We made so many mistakes...from; not pivoting fast enough from our first idea, to thinking if we build it they will come to us, to not setting expectations on how long it would take, to thinking it was worth more, to not understanding if we were the right management to execute (we made a number of hire mistakes), to touting three year "Conservative Projections" to investors, to saying we had no competition, to thinking money will fix our issues....ugh we made so many rookie errors.
When Scott Painter, Entrepreneur and founder of TrueCar and Fair.com said, "Raising funding is like that Tom Cruise movie 'Edge of Tomorrow'. Every day you will die, and then you just need to wake up the next day, take what you learned, and try to get a little farther"....he was so right!
But we did do one thing right: we reflected on the experience to understand what the takeaways were. We boiled it down to FOUR big, hard-earned lessons: