9 Lessons I learned from failing at my first business
Tags: business, opensource, web, javascript
Published: 2023-08-22 22:47:21

I am the _happy_ founder and _Chess Executive Officer_ of a now defunct chess platform called Chessroulette, which allowed players to see each other via camera during a game.

If you go to [chessroulette.live](https://chessroulette.live) you'll see a "white page of death" symbolizing...well you guessed it, no reason to become even more morbid 😝, but before that it used to look like this:


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/w9wjhurvtox0vodynv20.png)


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/oth2tblsjf4tkyadhpnr.png)



People could play or analyze chess games while on camera, so they could get a sense of human connection during those hard and lonely 2020-2021 pandemic days. That was the core of the project, which we later on took towards e-sports, tournaments & streaming.

Chessroulette was a project I poured my heart and money (literally) into for 2 years. I've started it during the first wave of the pandemic, back in 2020 as a hobby, and about a year later the team increased to 10 people. We were all trying to make it a viable business, except, even if I've tried my best and I know everyone in the team did the same, it never managed to make revenue before I managed to run out of money.😬

There are many things I could have done differently as the leader of the team, things I could have tried more or at an earlier time and outcomes I could have avoided but with all of these I have no regrets about the way it went down – it was a lot of fun, I did my best and I've learned quite a lot by making all the mistakes I've made. And besides, some things I got right, and I am proud of that!

And without any further ado, here are the 9 lessons I'm taking with me into the next venture:

## 1. Mistake: "Building everything in house" 👉 Lesson: "Be efficient"

There is literally no reason to build everything in house these days. It's smarter to hire a specialist who can do the job 5-10x better and faster than you. Yes it costs more upfront, but it's worth spending money as an investment and move with the momentum, instead of spending all of your efforts on building stuff to find out the momentum has gone.

## 2. Mistake: "Spending all of my time on the project" 👉 Lesson: "Balance"

I don’t want to put my whole life in the business anymore. No more 12-14h or even 16-24h hours per day anymore. This is detrimental to my body, mind and spirit – and doesn’t add more value. I become single sided, left brained, a machine that can only write code, without thinking and taking in consideration the holistic view of the project and of life in general. I am my best when I am in harmony!

![img](https://media.giphy.com/media/cao28HzJngWHu/giphy.gif)

## 3. Mistake: "Focusing only on the Product/Code" 👉 Lesson: "Focus on the community and marketing"

The community is very important nowadays, probably even before the MVP. Knowing you have people interested early on is super important.

One way to do both at the same time is by documenting the process on social media. You could combine that with another unique characteristic of yourself like Tim Ferris is saying and instead of doing it 2 times you intersect them and build your own niche.

But the main lesson here is that spending most of the time only on the product or the codebase, is detrimental to the business. In my next business I would probably try to balance it at 50-50 ideally, with a focus of building a community/audience early on!

## 4. 👉 Lesson: "Simpler Not Easier"

Taking the time to ensure a decision is the simplest, and not the easiest is very important. Also, just taking the time to not rush the process is very important as well – those tight deadlines? Most of them come out of thin air and our own fears – why? FOMO? See below:

## 5. 👉 Lesson: "It's a marathon not a sprint"

**Slow down**! As Gary Vee is saying: "_There is time!_". You are young. Great things take time – no point in trying to get successful in one night. Over night success stories are 10 years in the making.

![img](https://media.giphy.com/media/LVRBKMg4H33bcRZ3IQ/giphy.gif)

## 6. 🧐 Lesson: "Collaboration & Networking"

Make relations, maintain them, work more on that side of the hustle & less on the product until you can at least hire someone who can do that.

This is one of my weakest points and what I believe to be the main reason why Chessroulette didn't make it. If we were great at building the product – sometimes too great for own good as most engineers tend to be, we were fairly bad at showing it to the world and getting people to actually use it, be excited about it and tell their friends.

In the two years I spent building the company I did manage to build some relationships and collaborations but the scale should tip towards that side more than the product I would say now that I have the wisdom of the hindsight!

## 7. 😬 Mistake: "Building a product for the love of coding not to make it a business" | 👉 Lesson: "More Hustle, Less Dev"!

Focus on Building a Business not a hobby project.

Of course, building projects out of passion is a beautiful thing, and I love doing that, except, when it comes to building a business, that you know, is supposed to reach a point of sustainability – aka making revenue, is a totally different ball game.

So coming with the right mindset on that is very important. Skills like sales, marketing, building relationships, pitching and having a long term vision are even more important than design, development or systems architecture. 

If you are not good at that, my advice to myself is to find someone who is and partner with them!

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohhwoy4AB7fXp0GVq/giphy.gif)

## 8. 👉 Lesson: "Think Macro But Focus on the Micro"

Visualize the future with all the bells and whistles you want but focus on what you can do now! Take it one step at a time, one day at a time!

Cultivate patience in your approach and a long-term focused mindset. Good things take time to build, and so do the best that you can each day to close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be but most of all allow yourself to also enjoy the process!

It's not just the destination. It's the journey as well!

## 9. Mistake: "Doing everything myself" | 👉 Lesson: "Delegate to & trust others"

As a first time founder, it was very easy to find myself doing everything and wanting to do everything. I kept telling myself that I need to know how everything is done because that is my job and this is how I can best serve the team and the company. 

While the reasoning behind that sounds noble to some extent and understandable, the reality is that as a leader your main job is to empower people in your team and to _**trust**_ them with doing the job! Otherwise you become a control-freak and that's definitely not helping anyone!

## 10. 🤩 Bonus Lesson: "Be present!"

This is your baby! Make sure you're enjoying the ride with both its ups and downs. Most likely there will be some hard times but there will also be some fun, celebratory ones as well. My advice is to experience them all as they come for they all have their nuggets of gold in them!

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By the way Chessroulette is completely open source now! I decided to make it a place of inspiration for other people. You can see the web repo here https://github.com/movesthatmatter/chessroulette-web.

You can also see all other open source projects that came out of Chessroulette here https://github.com/movesthatmatter.

And finally, [Movex](https://movex.dev) is a framework that came right out of the "ruins" of the Chessroulette architecture when I realized that all of the network, backend and game state synchronization logic needed to be copied and pasted when I wanted to build another chess like game. It's a framework that can work with React or others and literally allows you to build a multiplayer game without worrying about the backend!

![Movex Logo](https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--FRQzhh2A--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_800/https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/bsgt24urbnsrqlzownos.png)

Would love if you could check it out and give us a star here https://github.com/movesthatmatter/movex! 🫶