I got my heart broken

Nerds,

I salute you from Miami, where I got my heart broken this week.

“It’s not you, it’s me,” we both said - as my co-founders and I shared our last daily sync.

Finding the right co-founder has been the hardest challenge of building a startup.

I’ve met people who’s vision and vibes align, but who’s timeframes don’t work. People whose timeframes work, but lack the complimentary skills to go to market. And then there’s those with the right skills, timeframes, and vision - but who lack the vibes.

What happened?

A few weeks ago in Berlin, I met a friend’s friend who reached similar conclusions about the US immigration market. We were working off similar timeframes and the vibes clicked, so naturally we started a trial period working together.

Since they were a team of 2 already, I hopped on their workflows and codebase. Within less than 3 weeks, I built almost the entire front-end for the product.

But there’s more to building a startup than just the product.

Since leading Surge and Cyfrin, I’ve become that engineer who’s always prioritizing growth product features and distribution.

“A product is worthless if we’re not getting it to the right market asap,” I hear myself repeating over and over.

The team wanted to focus on selling to immigration lawyers, while my priority continued to be immigrants. Lawyers have some of the slowest sales cycles of the B2B market and it’s hard to prove the immigrant’s experience will improve by proxy.

Although the product is functionally similar for both, the growth tactics change tons based on the target audience.

After a few days of back and forth, a lack of go-to-market alignment combined with an all-too-similar skillsets led us on Monday to call the trial period a “friendly break-up”.

What now?

Honestly, I’m not sure.

Like with every break-up, there’s a part of me that’s relieved. It’s better to end things early, than letting problems simmer and reach bigger scale later.

But there’s also a natural frustration and disappointment. Finding the right team is hard, but doing things alone is harder.

My years leading startups and working as DevRel have taught me how to dabble in (almost) every part of building a business, but there’s nothing like a shared vision to push projects forward.

I’m continuing to build Get You There and interview co-founders on the side, but I’m now also open to other ideas.

Are you building anything cool? Reply to this email, let’s chat!

See you in cyberspace,

Jules 🤸🏻