Last weekend, I watched Nolan’s The Odyssey. As a Greek, I’d been kind of avoiding it because I had mixed feelings about it, which is why I’m so late to the party. It was great. But the character who really stuck with me was Agamemnon. I already knew the story, of course. Greek mythology was a big part of growing up. But seeing it on screen brought it back to me in a way I hadn’t expected. He sacrificed his own daughter for favorable winds, and I walked out of the cinema thinking about what commitment actually looks like for entrepreneurs in the real world. Once I figured out what it looked like for me, I asked my cofounder to meet the next morning. I told him we weren’t at a point of real commitment to our project yet. I was imagining tons of calls and emails a day, filling up the sales pipeline, turning the prospects we booked for demos into clients, and running their campaigns with maximum effort. Basically, doing whatever it took to get our B2B newsletter marketing agency off the ground. We met after we both joined the Antler residency in Berlin and decided to try building something together there. For the past year and a half, he’d also been running his own newsletter on the side, which is where the idea for the agency came from. The newsletter already brings in decent money, which he’s currently reinvesting into its growth. The brands we had been chasing as agency clients were literally approaching him and offering to pay directly for advertising in his newsletter. I was asking him to make a sacrifice while those same brands were throwing money at him. Any of us would probably choose the easier, proven path. Understandably, that was the choice he made too. It became clear that the project was over, so we shut the agency down in that same meeting and sent apologies to the prospects already in our pipeline. That was co-founded startup number two since April, and project number seven since I quit my full-time job a little over a year ago. The first co-founded startup was an AI tool for customer success teams. We were developing it alongside a specific customer, basically like a design partner. I may have even posted here to complain about it at the time. They kept reassuring us, “Yes, this is interesting,” “Yes, you should build this,” and “Yes, we’d pay for this.” We developed the project they said they wanted, but apparently didn’t need badly enough to pay for. They never approved a budget, and we eventually had to kill it too. The AI tool and the solo projects that came before it didn’t turn into successful companies, but the experience was a big part of why I earned a spot in Antler’s Berlin residency. The founders and partners here get it. From day one, we were told that teams would change, and our team was actually the first to part ways. My parents don’t get it, though. They’re scared for my future and don’t understand why I keep changing teams or why no project seems to stick. Honestly, when they call and I hear the confusion in their voices, it hurts almost as much as the startups failing. I have about 90 days of runway left before I need to start selling assets to keep funding this journey. At the same time, I’ve reached the final stage of an interview process with an incredible company and team for a role offering compensation that is almost unheard of by European standards. And yet, I’m not sure I want the job. These past 13 months as an entrepreneur have been the life I always dreamed of. I’m exactly where I want to be, minus the “no revenue” issue, of course. So today, I started again, solo, with an e-commerce idea I’ve had for a while but kept dismissing. The concept is something I came across a few months ago called “buy now, pay maybe.” Instead of offering every customer the same discount, some customers have their purchase refunded after buying. I spent most of today researching the market and found a specific angle that I think could differentiate it from the existing options available to e-commerce stores. Whether that difference is valuable enough is what I still need to validate. I’ve vibe-coded the marketing website, but I haven’t built the actual product yet. My previous projects taught me not to confuse “this is interesting” or “I would pay for this” with actual validation. There is no real validation until there is a signed commitment or money in the account. This time, I’m doing the outreach first and will only start developing if a merchant commits to a paid pilot or signs an LOI with a specific budget and timeline. Before I make the same mistake again, I want to challenge the assumptions behind the idea. For those of you who run an e-commerce store or have worked closely with one: how do you decide when to offer discounts? What do you dislike about traditional discount codes? Have you ever experimented with surprise rewards or refunds, and did they improve conversions or repeat purchases, or did they just reduce margins and add complexity?   submitted by   /u/tomerlrn [link]   [comments]