My co-founder and I had just moved to France and everything fell apart. Our recommendation engine for ecommerce had signed up fast-growing startups across India and Southeast Asia. Most of them were funded by Rocket Internet. We thought moving to Europe would help us land more of their portfolio companies. We even signed POCs with Galeries Lafayette and Veepee.
Then GDPR hit. Overnight, handling customer data became too risky, and every European client pulled out. Meanwhile, the ecommerce bubble burst in Asia. Each month brought news of another customer sold to Alibaba, their IT infrastructure migrating to Alibaba Cloud. The final blow was a customer refusing to pay during an Alibaba acquisition. We couldn't cover our GCP bill.



Winning hackathon to stay alive


We survived on hackathon prizes while attempting pivots. But, nothing worked. We couldn't even afford a form builder to collect leads, so I embedded a Google Form on our homepage. It looked terrible. I wondered if I could reskin Google Forms to match our site. I built it as an addon over a weekend, and launched it for free on Google Workspace Marketplace.

The pivots kept failing, but the addon kept growing to hundreds of thousands of installs. Eventually I told my co-founder: maybe we should charge for this thing we built by accident. That's how Formfacade started.
But this isn't another redemption arc where I ventured into the unknown, struggled, then won. You know, this is not how real life works. The truth is: failure is constant at every stage of building a company. It just has different names.


Once We Succeed, We Call It War

When Elon Musk says "running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss," it becomes a legendary war story. That's because he's telling it from the other side. He's crossed the life and death stage of his startup. Failure still hurts (competitors, rejections, public criticism) but it doesn't threaten his livelihood. He can talk about it publicly, because he's not threatened by others judging him.


When We're Going Through It, We Know It as Struggle

When you haven't succeeded yet, you have too much self-doubt to speak about it. After we had some traction with Formfacade, we applied to YC and got shortlisted for an interview. One week before, my doctor told me I had a severe valve leak in my heart and needed open-heart surgery immediately. The estimated recovery period was two months: one month for preparation and another for recovery. That was almost the entire duration of the YC program. Even worse, we were a two-person team and I was the only developer. I didn't know who would fix bugs during my hospitalization.
Years later, I wrote about that story, because I had successfully crossed the literal life and death experience for myself and my startup. But if I had failed on one of those, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. That's the difference between a war story and struggle.


When We Let Down the Ones We Care About, We Hide Our Shame

Unfortunately, it can get even worse than that. The most painful part isn't when it affects you. It's when it affects your child or wife or parents. When you're failing, startup life isn't very different from poverty. You're worth millions on paper, while struggling to meet basic needs. Your parents lose confidence and subtly mention job openings. You can't buy a gift for your son's birthday and you cry alone in a parking lot thinking about it. Those are the moments that break you. 

That's when you understand what shame means. What you need at that point isn't a startup mentor. It's a therapist. But it's unprofessional to talk about this in founder circles and you can't afford therapy anyway.


If You Have to Quit

For those of you who are too embarrassed to even talk about it: Your situation might be unique, but the shame isn't. There is nothing to be ashamed of, even if you have to quit. Personal life isn't a distraction from your startup. It is the point. There's no victory in building something while your relationships crumble. There's no trophy for missing your child's birthday because you couldn't afford to "lose focus."
If you quit, you haven't failed at courage. You've already proven that by coming this far. You can come back stronger. When my doctor told me about my surgery, I asked him about my survival rate. He told me it was above 95%. I told myself that's far higher than my startup's survival rate of 5%. While that is a bleak survival rate for startups, you can try again if you fail. Failure is a blip in your startup, but its consequences in life are real. So, take care of your mental and physical health as you go through this inevitable pain. Because, the real failure isn't shutting down a startup. It's shutting yourself down.