After three years, I’m thrilled to announce the complete failure of my startup, Tetheros.
Well not thrilled in the traditional sense. I fully expected to have some traction at this point but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In 2022 I built some software, called it a startup, pivoted hundreds of times and failed to achieve any meaningful results. After pouring three years of myself into the project, I decided in early 2025 to downgrade my little startup experiment into a side hustle.
And I’d 100% do it all again, even knowing the outcome.
My career in technology has always been colored with urgency. I’ve played from behind in every single role. Not only because I don’t come from a traditional background for the job (civil engineering), but because the industry is changing so fast. In order to compete well, I’ve had to spend a significant amount of time outside of work studying and creating.
Most of what I do transcends work.
The term “work” doesn’t fit my ambition for the craft because it implies trading talent for money. In reality, my journey has been far more exploratory. A chase for the outer boundaries of my own talent and skill. An excuse to see how far I can go with the gifts I have to make a difference in the world.
In many senses, what I do means more to me than the 9-5 does. It’s almost a robbery that I was getting paid to spend time improving my craft. I would have done the work for half of what they paid me as long as the opportunity was good.
(don’t tell any future employers)
The conviction to see how far I can go - led my decision to leave a safe role at HealthPartners to create something of my own. More than hubris. More than ego. And certainly more than greed.
In March of 2022, I left HealthPartners and started Tetheros.
Tetheros was initially a software platform made to compete with Asana, Clickup, Jira and other work management tools. My brilliant idea was that many solutions on the market were making alignment harder than it needed to be. Tasks inherently lacked clear context and the way tools are setup creates bureaucratic nightmares and administrative headaches.
In short, Tetheros was made to make it easy for teams to do the right thing as much as they do things the right way.
Lesson 1: Not everyone who experiences your problem needs to solve it
Organizational misalignment is a hugely expensive problem. The cost of unnecessary tasks and avoidable meetings is probably in the trillions of dollars every year. Any companies that adopted the Tetheros framework for managing projects, goals, and work would immediately make their money back within a few days.
To me, it was a slam dunk.
Unfortunately, I peddled this brilliant solution to small businesses and marketing teams for over 9 months before accepting that even if those teams experience misalignment, it’s not painful enough to solve compared to anything else. Yes, Tetheros would help, but almost everyone I talked to had bigger fish to fry and were doing fine without a work management platform.
I was selling tourniquets for scrapes.
But it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I learned a lot of new programming concepts to build Tetheros. I prioritized industry best practices for building a software solution over my comfort, which forced me to add a series of skills I didn’t have, like React, Express, and how to work effectively with platforms like GCP and AWS.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 2: Be comfortable throwing away a lot of work if it lets you stay in the game
After a year of rejections with my brand new business, I went back to the drawing board of ideas. What I was experiencing wasn’t as much of a product issue as it was a positioning one.
Can I reposition Tetheros and its features to more suitably meet the needs of the businesses I’m already talking with?
Tetheros was becoming this huge puzzle that I couldn’t figure out. Once I realized I either had to sell my enterprise solution to enterprise clients (which I knew I was wholly unprepared to do) or find a way to meet the needs of smaller companies I should have ditched the current iteration of the software and retreated to the whiteboard of “other ideas” that I didn’t have.
Instead, I spent even more time refining the product into a more usable project management solution - closer to the tools already used by teams and companies I was talking with.
Unfortunately, at my insistence at being original and claiming intellectual rights to a design, I failed to really make Tetheros into a useful project management tool. There were no external integrations, it never had many of the primary functions required by teams, and the licensing model was extremely confusing.
After reworking the product for a few months I was left with something that was cool, good at what it did, but wasn’t worthy of being either a project management solution OR a work management tool: I just didn’t know it yet.
Here is where I should have thrown Tetheros away and restarted the entire game.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 3: Take your shot when it’s open
I spent most of 2023 working on the product, networking, writing for my personal brand, and a series of side hustles.
