BSSA #X - My first big failure

Hey, it’s Mat! 😁

After years of building stuff for fun, I was ready to build a real project. Something serious. Something people would use. Maybe even pay for.

So I launched my first big project: Parents vs Enfants.

It was a site where parents and children could post funny stories about each other, and people would vote. Like a fun little battle. I built it all from scratch. Months of work. And I was convinced it would go viral.

But when I launched... crickets.

No one came.

I had a Facebook page. A few posts. But no traffic. No users. It was soul-crushing.

I thought, maybe it was just the idea. So I tried again.

This time I wanted to build something bigger: a Facebook Groups alternative called Packeys. Built for student associations. It started with a real problem, which was good. But I made the classic mistake: I built the whole thing in isolation. I didn’t test anything. I didn’t ask for feedback.

I launched. And again... nothing. People didn’t understand the platform. It wasn’t clear. I had spent the entire summer working on it, and no one used it.

That was my second lesson:

Just because people have a problem doesn’t mean your solution is right. And building in silence is not good.

So I quit.

I decided I wasn’t meant to be an entrepreneur. I got an internship at a big French company and told myself I’d be a developer in corporate IT.

But deep down, I knew that wasn’t me. I was just lost.

In the next email, I’ll tell you about a dinner with two millionaires that changed my life.

Mat