Elias Stråvik
After several pivots, Elias and his co-founder grew GuineaPig to $10k MRR, but hit a ceiling during the economic downturn. He then transitioned to a solo growth agency and achieved $10k MRR in just 45 days.
Can you tell about your failure?
I was a technical co-founder of GuineaPig, a b2b SaaS startup for employee wellbeing that I started with my friend right out of university. We had to do three big company pivots before we found this idea which we managed to grow.
The idea of GuineaPig was to help employees feel better during their workday by taking more short breaks.
We essentially built “Headspace for Slack and Microsoft Teams” to make it super easy to use while working.
We worked hard to grow our revenue and were at about ramen profitability at $10k MRR, but we never managed to grow it much bigger. Our marketing idea was to piggyback on Slack and Microsoft Teams, especially during the remote work era of COVID-19.
How did you notice that things weren’t going as well as you’d hoped?
We survived the COVID crisis since we could address the problem of people working from home, but when the economic downturn hit after that, it quickly became apparent that it’s incredibly difficult to sell a "vitamin" product like employee well-being when companies were doing everything they could to save money.
Yes, we built it to $10k MRR, but demand dried up due to the economic downturn and very few companies willing to invest in employee well-being during these tougher times.
It was very difficult to decide what to do, especially when we didn’t know what we should do instead. It was even harder during an economic downturn when starting something new, consulting, or getting a job was more challenging than ever.
Friends and family had seen us struggle for years, going up and down, from almost running out of money to being on top of the world when we closed a $60k ARR customer. They honestly seemed to think the writing was on the wall.
What lessons did you learn from this situation?
I learned that it truly is better to fail fast and let go. New options will come soon, and by then you may feel bad for not realizing it sooner. It is a balancing act though, because it’s also easy to get stuck in pivot hell where you just launch and give up on a project if it’s not an instant success.
The best advice I can give is to not isolate yourself
Reach out to people, especially those in similar situations or those who have been through similar things before.
What happened next?
I am now working on a one-man growth agency for startups — essentially an alternative for startups to hiring someone in-house for founding growth until you’re ready for it.
A nice metric is that I managed to grow this agency to about $10k MRR in 45 days or so.