My discipline and productivity was through the roof, but ironically, I wasn’t rowing in the right direction. I wouldn’t realize this until over a year later. This is also the period where I made one of the biggest mistakes in my short career as a founder: unnecessary modesty.
My parents raised me well. They held me to high standards and developed good character in me, including humility. In personal conversations, I focus so intently on making sure other people have a chance to speak and feel heard that I rarely talk about myself. I still do this.
But you won’t make any money with mystery and silence about your work. It literally pays to speak up.
What’s clear to me now is the art of bringing your work into focus in a conversation is a sales skill. It’s critical to qualify the conversation and ask a lot of questions, and equally important to flip from asking to answering when the moment is right.
Like flirting, you have to know when to take your shot.
Also like flirting, I was hopeless every time.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 4: Win the qualifier before you play for the championship
Despite all the changes I was making to Tetheros, I was still suffering from the worst product decision I ever made.
(I’d even go as far to say that it’s a cardinal sin if you’re thinly bootstrapping a software business for the first time)
One of the biggest complaints I had about the industry giants was the complex licensing. I didn’t understand why they would gatekeep features from users when it costs them nothing extra. Many companies put basic, quality-of-life features behind paywalls to force users into a higher tier of the product. These are stupid things like being able to view data as a table instead of a list, or removing a watermark from a generated asset.
So I built Tetheros different: all features would be available to all users with any license. You only pay per active monthly user on your account. Unless you’re using your free workspace that’s included. Then, you can add up to 5 other people to it without worrying about it. You only need to pay for users in your NETWORK, but not if you’re a member of…
Do you see where I’m going?
Besides being the most confusing thing to sell, Tetheros was trying too hard to be “good” at licensing. I’ll summarize the issue without explaining the poorly designed account model as Tetheros was too generous to free users.
I went so far into making sure people didn’t have to pay for features that I built a platform that my entire target audience could use for free with no pressure to move into a paid state.
I offered a free tier when I needed money the most. At this point I had over 100 active users on the platform who were paying me in metrics when I needed money. I love that my product helped teams work more productively - that was the mission - but it came at the expense of my business’ revenue.
Large businesses can offer generous free tiers of their products as a funnel because they can afford the potential losses if a user doesn’t convert. They have the capital and usually a mature strategy in place for monetizing their base.
I was so generous that I had nothing to pressure my target demographic into upgrading their license. And I didn’t do anything about it until 2025 (oof). Tetheros tried to play championship ball before making the playoffs. If I could correct this mistake, I’d advocate for disqualifying 1,000 free users if it meant acquiring a single paid one.
It wasn’t something I figured out until well over 2 years into the business.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 5: Sales is an effective, but unforgiving teacher
Midway through 2023 I realized I needed a more intentional sales strategy.
Until that point my entire strategy was to lean into personal branding, networking, and volunteerism to drive organic interest to my work. It worked for my candle making company - why wouldn’t it apply here too?
With almost two years of no revenue I figured it couldn’t hurt to work on an outbound sales strategy to bring people to me. I wasn’t wrong - the next few months were packed with sales calls with my target market.
The work management industry is worth billions of dollars (maybe even trillions). Companies like Clickup, Asana, Smartsheet, and Notion have exploded in the last decade thanks to the obvious need for collaborative workflow tools. Surely Tetheros could snag a small slice of the market and build a foothold.
Ambitious as ever, I bought the top 5 books on sales and studied them for weeks as I started creating a plan for prospecting and sales. I tuned Tetheros for a better onboarding experience and hit the ground with cold calls and emails.
I hate getting sales emails, so I was especially sensitive to how I prepared.
One thing I learned is that sales isn’t bad, but poorly targeted sales people are. There’s nothing more infuriating than having your inbox full of junk. My goal was to reach out only to people who I thought had a realistic chance of needing something like Tetheros. Part of this process was identifying different groups who likely needed help coordinating work and tracking goals.
I found several: event-based non-profits and professional associations among them.
