Goodbye, Buttermilk 👋

I’ve made the tough decision to shut down my first start-up, The Buttermilk Company. Lots of factors went into this decision, but here’s a few with some advice strewn in:

🤯 Mental Health

Running a company is incredibly difficult, as anyone knows. Running it alone is even tougher. Throw in a few personal life changes, city moves, and getting married and you have a very burnt out founder. I heeded all the warnings about being a solo founder and had in fact started a search for a co-founder when we were accepted into Y Combinator’s summer batch. Not wanting to miss the opportunity, I joined the batch alone and instead focused my efforts on building the company. This was definitely the right decision at the time, but sometimes I wonder if I had pushed off YC and taken time to build out the vision and team of the company if I / Buttermilk would’ve faired better. I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had with Buttermilk, but now acknowledge my limitations as a human. I need space and time to flush out something as big as a new start-up before jumping in full force. My mental health and happiness took a huge hit, and I’m slowly starting to pick up the pieces.

For any current or would-be founders, I highly recommend getting a therapist or coach to help you, whether you’re solo or not.

💸 Unit Economics

If a business doesn’t make money, what’s the point? You could point to current unicorns that are burning cash as a counterpoint, but those are few and far between. Especially for CPG (consumer product good) companies, you need to have solid unit economics that make solid sense. While we had good enough margins on our products, our prices didn’t match the quality we were producing — we were selling amazing products at cheap prices because that’s what customers demanded from the food industry. We made every single product from scratch, used high quality ingredients, hand packed each one, and shipped perishable, fresh products all over the country. Regardless of our amazing quality and dedication to healthy and fresh products, customers weren’t willing to pay for what we provided. In fact, we constantly received feedback that our products or shipping costs were too high. Each time we adjusted our prices, our quality and service didn’t decrease so our margins took the hit. At some point, we had to face the facts that customers aren’t ready to pay for the products and services we’re providing.