Farewell GiftStarter

Group gifting trivia from the world of GiftStarter:

• The average gift size was $750/gift.  People do gift bigger when they go together.
• Group gifting is not a female thing.  It's 49% male, and 51% female.
• Most group gift items were gift cards, and gadgets.
• About 8 people/group gift was the right size.  
• Men give about 40% more dollars than women do.
• Group gifting beauty and fashion products are not so hot.
• The most successful group gifts are very practical and very easy to emotionally support.

My heart hurts.  A lot.  To say goodbye.

I pushed and pulled and fought as hard as I could to create something out of nothing.  I met some very talented and inspiring people along the way.  Thousands to people were part of this journey, and I could not have gotten anywhere as far as we did without everyone.

• Advisors like Gina Cuff and Hoon Kong.  Advisors that also personally invested themselves into the company like: Jonathan Sposato, Barbary Brunner, and Rob Adams.  Even informal ones like Leo Novsky and Travis Jones that helped me navigate those tumultuous waters.  I worked for Logic20/20 from 2011 to 2014, and they have continued to support me even after leaving the company in ways that I will forever be grateful for - Thank you Christian, Ellen and Travis for everything.  
• Investors like Gary Rubens, Heather Redman, Rebecca Nordlander, and Rudy Gadre that go above and beyond with the quality time they spend with you.  Gary would take me out to hit golf balls for hours while coaching my golf swing and my business acumen.  Heather Redman would take me to go get our nails done.  Barbary who would take the phone call day or night, within hours of needing help.  Man, I remember the day Rebecca called me and said, "I woke up this morning and decided I'm wiring you money.  Go out there and make it happen!"  She's awesome.   Rudy, heart of gold and one of the best brains out there.
• Past employees, founders and team members like Stuart Owen, Christie Tarazon, Sean Zhong, Gina Cuff, Melissa Glidden, Arianna O'Dell, Hoon Kong, Jon Peck, and Valentine Gunko.  So many memories.  The other co-founders: Stuart is raw talent and incredibly smart.  Christie not just talented, but my goodness, one of the strongest women I know.  What Christie endured and pushed through during that first year is super human stuff.
• Lawyers like Lee Schindler and Adam Phillipp.  They are absolutely my go-to humans when on a startup journey and would not go anywhere else.  
• Accelerators and incubators that gave us a shot like 9Mile Labs and 500 Startups.  500 Startups where all of this startup theory really landed.  Hard.  Very pregnant.  So much truth and learning.
• Family and friends that helped give us hope, especially when times were REALLY tough.  Susan L. who surprised me with gifting requests and proactively gave so much insightful feedback.   
• Partners like butter LONDON, and B&H Photo Video that went above and beyond to help give the business shape and life.  B&H Photo Video Yosef called me days after our first ad-hoc meeting and gave me tips that ultimately gave birth to our beautiful business model.  Oh, and Stacy Kincaid who worked with us during the Providence Health relationship.  Really good people left and right.
• Most importantly, my husband, @luggagedonkey.  He covered so much on the family and home front, with our baby, my in-laws, my mother, my brother, everything.  And he cheered me on so fiercely, there's no doubt that he's my co-founder in anything I do in life.  The best kind of co-founder one could ever ask or pray for.

In the end, the 10 big lessons for 2014-2018 are...