So late into 2023 I began my foray into the art of sales. Steeled by my resolve to crack the code of my startup and completely excited by learning new things, I managed to stack my schedule with sales calls after a few weeks. It was normal for me to have 2 or 3 calls a day with leaders who responded positively to my outreach.
Needless to say, I was building some good traction and feeling good about it.
This might finally be the break I need to create revenue!
Prospects came and went for months but not a single organization or non-profit committed to Tetheros. At a price of $26 per monthly active user, the cost wasn’t worth the value to them. My sales experience (or lack thereof) wasn’t helping. Time after time I’d have excellent discovery and demo calls with a prospect, aligning on almost everything, but when it came time to close the wheels would fall off.
It cost me almost six months of prospecting, outreach, and follow-ups to learn that perfect prospects have the right pain and a budget to solve it.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 6: LinkedIn sucks
I hate LinkedIn.
At a certain point in my journey I wanted to work on building my personal brand. I dedicated days of my life creating for a few platforms: YouTube, this blog (or one of its variations), X, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn seemed to make the most sense for my goals to reach business owners so it became my main focus.
The idea was to build out who I was online and use that to draw more attention to my work.
My POV centered primarily around my personal ambitions, technology, productivity, and a sliver of what I was doing with my business.
The problem was that although I wrote frequently with quality and authority, I didn’t have a very strong POV. By design, I wrote more about myself and my own opinions and this decision could potentially be studied as a failure of my process.
I didn’t organically grow after writing consistently for over 1.5 years. My followers and connections on the platform primarily came from my cold outreach connections and a handful of real in-person connections: not from my content.
There are a few reasons this happened.
First, my writing was exciting but not opinionated. It probably fell more into “generic entrepreneur bait” than “life-changing information” content. That’s okay. I’m not comfortable lying about my accomplishments online or reducing my writing to platitudes or memes. I can confidently say I wrote with integrity.
Second, LinkedIn doesn’t care about most content. They are not a social media platform. They are a sales and job board with a content creation plugin. Content is an afterthought only rewarded by the dominant accounts who have watered down their position into a spewing of generalities and platitudes.
Whereas proper social media platforms like X or Instagram primarily make their revenue with ads (nearly 100%), LinkedIn’s ad revenue is only 40% of their business. The rest comes from premium subscriptions and talent solutions. Their algorithm serves multiple beasts, meaning the incentive to reward content is different than other platforms.
And for whatever mysterious reasons, my content strategy didn’t fit their vision well enough to have meaningful organic reach.
It’s also extremely annoying how punishing their algorithm seems to be with external links. Maybe that’s shifted since 2025 started, but it felt pointless to post anything connected to other websites… so I didn’t.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 7: Growth is the distance from your starting point
To say the last three years have brought incredible growth is a massive understatement. I grew a company and myself by almost every metric that matters except revenue.
At no point was I unhappy with the challenges and promises my work brought. I had the freedom to explore innovative technology, learn skills like sales and marketing, network with people from all types of backgrounds and motivations, and fully immerse myself in cloud-native web application development.
The outside world can easily reduce my effort into, “made nothing after working for three years” and assume I’m where I started in 2022.
But that POV misses the broader definition of growth.
Growth isn’t measured by a single data point on a spectrum - you can’t know how much something has changed unless you know where it started. In my case, I started with a dream and some technical skills.
Over three years I worked harder and longer toward those dreams, constantly reading new books and integrating new technology. I had no formal background in software development. For the first few months of my venture all I did was study the latest frameworks and architecture patterns to get up to speed and deploy the first version of my invention.
When my business needed marketing or sales, I’d usually balance my path with YouTube university, some books, and immersion into whatever domain it was. People learn best through experience, and I made it a priority to enter each new thing with the mindset of a student.
You won’t be good at anything you aren’t willing to be terrible at for a while.
The last three years of my professional life have not only been tremendously rewarding, but they’ve brought the highest rate of growth I’ve ever experienced. It all moved so fast.
