Two years ago, I was running Docbot, a knowledge-sharing platform for tech teams. As a solo founder, I’d managed to raise £580k in venture capital funding to build what I believed would transform how engineering teams documented and shared information. Today, Docbot is shut down.

After multiple pivots and countless attempts to find product-market fit, I made the difficult decision to close the company. It wasn’t the outcome I’d hoped for when I started this journey, but the lessons I learned along the way have fundamentally shaped how I think about building businesses. Here’s what went wrong, and what I’d do differently.

Being Afraid to Burn Cash

When the investment hit our bank account, I remember staring at the balance in disbelief. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life, and that realisation terrified me. I became obsessed with preserving runway, convinced that frugality was the path to success.

This fear led me to deprioritise expenses that could have accelerated our growth. Ad spend sat in the “maybe later” column. Marketing initiatives were shelved. Customer acquisition strategies were postponed. Instead, the money went almost exclusively toward salaries—building the team and the product.

Looking back, this was a critical mistake. By being too conservative with our burn rate, we actually slowed our path to finding product-market fit. We could have learned much faster whether our assumptions were correct by investing in growth experiments. We might have discovered the need to pivot earlier, or found the right positioning sooner. Instead, we moved cautiously, and that caution cost us time we couldn’t afford to lose.

Hiring the Wrong Team Composition

As a software engineer, I did what felt natural: I focused obsessively on building a great product. And I believe we succeeded on that front. The engineering, product design, and user experience were all top-notch. But a great product alone doesn’t make a successful company.

I hired people like me—engineers, product managers, designers. We built beautiful features and solved complex technical problems. What we didn’t build was a sales pipeline or a marketing engine.

I had absolutely no idea how to manage a B2B sales cycle. Lead generation was a mystery. Positioning? I was making it up as I went along. I should have hired someone with real experience in sales and marketing from a startup or scaleup environment—someone who had been through the zero-to-one journey before and knew how to build demand from scratch.

Instead, we had an incredible product that not enough people knew about, and even fewer understood how to buy.

Overlooking Security From Day One

Docbot’s value proposition required customers to trust us with their internal documentation and knowledge. That meant storing sensitive data, intellectual property, and confidential information. Security should have been a cornerstone of our offering from the beginning, but I treated it as something to address “eventually.”

One of the quickest wins we could have pursued was starting SOC2 or ISO27001 certification early in the company’s life. Or we could have hired a DevSecOps engineer to help architect the product with security built in from the ground up. With the right security posture, we could have even explored on-premise deployment options or other enterprise-friendly approaches that would have opened doors with larger customers.

Security certifications and robust architecture aren’t just checkboxes—they’re sales enablers, especially in the B2B space. Without them, we faced an uphill battle convincing enterprises to trust us with their data.

What Comes Next

Being 25 years old and running a venture-backed company was an incredible experience. The pressure, the responsibility, the constant problem-solving—it shaped me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. But over time, I’ve come to understand what truly matters to me.

It’s not building a unicorn valued at $1 billion. It’s not the headlines or the validation that comes with massive scale. What I care about is freedom—the freedom to work on what I want, when I want. The ability to build something sustainable that both my users and I genuinely love.

Now, I’m focused on building as a solopreneur. My goal is simple: grow monthly recurring revenue to a level that lets me live comfortably while creating products that solve real problems. No investors to report to, no pressure to chase hypergrowth, no need to compromise on vision for the sake of scale.

Docbot didn’t work out the way I planned, but it taught me what success actually looks like—at least for me. And that lesson alone made the journey worthwhile.