After 3 years of building an amazing app, beloved by our users, we still decided to kill it. Here are my 5 learnings as the founder of now dead Kairn.

Some context first. End of 2022, I officially decided to end Kairn, the startup we started in May 2020. It was an incredible adventure, from building the app from scratch, seeing it succeed with thousands of users (#1 on Product Hunt as am sure you remember 👀), raising funds in the US and Europe, writing fancy articles, being quoted in lists of top this and that, and ultimately killing it as I couldn’t see its’ future anymore — no matter how thriving it looked.

*To know why we closed, check out the podcast here (for 🇫🇷 speakers - we're preparing the summary for 🇬🇧), we discuss the end (both why and the horrendous road to close companies)*

Months later, I realise it was hard to come to terms with the decision. It felt like a love relationship that you haven’t properly ended — you stay stuck. So it was time to move on, close the chapter, reflect on the learnings and get moving towards a new goal.

Learnings first.

💔 Cofounder - Don’t start a company on your own, like a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y don’t

Find someone (1 or 2 pp) you already know, trust, and, ideally, someone you’ve weathered stressful situations with. You should both know and appreciate how each other reacts under pressure. Building a company involves navigating tremendous lows and experiencing pretty crazy stress. As a founder, you can’t afford to be emotional with just anyone (your public image matters oh-so-much). Your cofounder becomes your confidant, the person you can be vulnerable to. And in a more practical way, you need to ping pong ideas to make them evolve. While your team, maybe some investors, can help you in that, you don’t call them on a Saturday at 9 am coz you got excited about a potential new feature in your dreams.

What happened at Kairn? We started as a duo having met through connections. It all looked really bright but when it got hard we were misaligned and ended up splitting up, like a newly met Tinder couple that doesn’t agree on the movie and ends it there, in front of the theater. There was too little glue that kept us together and we didn’t fit in how we reacted. And then I discovered a perfect match but it was time to wrap up… maybe for the next story (you know who you are 😏).

👯‍♂️ Team - Recruit people you love to work with rather than people who love your idea

In the early stages, you have no clue whether you’ll be operating in the same space six months down the line. Pivoting becomes incredibly challenging when you consider the potential need to replace the entire team. So create a core team that can weather countless pivots alongside you. Many people suggest hiring for the mission, which is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. However, I encourage you to take it a step further: hire and retain individuals who challenge you and whom you challenge too — look for mutual growth. Hiring people that have similar work values and make you grow will be key to delegating key work to them. You’ll need to feel that you can trust their dedication — and skills of course but more importantly, their willingness to do it well, to learn to do the best version they can.

And at Kairn? I initially recruited people motivated by our mission of helping people get things done. But when we focused on helping teams I felt some were misaligned and it became tricky. Funny enough, for some, I felt the match was perfect. One of my favorite moments of the last years was going home after a team event and thinking “If everything goes south, I’d definitely call them again for the next one.”

🤑 Investors - Seek investors you trust and feel comfortable with

Building a relationship with investors is no easy feat. It requires a delicate dance of trust and admiration building. You want them to be excited and optimistic about your progress, but you also want (and need) to reach out when trouble arises. Your financing hangs heavily on your company’s public reputation. So as long as your investors are singing your praises, you’re trending high. If they utter one bad word, a huge storm builds up. So build trust, and for that share the good, and the bad news. The more I think about it, the less I believe you always need to show a plan of how you have a potential solution to get out of bad news. Sometimes, you want to find that solution with them. So ask for help, but ask the right person each time. In the early stage, you pick investors to have skills around you. So when you have a growth issue, ping your growth investors. Make sure to ping everyone once in a while so they’re all activated.

And at Kairn? I didn’t have the same relationship with all our investors. With some, I kept a somewhat formal reporting relationship. Telling them of the highs and the lows but always with a plan to test, already kinda figured out. With others, the trust was absolute. I called on them to challenge my craziest ideas, or even whether we had the right ICP or not. It often ended in never-ending WhatsApp threads firing up at 3 am. They became my unwavering support system. And ultimately, they were the ones helping me make the difficult decision to close Kairn. Looking back, I realise I could have extended my absolute trust to all of them. No investor should expect a founder to always have a solution in mind. Rather, they get interested when you admit you have a problem, no clue on how to solve it, and need them to help you bounce it out. And if some end up creating a bad storm, well… next time keep them out of your big venture.

