I am in my 4th try as an entrepreneur. I have decided to document the other three to reflect about what happened. And sharing it in public in the remote thought it might help anyone in the same situation.

Back in 2017 I was running a 8-person marketing team at a Series A startup, very Rocket Internet style. Back then we were heavily betting on performance marketing (reinvesting almost 100% of revenues), so every penny was key to be well optimized (budget around $5M annually).

Performance marketing (AdWords, Facebook ads, display ads) was not a common skill set in Europe, so I struggled with getting world-class expertise on it. But after a few months of trial and error, I realized it was (and still is) a math problem: the amount you’re willing to spend on an ad is a function of your cost per acquisition and your conversion rate.

I started building a model in Google Sheets, that then became so big that I moved it to Google Apps Scripts (yeah, Google’s own JavaScript). When the CPC was too high, I lowered it through the Google AdWords API, and vice versa. As it was difficult for non-technical people to consume the data, we plugged Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio) and there you go.

The model was able to run an AdWords and Facebook Ads account on auto-pilot. Soon, my team of 8 was no longer so needed, so we repurposed them to other teams or roles (we started doing ML over this data).

And this made me wonder whether I could actually create a business out of this. When I talked to people in the field most seemed interested. Some even offer to pay for the algorithm upfront.

I decided to start small, partnering with a colleague that knew SEO to create a boutique agency. We got a swimwear brand as the first client. The job was well paid for the time we dedicated.

But why not pursue it further? A few reasons:

1. Risk averse mentality: to get more customers, I probably had to dedicate more and more time, and that meant leaving my job. If I knew what I know today, I would have done it.
2. Service-based business meant spending a lot of time in sales: something I wasn’t good at nor particularly excited about. I developed it later down the line.

I really had something, and I didn’t take the leap. We can’t go back in time, so I am channeling the regrets to building now (follow me on X to check what).

I hope this story inspires you to take the jump, instead of chickening out like I did 🐣

NB: out of curiosity, I went into my archives to pull the code and it was all a big mess of intertwined Google Sheets. If it didn’t take 2h to untangle it, I would have shared it.