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🤫 EXCLUSIVE: I interviewed this founder
How Commune died of suicide, not murder (the founder's painful truth)
Admond Lee
August 18, 2024
Hey Founders,
Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.
Founder interview with Varick (Co-Founder of Commune)
Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Commune
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Didn’t validate the startup idea enough before building the product
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Find the right co-founder
🔗 The Runway Insights → What I learned working for Mark Zuckerberg
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → PropertyGuru to be acquired by EQT for USD 1.1B (and taken private)
☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Commune
🚀 The Rise of Commune
Commune, a startup based in Singapore, was founded by Varick and Isaac (his high school friend) to revolutionise how product teams make decisions by providing analytics and insights based on customer feedback.
🧑🏻💻 The founders’ background
Before building Commune, Varick was a software engineer at Grab and the creator of Lovespan, an AI couples conversation app.
As a builder who has always wanted to create products to help people, the startup path seemed like the perfect fit, so he joined Antler, the prominent startup incubator in Singapore, and embarked on his startup journey with his co-founder — Issac.
The Problem — 🥵 Product teams often struggled to extract meaningful insights from a sea of customer feedback and reviews to drive their decision-making.
The Solution — 🧠 Commune provided real-time analytics and actionable insights for customer feedback using AI to help product teams build better and more impactful products.
By analysing customer interactions and reviews, Commune was able to surface the most important trends and patterns.
💰 After getting funded (pre-seed) by Antler for $125k, Varick and Issac got to work and were busy building the MVP. After 2 months of building, they landed a few pilot customers who were excited about the prospect of having a single tool to manage and analyse all their customer feedback.
The early traction was a good validation of their product and a sign that they were onto something big.
😯 The founders were riding high, convinced that they had cracked the code and were well on their way to building a successful venture-backed startup — until the reality hit.
📉 The Fall of Commune
At my lowest point, I'll never forget tearing up in therapy after being gently asked what made me so sad. I confessed that I missed the simple joy of creating just for fun, not chasing some grandiose dream.
🐝 The honeymoon period didn't last long. As Varick and Isaac dug deeper into their pilot customers, they started to realise that the problem they were trying to solve wasn't as painful to customers as they had initially thought.
🙅🏻♂️ While there were a few pilot tests, their users (product teams, user researchers) found it useful, the actual customers (their boss) were not convinced to pay as they could just talk to a few users to get their feedback or follow top management’s direction.
Not only that, they also faced many other challenges and realised the journey was way tougher than expected.
📌 Here’s what happened to Commune:
Feb 2023 — Varick and Issac joined Antler.
Apr 2023 — Raised $125k from Antler, and Commune was launched.
💡 Fun fact → Commune was the pivot from their previous startup idea which was an AI chatbot to help companies handle customer enquiries, calls and tickets.
After seeing many similar players in the same space and deciding to avoid over-reliance on external parties for API partnership, they pivoted to Commune.
Jun-Sep 2023 — 🔥 Launched MVP, onboarded a few pilot customers, iterated the product based on feedback.
By the 8-10 month mark, they struggled to get meaningful traction with customers, and it had become painfully clear that Commune was not going to work.
Traction was low, initial funding was burned, runway was short, stake was high, and the founders had to make a tough decision.
May 2024 — 🥲 Varick officially announced they were shutting down Commune.
Why? Because the emotional toll was immense.
Months of sleepless nights, tons of uncertainties, exhausting co-founder arguments, and sacrifices of not being present around loved ones.
July 2024 — Varick joined a startup as a founding software engineer to build ERP software for SMEs using technology and AI.
While the failure of Commune was undoubtedly a painful experience for the founders, Varick now approaches his entrepreneurial journey with a renewed sense of purpose and a deeper understanding of what it truly takes to build a successful and sustainable business.
💟 My Thought:
It hit home to me when I heard the sharing from Varick because we made the same mistakes and learned the painful lessons from our startup journey as first-time founders — similar to my journey when shutting down Staq.
Are you also facing the same struggles when building your startup? Reply and let me know.
It’s surprising to see that 99% of early-stage startups died because founders made similar mistakes. Remember, for any startup, there are many ways to succeed, but only a few ways to die.
As long as you don’t die, you have a chance 🤝🏻
Want to learn more about Commune’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Didn’t validate the startup idea enough before building the product
We thought we knew better than the customers. We thought we could make decisions on our own.
Varick admitted that he and Isaac spent too much time building the product without properly validating the market need and customer demand.
