Zenaton is closing
After our seed round, we (I) did not manage to reach a clear product-market fit, nor did we change the product quickly enough in order to reach it. So with our investors we decided to give the rest of the money back and close Zenaton’s service a few weeks from now 😢.
There are multiple explanations for this situation, and I’m writing another blog post to share what I learned on the way. But today, I would like to dedicate this blog post to thank everyone who was important to Zenaton and to me:
The Family was incredibly helpful at Zenaton’s beginnings. Thanks to them, I had the opportunity both to work for the first year with great conditions, and also to meet Louis, who would soon become my cofounder and Zenaton’s CTO. In our post-Covid world, The Family is reinventing itself once again as a fully online support force for entrepreneurs. Go work with them if you have the opportunity.
Our Team: as an entrepreneur, your company is like a family, and the best moments you remember are the ones you shared together, relentlessly dedicated to solving issues and giving your best to make the vision a reality. In the process of closing Zenaton, I have had to let people go, people who were truly believers and it’s a heart-breaking thing to do, as they deserved a better outcome.
Our Customers: they were truly innovators. Using Zenaton was a hard choice (probably too hard, but let’s talk about that later). They had to understand a new coding paradigm and also entrust us to operate processes that are more often than not at the heart of their own service. So we did our best to support them and make sure they had the service and support they deserved. If you’re one of them reading this today, thanks for your confidence, and my apologies for the additional work you now have to do to replace Zenaton.
Our investors: we were lucky enough to have some of the best European investors: Accel, PointNine, but also Kima and the Slack fund and some outstanding angels. They have all been supportive and helpful, willing to help me make better decisions, even when things were not going as expected. Accept their money if you have the opportunity.
Before making the decision to close Zenaton, I proposed a completely new plan to the board, basically to follow an open-source strategy. In the end, the board decided that the current structure was not the best to fulfill that plan, but Accel proposed to take out their own liquidation preference to leave enough money in the company so that Pierre-Yves — our first developer — and myself could work on this and build a different Zenaton. PointNine, Kima and the Slack Fund also agreed on this proposal. As founders, we’ll often talk about how VCs can misbehave — and so it’s also important to speak out publicly when they make founder-friendly moves, like they did with us.
In my next post, I’ll share what we learned, and what Pierre-Yves and I are building now :)
