Two year ago, my second kid was born in the middle of a hot summer.
Soon after, a third baby was born : Siopi.ai.
I don’t know why I believed that starting a company with two infants was a good idea. It’s not. The urge to help people at scale was maybe stronger that my instinct of preservation (or my sanity). Tinnitus concerns 15% of the world population including me and it’s like nobody gives a f*ck.
Complaining wouldn’t change a thing about this. Acting would.
Fast forward today, we are blowing the second candle of our adventure.
At 33, I feel that I never learn more than during this two last years. We went from 2 to 9, and then back to 5. I’m so grateful of the people I’ve met and I had the honor to work with.
However, not everything was smooth or successful.
The corollary of this fast learning: I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I made bad business decisions, I made bad human decisions, I made bad family decisions.
I can’t count the nights of worrying, anxiety and feeling of hopelessness. Sometimes, I woke up at 4am with my heart pounding in my chest, sweating.
Building a startup is hard. Everybody is telling us that.
Like every transformation, you can’t do that without a bit of pain and sacrifice.
But I loved that. The sense of agency, of doing something that matter, is the best feeling in the world. I felt so bad because I cared.
I cared for the mission. I cared for being up to the task. I cared when I fuck*d up. I cared when I took me too long to learn from my mistakes.
But today the smell the candle makes the air a bit bitter.
I couldn’t help millions. Yet. Only 2158 users created an account.
We missed all the milestone we decided. We couldn’t reach the expected 10,000 monthly active users. We couldn’t deploy 90% of the roadmap.
Yet, we w the last conversation I had yesterday with a user made all bitterness go again.
This is why I want to keep going.
See you next year to blow the third candle.
Still extremely grateful for your very heartfelt, empathic video-answer.
And by the way: – thanks to your questionnaire in SIOPI (that I filled in both english and french) that for the very first time EVER, I myself managed to have a much clearer picture of my health situation with my peculiar types of T&H [Tinnitus & Hyperacusis].
What you are doing with the app is of invaluable importance and historic!
