"I wish I had validated my idea first before spending tons of money.”

Melanence is pre-revenue, post-product. Right now there’s a waitlist for the new version. And it has just secured a $200,000 investment from an accelerator program. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it is NOW.

Juan’s first round of capital investment has a story to go with it  –– he crowdsourced money from friends and family, and dipped into his wife’s 401k––before realizing the first product he’d developed didn’t have a market and he needed to pivot. Let's get into the details and lessons he’s learned along the way.

FF: Please. Tell us about your burn.

Juan: So you’re like, ‘tell me the terrible things that you did.’ I like that. May 2020, I had an idea. I was working in marketing at the time and I just wanted to try to strengthen my skills because I wanted to go after a much more senior role. And I became extremely frustrated at how difficult it was for me to be able to find professional instructors on these platforms who looked like me. It wasn't very diverse at all. I had to go 20 pages before I found someone who looked like me. So I had this idea of ‘let's create a platform, a marketplace where you can have professionals of color create content and then you can have core subject matter experts and then you can have other people come and pay for it.’ I'm not technical. So I found a development company based out of Ukraine. They gave me a quote for like $60,000. I had no idea what an MVP was at that moment and we just started building. Eight months in, and about $90,000 later, I had a product. I crowdfunded the money from friends and family, and I dipped into my wife’s 401k. And now was the time for me actually to find out, if what I was doing, if there was actually a market for it.

FF: Ruh’-roh. That’s a lot of dollars to spend before you ask that question.

Juan: Right. I had an idea of what I wanted. But I didn't talk to any customers before I built it. Everyone in my circle just said, ‘oh, it's a great idea.’ And so now I started doing customer discovery interviews. Okay, honestly? First I actually found out about these things called “customer discovery interviews.” Then we started having those conversations and people were saying, ‘based on the things we want to learn, it doesn't really doesn’t matter who’s teaching me. If I’m learning about Excel the person can be Black, brown or purple.’ You know. And our whole platform was based on the instructors being Black. So I'm essentially being told by 70 people, ‘hey, that thing you built, we really don't have a need for it.’

FF: That sounds like it might have been hard to hear?

Juan: I didn’t want to hear it, honestly. And so I said, ‘we're going to try to just launch it anyway.’ So we raised some more money via equity crowdfunding. We spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. We started draining the money to a point where we could no longer sustain the company.

FF: So what did you learn?

Juan: What we ended up learning was people were coming to us and they really wanted a community of entrepreneurs that they could connect with. They wanted to actually be able to reach out directly to the people who had the information, not just watch content or videos, and that that's a completely different platform. We were very close to putting everything down. Then another founder spoke with me, they walked me off the edge. They said ‘hey, you've been really great at building this community.’ And that's how we got to where we are.

FF: So how do you feel about it?

Juan: I wish that I didn't have to go through all that to learn this particular lesson, but it is one hell of a story to tell.  

FF: So was there any sense of kind of discomfort when you were burning through this money and it wasn't working out?

Juan: I didn't feel like we were spending the money frivolously. I wasn't getting paid. Nobody on my team was getting paid. We didn't have tons of money. But there was some shame. Because I hit up my family & friends to invest in my company, knowing that not everyone had extra cash to invest in this business idea I had. And they’re probably not going to see that money again for five or six years. And that's a big deal. And there were team members, some of them are my friends, and I had to let them go. So there was shame and embarrassment.

FF: So what do you wish you had done differently?

Juan: I wish we took more time to understand the fundamentals of a founder, a startup founder’s journey and how to build a business in a sustainable way.

FF: But you kind of had to learn that from making the mistakes, right?

Juan: I wish I had validated my idea first before spending tons of money.

FF: And so what’s new about the platform now?

Juan: So we’ve actually moved away from the cultural aspect we started with. Now we’re trying to build a really diverse community. We say we’re the easiest way for entrepreneurs to build their network. And we got into an accelerator, and we want to iterate, and we’re going to try to relaunch in November.

FF: And this a real personal question. You don't have to answer it. But is your marriage OK? Because that’s a lot of pressure…

Juan: Oh, yeah. My marriage is great. Because you know what? My wife learned through this process. She’s been inspired to illustrate a children’s book and take more risks now than she’s ever taken before.  

FF: Thanks for taking the time with us, Juan. This was so awesome and I’m sure people are going to get a lot out of reading your experiences.

Juan: Thank you.

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