What I Learnt After Failing My First Startup

How It Started

When I first started building RezervasyonYap, I really didn't know much about coding or business and startups. I was a 16-year-old kid with my friend, trying to make some money. A friend of a friend suggested "Amazon for barbers," and we later added AI because we thought it would be a good pitch, since AI was really hyped. We didn't even know we were starting a startup. We knew our customers were barbers, and I researched their problems on the internet, but I never talked to them one-on-one until I finished the product.

Building It

For about a month I built every day: an all-in-one platform, mostly vibecoded in Cursor. The models weren't great at system-level work, so I had to learn backend and AI engineering as I went just to keep the product from falling apart.

The product was all-in-one. Customers could browse and find barbers. Barbers could list their shop and get a live dashboard with their appointments and revenue, plus an AI chatbot that helped them grow their business and use the tools on the site. They could print a QR code so customers could rate them, and save each client's name and number to send automatic SMS messages or run campaigns with the AI.

At the end I had a finished product, but I had never spoken to a single barber.

Then the first problem showed up. I showed the barber dashboard to my friend and he didn't understand shit about it. And the biggest mistake was what I did next: instead of making it simple, I fixed the problem by recording a tutorial on how to use it. Now that I'm writing this and looking back, I think: who would use an app that was meant to save your time but made you watch a tutorial first? It's exactly the opposite.

That was the first sign I was building for myself, not for them.

If it can't be understood in 10 seconds without me explaining it, it's too complicated.

Finding Clients

The first barber we went to was a local one my friend suggested. His shop was close to my friend's house, where we mostly hung out. I don't know what kind of mindset that was, but we didn't actually try to sell it. We tried to find the problem after we had built the product. We asked if he would use it and why not, so it was a mix of selling and learning, not really doing either properly.

He said he wouldn't use it now, because he already had clients and didn't need it, but that it would be useful if he opened a second barbershop. At first we thought, okay, that makes sense, but to judge it we needed to talk to more people. Since it was our first approach, we brushed it off. Looking back, he was telling us it was nice to have, not something he needed.

After each approach we tried to improve the pitch. My friend was mostly the salesman and I was the tech guy standing next to him. After getting rejected, we wrote a script, and it wasn't the "cool idea" type of pitch. We realized we needed a hook, so we started with: "Would you want to improve your work with tech?"

We approached 5-10 people a week, which isn't many, because of school and lack of time. Before the hook, 1 person out of about 10 showed interest in a whole week. The day we started with it, 5 did.

That's when I understood something:

don't show how it works, show what they get. The tutorial was me explaining the method. The hook worked because it talked about their work and not my app. Barbers don't buy a dashboard, they buy fewer empty chairs.

Why We Gave Up

On that same day we also learned something good and something bad.

The good news: 2 barbers were already paying for this kind of service. One of them had paid for a service like ours and got nothing back, because that startup gave up. He still pays for Google, though, and told us he'd rather use Google since a lot of people use it. I was happy, because 5 people were interested and it showed barbers do pay for this.

The bad news: my friend lost hope because of those startups that had already tried this and failed. I still don't believe that was the real reason he gave up.

After about 3 weeks of selling, we gave up. One week after the day 5 people were interested, my friend lost his hope. He was our salesman, and without him I just stopped going to the shops. We never followed up with any of the 5. Nothing bad happened. We lost our motivation, because money was our main motivation, and when it got hard, it was gone.

If money is your only reason, you'll quit the first time it gets hard. We did, after 3 weeks.

I wanted money, but I also really enjoyed the process. Building it was amazing.

What I'd Do Now

These come from books I read after failing, not from winning.

1. Start with one narrow group of customers, not everyone. I built for everyone at once.
2. Make it as simple as possible, the way Steve Jobs would do it. See the tutorial.
3. Don't spend more than 2 weeks on your first MVP, especially in the age of AI, when you can build fast. I spent a month.
4. Have a personal relationship with your customers. Be close to them and understand them. Talk to them a lot, really a lot. I finished the whole product before I talked to one.
5. Before you improve your MVP, make sure they really want it. A company once made cheap, good dog food, but the dogs wouldn't eat it.
6. Learn your tech stack. You're the founder, so you need to at least know what's going on. I spent 1 week on a single bug.
7. Pick either B2B or B2C. I started with both and failed at the first.
8. Follow up with every interested lead. We never followed up with our 5. Maybe we'd have a successful company now, maybe not. No one knows, and that's the point.
9. Don't depend on one person to sell. When my friend quit, I stopped too.
10. It's easier to sell painkillers than vitamins. My friend and I talked about this: selling something people would like is harder than selling something people would love. People love a painkiller. A vitamin they just like. The first barber told us he already had clients and didn't need it. That's a vitamin.

One Sentence

If I could give all the advice in one sentence, it would be this: put all your focus on building a product that solves the main problem, and make it so great that people love it.