They were too eager to start building and assumed they knew the solution, rather than thoroughly testing their assumptions with potential customers. This led them to build something that didn't fully resonate with the market.
🌏 In fact, the startup idea actually came from what they observed from the West. They saw many successful Western companies in the same space and wanted to replicate the same model for Southeast Asia.
❌ This copy-and-paste approach failed because:
In Western countries, companies tend to use a product-led approach to build their solution, hence the need for product analytics tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel.
However, for Southeast Asian countries, products tend to be built based on a top-management-led approach, relationship, or heuristics.
Markets and customer profiles were very different, hence the need to constantly talk to customers, understand the problems they’re facing, and build the solutions to solve them.
Mistake 2: Lack of co-founder fit & alignment
🤝🏻 Good friends ≠ Good fit as co-founders
Even though Varick and Isaac had been friends since high school (for 16 years), they didn't properly evaluate whether they were a good long-term fit as co-founders.
They were too eager to start a business together without aligning on key things like roles, responsibilities, goals, and values. Unfortunately, resentment built up between them.
This led to frequent disagreements and conflicts that hindered their ability to effectively run the business. As a result, the decision-making process was slowed down as it involved a lot of debates and conflicts before reaching a consensus to get things done.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Commune’s Dashboard
Lesson 1: Validate ideas thoroughly before building
Varick admitted that he and his co-founder made the mistake of not validating their initial product idea enough with customers. They relied too heavily on assumptions and what they thought the market needed, rather than rigorously testing their hypotheses.
🌟 Key Takeaways:
🚶🏻➡️ Don't rush into building a product
Invest significant time and effort into validating your idea with potential customers through interviews, surveys, and small-scale pilots.
Continuously gather feedback and iterate on your solution before scaling. Be prepared to pivot or change direction based on what you learn.
🧠 How to do user interviews
The biggest challenge of doing user interviews is that people lie to you because they don’t want to hurt you.
Asking them, “Do you think this product is useful?” or “Would you buy this product?” is almost always the wrong questions to ask.
Here are 5 questions to ask when you’re doing user interviews next time (based on The Mom Test):
What's the hardest part about [doing this thing]?
Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem...
Why was that hard?
What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problems?
What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?
Ask these 5 questions next time and watch the magic happen. You’ll be surprised how much truth you’ll be able to uncover from users.
Lesson 2: Find the right co-founder
The lack of alignment between Varick and his co-founder Isaac was a major contributor to Commune's downfall.
Varick now emphasises that founders need to prioritise finding the right co-founder fit, even if it means passing up on the convenience of working with someone they already know.
🌟 Key Takeaways:
⚡️ Traction is the biggest indicator of co-founder fit
How to know if you and your co-founder are the right fit? The answer is TRACTION.
Before officially partnering up, try working on short-term projects together for 2 weeks. After that, see how much progress both of you have made.
If traction is slow due to whatever reasons (i.e. lack of communication, conflicts, slow momentum), break up ASAP and move on.
The biggest opportunity cost for early-stage founders is to stick together for fear of hurting the other person’s feelings when both of you could have moved on for better opportunities.
Lesson 3: Know your “WHY” & have strong conviction
I can’t stress this enough because I’ve seen many aspiring founders want to build startups for the wrong reasons.
Aspiring founders need to have a clear understanding of why they are embarking on the startup journey. The startup path is so tough that any rational person would simply give up without a strong “WHY” to persevere through the rough times.
🌟 Key Takeaways:
💰 VC-backed vs Bootstrapped business
Do you really want to chase the “unicorn” status by building a VC-backed company or bootstrap a business at your own pace with full control without pressure from investors?
There’s no right or wrong answer, only the answer that fits your long-term goals and values.
Start with an end in mind, and you’ll be more intentional to build a company that you want.
💟 Solve a problem that you care about
If you’re not passionate about solving the problem, chances are you’ll quit when things get tough.
It may sound cliché but it’s true.
🙏🏻 Let me know if you want to see more founder interviews
Since today’s issue is the first founder interview on failed startup stories, it’d be very helpful if you could rate this edition (at the bottom) if you want to see more founder interviews.
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🔗 The Runway Insights
What I learned working for Mark Zuckerberg (Link)
Airbnb's Playbook: Lessons in Building a Culture of Belonging (Link)
10 time management techniques that actually work (Link)
The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Pixar (Link)
How remote work impacts startups (Link)
How to find your first ICP Guide (Link)
Y Combinator: Fall 2024 batch applications due by 27/8 (Link)
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
💃 Rate Today’s Edition
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That’s all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
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