🎯 Product - In bottom-up products, build for virality

Focus on building an app that thrives on viral growth, so 1 user brings N users. Keep virality constantly in the front of your head when building all — like ALL — features. Network effects — how people invite other users in — and compounding value — how users get exponential value as more users join the tool, need to be carved into every feature you build. The best bottom-up tools deliver value to users individually but their magic happens when users invite others to join. Take Miro, for example. Yes, it empowers designers to create flows but way more importantly, it enables them to present their work and receive feedback — a crucial aspect of their professional growth.

And at Kairn? We started off building for single-player usage — we wanted users to be in love and then they’d talk about Kairn to everyone around. We realised too late, only when we added collaboration, that we had built two separate flows. Our single user loved the product but they were on an independent flow and had little reason to explore multi-playing. They were very happy playing solo. So yes, one user brought new users, but there was no compounding effect. Only users that came for the multiplayer mode were compounding.

🗑️ Growth - Build a growth engine but fill those damn cracks first

Growth is a relentless pursuit. You can have the best launch ever, it’s only gonna buzz for a few hours. So of course it’s key to construct a growth engine that generates sustainable growth. But if you’re working crazily to get users in and most of them get out before they even understood your product, it’s all pretty useless. And worse, scaling your growth because you feel you’ve found the way to get people in, without fixing your leaks, that’s worse than having team swag before PMF. Working on your activation funnel, mapping it out in analytics, and improving each step is key. Understand where you’re losing users and optimize those areas. Every day, I review self-serve onboardings, and very few genuinely excite me to use the product. They contain cracks through which value and users escape. So build a product growth position with both creative and analytical skills.

And at Kairn? We knew getting our users to download our macOS app was absolutely key for them to get in love with Kairn, and our Slack integration was essential for our multiplayer path. So we kept on iterating on those flows. Sometimes we got it wrong, and our activation would plummet, and then we’d fix it and hop 👏 activation was back up. Our biggest mistake here was probably waiting to ask users to go through the flow while looking at them (not just data analytics but proper video records). Sometimes people were clicking everywhere on a permission page and they simply needed a little image on how to unlock the Apple 🔒… and it would take us weeks to figure it out.

🙏 Thanks

To wrap up, these are the top five learnings from what I now consider to be the best MBA in the world: building a startup. It’s a wild adventure that requires a touch of naivety (otherwise, you’d never start), and a hint of masochism (because you love to hit bottom and get back up), but above all, you’ll need to create your crew to navigate those stormy waters. So more than anything, I am incredibly grateful to those who gave me the possibility to get these learnings — the entire Kairn team, the eFounders team, our investors, and our beloved users. I won’t quote everyone but special thanks to Xav, Alex, Matou, Juju, Gov, Thomas, Lucas, Romain, Thibaud, Amaury, Didi, Meg, Alexou, Greg, Louis, Juliette, Sarah, Jojo, Gregou, Alexis, Gus, Ines, Ekin, Dom, Luc, Loïs, Jean, Alexis II, David, Mathilde, Nono, Enzo, Ferrurru, Amine, Paul, Mat, Lotti, Laurent, Antoine, Nico, Pierre, Timothé, Roxanne. (Writing this list I realize how the startup world is still soooo men-heavy).

⏭️ And now, what's next for me?

You're here on the website so you probably know. I'm now applying those (☝️) learnings, and those from my years as an investment banker, and then a product person in startup studios and incubators, to help startups build their product growth. From optimising virality, reviewing self-serve onboarding, aligning the microcopy - I’m here to make sure any user that comes your way makes you grow.

Oh, and because I’m still a bit naive and got all that surf energy, I’m playing with AI to help my doctor brother share information efficiently with his patients 😏.

Cheers,
Pat