I’ve become the mentor I would have needed at the beginning of the journey: far from having things figured out, but battle-tested in the arena of learned experience. I have transformed into an absolute beast for solving problems and challenging my own status quo. It’s an earned confidence that no matter the task ahead of me, I have the resolve and ambition to enthusiastically bring my steel initiative to it.
The world would be right to declare my journey a failure from a revenue or customer standpoint.
But on the basis of skills, personal development, wisdom, and resolve… it would have taken decades in a normal role to reach the level I’m at now. Regardless of the current result, the investment in myself will pay off in innumerable ways.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 8: Capacity expands the aperture of your focus
Something I wrote about a lot was my commitment to routines.
Routines improve your energy efficiency and allow your brain to reserve power for more specific tasks. For much of my time running Tetheros, I woke up at 4:30am and committed to having weekly and daily plans. This wasn’t a flex, but a decision to increase the effectiveness of my time.
I was always on a timer with the business, which was a function of time and money.
If I could find a way to increase my time, it would help my chances of creating something that would help with money.
Most tasks in my business were entirely in my control:
- Product development
- Finances
- Operational automation
- Content creation
- Learning/studying
But some were entirely dependent on the outside:
- Sales outreach and calls
- Audience engagement
- Networking
When my workload shifted to include more items that depended on the outside, I found myself with extra time to spend on other opportunities. I designed and launched Tetherform in 2024 as a separate product in the Tetheros suite.
It was meant to solve a personal headache with surveys I’d experienced in the past, namely the frustrations involved in managing surveys and analyzing the results. It took a fair amount of time to build, on top of the main work for Tetheros.
But my schedule allowed for it because I created extra capacity.
ChatGPT thinks I’m unfocused because I have hundreds of different projects going on at once (personal and business), but I’m actually working to my expanded personal capacity. I’m able to dedicate a significant amount of extra hours to projects every week compared to most people by maintaining a working schedule 6 days a week from 4:30am - 6:00pm. It’s not perfectly lined up like that, but most weeks look close to it. In a given year, I’ve already outworked a standard 40-hour work week by early July.
You can get a lot more done with more hours, discipline, and efficient habits. Which means you can take more shots on ideas and improve your chances of getting lucky.
Prioritizing becomes more important the more you have in flight at once.
Waking up early or working long hours is terrible when you:
- Don’t have a habit of waking up early already or
- Don’t particularly like working at your job
Like I said earlier, the term “work” didn’t really fit what I did for three years. I designed my week and got to continuously build toward my dreams. Not all of it was fun, but all of it was planned out and important to me. I had no problem waking up early and putting in the hours most days because the madness was my own design.
Total Sales: $0.00
Lesson 9: It’s okay to be proud of hard work
I’m disappointed Tetheros didn’t skyrocket into the world’s most valuable company inside of 36 months.
But not surprised.
From day one, I was realistic about the odds of success. That didn’t stop me from pursuing it with passion and blissful ignorance about how to build a software company.
I worked harder than I ever have for anything in my entire life. And although I made sacrifices, I’m proud of myself for many things:
- Showing up every day
- Never pretending to be something I’m not.
- Balancing ambition and family, however imperfect
- Absolutely weaponizing my mastery of modern technology
- Discipline, bravery, and consistent pursuit of growth
- Getting in the ring in the first place
A head full of optimism is unbeatable because no matter the result, you’re able to keep long term faith in the dream.
I absolutely love the Jeff Bezos quote:
Remain stubborn on your vision, but very flexible on the details.
That’s where I am today.
My current goal is to become one of the world’s top 1% software engineers. My ambition is to work for a company, team, or leader that supports that pursuit and allows me to do work that makes a difference.
I will eventually run my own business again. But I’ll be a different man with a new appreciation for the challenges and an unmatched skill set for building excellent products that can change the world.
Character isn’t forged in the field, but in the fire. One day I’ll appreciate these trials for the opportunity they created and the person they helped me become.
Onward.
Please send all work questions to my email: my first name at Tetheros.