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🙅🏻♀️ Should you quit?
How Fit Rebel's founder quit her business, went back to a full-time job, and became much happier now.
Admond Lee
April 28, 2024
Read Time: 5 minutes
Hey Founders,
Welcome to The Runway Ventures, a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into startup mistakes and lessons learned to help you become a better founder.
By the way, I’ve created a quick survey that takes less than 30 seconds to complete. This will help make sure I’m creating the best content for you in the future.
If you’ve got 30 seconds to spare, I’d be very grateful if you could fill up this survey.
Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Fit Rebel
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Tried to do many things alone
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Find the right co-founder / team
🔗 The Runway Insights → YC: When should you trust your gut?
🤝🏻 The Founders Corner → What’s the biggest mistake made by first-time founders?
☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Fit Rebel
🚀 The Rise of Fit Rebel
Fit Rebel, founded by Nadia Hasbi in 2016, was a local sportswear brand in Malaysia selling high-performance sports leggings where designs were hand-drawn and painted by traditional Batik artists of Malaysia.
The Problem — Female consumers struggled to find the right sports leggings in Malaysia.
The Solution — Fit Rebel provided a variety of high-performance sports leggings to female consumers by partnering with various brands, helping people stay active and boosting workout motivation.
💰 Back then, Nadia was a workout enthusiast and got her early fund through crowdfunding on Indiegogo. And guess what? The crowdfunding was a huge success and Nadia secured RM 23,549 from her early customers.
🌏 This gave her the confidence that there was a market for her batik-inspired sports leggings. From there onward, Nadia grew her business and had customers from over 45 countries in 2016.
📉 The Fall of Fit Rebel
Fit Rebel had early customers and it seems the traction was great, so why did it still fail?
Well… Nadia actually shared her journey and the challenges faced when building Fit Rebel. In November 2022, Nadia announced that she would quit her business and close down Fit Rebel.
Based on Nadia’s sharing, one of the biggest reasons why Fit Rebel couldn’t make it was due to manufacturing.
😮 Manufacturer closed down
Ever since the launch of Fit Rebel, Nadia had been working with the same manufacturer as it could produce high-quality sportswear at a good price. However, good things never last.
Eventually, the manufacturer shut down because of the pandemic. Nadia had no choice but to start looking for a new manufacturer. When the new manufacturer delivered her order for 500 pieces of yoga pants, it was a disaster.
The quality wasn’t good. Nadia wasn’t satisfied with the products. She also couldn’t get a refund, hence she was stuck with a batch that she didn’t want to sell.
🥊 This was a huge blow to Fit Rebel.
🥲 Stress → Burnout
Dead stock is probably the biggest nightmare for any seller. Together with the stress of running and keeping the business afloat, Nadia had burnout after 4 months of running Fit Rebel. So she took a break to recharge.
🚪 When one door closes another door opens
Interestingly, during her first week of break, she got an email from an American company for a remote job opportunity. Nadia decided to follow the lead, and soon enough she ended up accepting the job as a growth marketing role.
With that, Fit Rebel was shut down after 6 years as Nadia wanted to do what she thought was right. Still, Nadia was an inspiration to every entrepreneur to never stop pursuing your dream!
“I quit my business, I’m back to a full-time job, and I’m much happier.”
Want to learn more about Fit Rebel’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Tried to do many things alone
This was also one of the regrets shared by Nadia on her YouTube channel.
Because of trying to do many things herself, Nadia:
Didn’t think big enough
Nadia started with the mindset of running Fit Rebel as a small business.
As a solo entrepreneur, Nadia was afraid of not being able to handle the workload if Fit Rebel grew too fast.
Didn’t expand the product range
Nadia took around 1 year to create her first collection of sports leggings, from prototyping, sampling, and production.
Because of the long process and intensive workload, she was concerned about expanding the product range.
Didn’t join TikTok to promote her business
Nadia was the only person putting out content for Fit Rebel on FaceBook and Instagram.
When TikTok came out, Nadia didn’t join the platform as she was fully occupied with other social media.
Mistake 2: Relied only on 1 manufacturer
When the pandemic happened, the original manufacturer that Fit Rebel had been working with shut down.
This was a huge blow to Fit Rebel because Nadia had to start from scratch to find another manufacturer. As a result, the entire Fit Rebel’s business was disrupted and put into an existential crisis overnight.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
“Looking back, despite the struggle, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Lesson 1: Find the right co-founder / team
Building a company is extremely hard, especially during the early days. That’s why you’ll need support and help to make sure you can continue building the business without getting burned out.
Find a co-founder to build a company together if possible. Having someone who’s aligned with your vision with complementary skillsets is better than fighting the battle alone. The chance of success is higher.
Once you have enough cash to hire people, build a team. Never let your fear of growth stop you from expanding. At the end of the day, you can’t do everything yourself, and you’ll need to delegate tasks to the right people to execute.
In short, find a co-founder first, then build a team. Don’t do everything yourself.
Lesson 2: Leverage your strength
When Nadia started Fit Rebel, she was very new to fashion design and digital marketing. Hence she spent lots of time figuring out what she needed to do at each step of the way.
While this might work out, a better approach is to leverage your strengths when building your company. Because the odds are stacked against you, and leverage your strength to do what you’re good at can increase the chance of success.
For example, if you’re a software engineer, you can focus on tech to build a product while your co-founder can focus on the business side.
🔴 For the short term, doing everything yourself is okay.
🟢 For the long term, do what you’re good at and delegate the rest, otherwise you’ll burn out and can’t scale as a company.
Lesson 3: Avoid having a single point of failure
Never rely on a single vendor or manufacturer in your business. The only constant is change. If your whole business depends on a single machine, and it couldn’t run without the machine, then you’re in trouble.
The solution? Explore and work with more vendors or manufacturers as a backup option. Working with different partners also helps you avoid vendor lock-in and give you more options for potential negotiation for better deals.
🔗 The Runway Insights
🤝🏻 The Founders Corner
This is the place where you can ask me any questions about building a startup. Every week, I’ll pick one question to answer.
Just reply to this email with your burning question. Let’s win together 🤝🏻
Founder’s Question:
What’s the biggest mistake that most first-time founders tend to make?
My Thought:
Instead of one biggest mistake, I’d share 2 biggest mistakes as they are both linked together somehow.
🔴 Not the right team
If possible, don’t build a startup alone. Find a co-founder instead. If you’re a tech person, find a business person and vice versa. Most importantly, ask yourself this question and answer it honestly, “Why you?”
Why do you think your team (you & your co-founder) can win?
What makes your team special?
Do you have a unique market insight that most people disagree with or ignore?
Do you have the skills to solve the problem?
Do you have the leverage and network to get the company off the ground?
🔴 Solve the wrong problem
Finding the right problem to solve is, by far, the most difficult thing first-time founders can do. Most first-time founders may think they’ve found a problem to solve, yet their users or customers might not really care about the problem.
Even worst? They might spend 3-6 months building a product and launching it, only to realise this is not what their users or customers want. Sad, but true.
One approach to finding the right problem is to build fast, talk to users or customers, and iterate the product in the fastest way possible without spending too much time or resources.
🤝🏻 Join our founders community on Discord:
Building a startup is one of the toughest things you can do. Why struggle alone when you have our community to help and support you.
This is the founders community I wished I had when I first started.
That's all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope it has helped you in some ways and brought you some peace of mind.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.
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