As I’m sending the notice to my customers that the service will close, I also feel a huge relief. I’m now free from this financial and administrative burden, a failure that some would call experience.

Circa 2017, I released my first real project to the world: Exdone.fr.
It was a platform dedicated to small CPA firms to help them collaborate better. At that time, there was still companies doing it old-school and managing their cabinet with Excel spreadsheets.

Being a solopreneur is not easy. Although I think I did follow many good steps:
– confirming a problem among my market target
– building a product MVP fitting the need
– creating a file with contacts to promote the solution
– prospecting (cold calls, cold emails, Linkedin and Twitter)
– asking for help on my weakest point: sales and prospection

Here are the challenges that lead to my failure:

– “Entreprise” culture
CPAs (in France at least) have this very risk-aversion culture. Changing tools is a very slow process, possible when they are fully out of their tax season. A change difficult despite having a real organizational problem as stability is what keep overflown companies afloat. Some of them were se late that either they had years to catch, or would finish their mandates later during the year, around October.

– No co-founder or team
They also are very solicited by salesmen, and building trust takes time, energy. For most, a phone call simply does not cut it. Running solo was not a testament of trust for a type of market that needs the insurance that their partners and tools won’t fail them (especially during tax season).

– building remotely from my target
I initially built the solution for a member of my family who is accountant. I embraced the fact that I\’d build the product for another country (France, which happen to be my country of origin).
However, being Canadian , I could not be present to the annual congress, and advertise physically my product to my target audience.
Cold calls also were challenging as my time window to call France was quite short.

– Being introvert
It took me months before being “comfortable” running a cold call script. I prepared a script, tested it with my wife first, then on accountants that were not the target (running bigger firms). Then after a couple of tries, I was finally ready to do it on my target market: <em>small accountant firms (5 to 10 employees) with no presence online, likely using outdated technology to collaborate.

– Quitting my 9-5
A bad experience at work lead me to quitting my job. I took that as an opportunity to work fully on my project for a little while, and give the project a chance. I did save about 10k to survive a couple of months without income, but as time went by, and results not happening despite my efforts, I had no choice but to find another job.

– Too short marketing budget
Having a tight budget, I really wanted to succeed organically but took too long to throw money at the problem. Then, a bad experience with a contractor selling formation instead of actually doing the job, made me waste both time and money..fr

After 2 years of struggle, then came the COVID outbreak, and I threw the towel in 2020 when I became a father. Such a divine blessing that my priorities had to shift entirely. By the way, shout out to the parents who manage to do it all! The word “exhausted” took a whole new meaning. The little time I had left for me, I just spent it sleeping or recovering.

These were valuable lessons for my first experience creating a business. I absolutely loved working with my first client collaborating on a solution that would fit their needs, and being a software developer, I had a blast designing, creating and delivering value. I still think that the solution proposed by Exdone.fr has its place, but will reach the market if delivered by a more “Entreprise’y” company.

For my next endeavor, I will spend more time and energy figuring out if the problem solved is critical enough that my target market is willing to pay quickly, and open to change.