🎉 Hey Failories! It's Nico here.

This week I bring you an interview with Rize's founder, an article analyzing Yogome's failure, and the three must-reads of this week.

But before that, on Monday, I finally released Failory's #1 online course (Pre-Sell to Validate) lessons to those who had pre-ordered it.

This course is a perfect starting point if you have come with a business idea but don't know what to do next. Validation of ideas is a MUST, and the best way to approach it is by pre-selling your product or service.

In this course, I share 10 step-by-step strategies to get pre-sales and +20 real examples of how founders used pre-sales to validate their ideas.

I'll keep working on the course during the following weeks, releasing new lessons and helping each student to validate their business idea. Get the course here for $100.

Now let's get into this week's content.

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content 📚

💰 Shutting down a VC-backed startup to build an $11k/mo bootstrapped SaaS. Will is co-founder at Rize, a productivity SaaS which helps you track your time and build better work habits.

They launched on Product Hunt in May 2021 and hit the #1 position of the day and week. In October, 6 months later, they made +$11k in sales, while still being a two-person bootstrapped team. Here's how to build a profitable and fast-growing SaaS.​

️💀 Yogome, from raising $36.5M to being forced to shut down. Yogome, an educational gaming startup for kids, started in 2010 in Mexico and shut down 8 years later.

In an attempt to impress potential investors and raise funds, the startup's founders decided to manipulate and inflate the app's usage data. When this situation surfaced, the board of directors and investors decided to shut down the business. Here's Yogome's failure story.​

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🔴 What new SaaS founders get wrong... They show their idea to potential customers and ask “Would you use this?” Learn why that’s wrong and better ways to get continuous idea validation through effective customer research methods. Watch on YouTube →

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what I'm reading 👀

​My last day at Growth Machine. Nat Eliason is the founder of Growth Machine, a content marketing & SEO agency. He ran the business for a few years, but eventually decided to put someone else in charge of it, so he could focus on other projects. In this article, he shares how he achieved it.

​Startup's Operating Agreement. An operating agreement is a document used by LLCs to govern internal operations. In this article, Outseta's founder shares their operating agreement and how they have made their most important financial and functional decisions.

​Startups' founding options. Many startup founders resign to a huge % of equity to raise funds and grow faster. In this video, Nathan Latka analyzes 5 alternatives to equity financing.

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That's all for this week. Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Nico

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