1. Startups are really hard.  Don't do them light heartedly or just because it's the trend.  Don't do it because you're bored at work.  Do it because you cannot exist in life without the big idea going big.  For me, despite all the advice I got from the smartest people I know, I went in head first into a startup business in an arena (ecommerce + gifting) that was proclaimed to be the hardest kind of all.  Hundreds of dead startups left and right for over a decade.  Millions of dollars put in all kinds of directions and all kinds of ideas.  I actually went in seeking to earn the worst war wounds as a startup founder.  I definitely got them.  Samurai style.
2. Product Market Fit.  That does NOT mean build the product first.  That means validate there's a MARKET for your idea first.  Talk to consumers.  Talk to people that HATE your idea.  Ask them if they'd pay for it.  And why.  And how much.  Then ask them to prepay for it.  Validating and then FINDING the market is hard enough.  Creating a market is extremely difficult.
3. Team.  Team is everything.  It's REALLY hard to find people that'll be the right fit for EVERY part of the journey.  So as CEO/Founder, you're going to have to make some really tough decisions.  Decisions that affect people's lives.  You're going to have to let a person go that's been with you for the first 5 months.  You're going to raise a lot of funds, and then find that the entire team you have before you doesn't cut it for the next giant milestone that the company needs to accomplish.  Some people cannot handle chaos and ambiguity.  Some people need management.  Hire and be ready to fire fast.  
4. Find the "AJ".  In the quest to find Product-Market-Fit, I've picked up a tip from the guy who did the super "grind" for 6.5 years looking for it with Offer-Up, Nick Huzar.  Nearing the end of the rope for GiftStarter in the fall of 2016, I met up with Nick and asked him, "How'd you do it?  How'd you last 6.5 years with a wife and a kid doing the product market fit finding grind for that long?  He gave me the tip of having an "AJ" by your side.  AJ is someone that'll turn left and pounce 5 feet into the air when you just jump left.  AJ is someone that'll work side-by-side with you pinging 100s of people a day in the hunt for the market.  AJ is the someone that'll knock on doors, make photocopies until 540AM all night long, drive you 15 hours across states to make a meeting, and all kinds of stuff to do whatever it takes in the grind.  I found my AJ too late - her name is Jin and she worked with me starting in October 2016-April 2017.  If only I had found her sooner.
5. The Wozniak Problem.  If you are in a technical realm with your startup, you will need a Wozniak (your startup CTO/leader) who will tirelessly work and burn the candle at all hours of the night to build, fix, kill bugs, and then some.  If you're in the technical realm, you as the business CEO will have to quickly gain some base level technical acumen.  You can't say that's not my area.  Get dirty.  Roll up those sleeves.  By the end of 2016, I was deploying my own site, making code changes, setting up CloudFlare on my own.  When I got stuck, I'd drive over to my technical advisor's place and work side-by-side in the code for hours and day on end to figure it out.  I had to do that because I could never get a handle on solving The Wozniak Problem: being permanently married to a technical leader who is 100x or 1000x better than everyone else, who other technical people will follow.  People can't follow someone not of their kind.  It's hard for an extremely technical expert to follow a business leader.  (Oh, and I finally found my Wozniak - way too late.)
6. Documentation & paperwork.  Oh my goodness, do not underestimate the power of documentation.  Proper documentation and proper paperwork.  I've screwed it up so many many many times until now, I know how much MORE painful it is to not do it right the first time.  Operators are the ones that say, "the devil's in the details.  Ideas are cheap."  Get a good filing cabinet and a good digital filing process from day one.
7. Think marathon & pace yourself.  Finding Product Market Fit is a grind.  Be strategic and methodical with the grind.  Once you find Product Market Fit, pace yourself to not scale up TOO fast.  
8. Watch out for assholes.  No matter how "attractive" they are with the number of people they know, who they know, how much money they might potentially give you or have.  Do not proceed.  There's assholes posing as advisors just for the vanity of it.  There are assholes that give you a lot of great value at a very significant cost. There are asshole service providers that want to be your lawyers when they really should have no business being a lawyer in the first place.
9. Stay intact.  Startups are tough.  Business is tough.  Doing the grind in finding Product Market Fit or fundraising is tough.  The best insight that the advisors and investors of GiftStarter have said to me is no matter what happens, stay true to yourself and the people in your life.  We want to work with and invest in the founder that continues to have a great marriage and family despite the hardships.  We want to work with and invest in the founder that has good relationships with the advisors, investors, employees, partners, and vendors that they come into contact with.  Startups fail - don't lose your marriage nor your principles over it.   *** If you have an important significant other in your life, you better be in sync with them with your goals.  If you thought it was hard to find Product Market Fit with a supportive spouse, good luck on finding Product Market Fit or doing a startup with a spouse who isn't there to support you. ***
10. Intentionally choose the big influencers around you.  The five people you spend the most time with have the biggest influence on you.  Choose wisely.  And aim high in terms of character, work ethic, and smarts.  It really matters. 

Knowing when to walk away.

Spring to Summer of 2016 was really hard.  I thought I could be superwoman, having just given birth to my Lentil - that with the help of my awesome team, we could pull through this together.  Deep post partum depression.  I spent the summer of 2016 in a deep depression.  Deep despair.  My husband often had to peel my salty existence off the floor and into bed.  I did not feel like I even deserved to be alive.  I often thought the world, my husband, Lentil, everyone would be better off without me.  A waste of space.  Unworthy of the air I took in.  I looked at the sweet innocent face of Lentil and would end up crying because I felt I did not deserve to be his mother.

My advisors and investors starting sitting down to give me the "talk" in 2016.  They told me it was okay - to close it down and give them the write-off.  They told me to get going on the next startup because that one was the one they wanted in on.  I tried for one last hurrah in the fall of 2016, with my "AJ" by my side (thanks to my investors, especially Rudy, for giving me that one last swing at the ball).  Fall of 2016 was not the season of generosity and giving.  Power was changing hands - and the air was filled with emotions between the Clinton versus the Trump camps.  

​January - March 2017 I spent most of it on the verge of tears or crying my face off or finding a place to belong.  I'd be fine, and then while brushing my teeth with my husband in the bathroom, I'd tear up.  Standing in the kitchen I'd tear up.  I tried to get "out there" and involved in the community to pick up my spirits.  I tried to do this "Red Scarf" thing which was all about giving it forward to another woman entrepreneur.  I spent a bit of time doing office hours.  I put together events.  I volunteered to help the Riveter launch.  I did consulting on the side.  I advised any startup that came our way.  I really wanted to help this tiny little startup company called CakeCodes (which later became Storm and one I am part of today).  

And here we are.  May 2018.  I should really have called it quits back in the Winter of 2015/Spring of 2016.  I definitely should have in the Summer of 2016.  I absolutely should have sometime in 2017.  It is now officially May.  We are in the first week of May 2018 and I am finally officially and publicly - calling it done.  

Hope this post helps someone out there.  If you ever want to talk, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.  It is so lonely being an entrepreneur, a founder, in startups, being a founder CEO, raising funds, doing the grind, having employees, figuring out how to be a mom as a founder, all of it.  The emotional depression and the depth of despair that one experiences is so great, I wonder how many of us are suffering silently. 

Hugs to you out there trying to change the world.

​--Arry
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