder.  If you want the details of our codebase and the technical challenges we faced, you will need to ask him.  In some places the names of individuals in this story have also been changed. But you will find out how:

• A critical mistake in customer discovery undermined 18 months of work
• Content loved by thousands just wouldn’t convert to paying customers
• A 6 page pdf became a better MVP than our excellent software
• An unexpected pivot made us more money in 6 months than the previous 18. 
• I found a technical co-fouder at a virtual meetup I almost skipped.
• A chance meeting at a coffee shop led to a small exit.

And much more.

So consider this a starting point.  If you find this valuable but have more questions about how we went about certain things, please reach out, I would be happy to chat. 

We worked on Kommon for almost four years.  We started with aspirations to be a VC-backed SaaS company to help people managers become better bosses.  We ended up as a bootstrapped provider of training courses with monthly revenues of $5000, which we sold in a small acquisition in 2023. 

Our achievements were modest.  But after much trying and failing we created a product which delighted customers and I think the path we took to get there will ring true for many entrepreneurs starting their first company, or anyone thinking about it. 

The experience also gave me the confidence to think much bigger. To not limit myself to my previous experience but to embrace the world’s biggest challenges which are just waiting for people with the talent and drive to solve them. My current interest is in helping solve the climate crisis by repairing our atmosphere through carbon dioxide removal - a generational task. If that seems like a leap from an HR SaaS app, my story will make it make sense.

This story has six chapters:

1. The Start: Why I chose to start Kommon, my motivations, and how it all began. 

2. Validation: How I validated the initial idea, designed the MVP, and took a wrong turn which undermined our entire business.

3. Build: How I found a technical co-founder, built our MVP and waitlist, and started marketing.

4. Launch and Learn: How we launched our product, failed to gain traction, and worked out how to rebuild.

5. Pivot: How we successfully pivoted and made more money in six months than the previous year and a half.

6. Conclusion and Sale: How we made the decision to close down Kommon and achieved a small exit.

Each chapter tells that portion of the story, including a section on the specific lessons learned during that stage of building the company. 

‍All the key lessons are also consolidated here in summary.

If you take away even one thing which helps you, it’s been worth it.

If you'd rather read the story on ebook then you can download it here. It's an MVP, excuse some of the layout issues.