When your startup fails

A startup first has an inkling or a concept. It's possible that the founder identifies a problem and believes they can use some technology to address it and change an industry, but things don't always work out as expected. Lillian Cartwright, the founder of ShelfLife, discovered this when she first started her business. Cartwright was forced to close her business last year when the economy tanked and venture financing became scarce. She is now ready to move on to whatever comes next after learning the hard lessons she experienced.

Yet when she first started out, Cartwright thought the beverage sector was ready for a digital shift. A few years ago, when she was enrolled in Harvard's graduate programme, she had the notion to launch a hard seltzer company.She soon discovered that finding the ingredients was more difficult than she had anticipated, and she started to have an idea for a company—a two-sided market place where businesses could acquire ingredients, bargain for a price, and invoice and pay—all in one simple location.It sounds like a concept that an industry mired in paper and manual procedures would embrace, but Carwright would later discover that she may have gone a little too quickly, particularly in the area of accounting. It's simple to overlook how challenging it might be to change ingrained manual processes when thinking about digital transformation. Although if digital is more efficient and can save money and time for an industry still dominated by phone calls, faxes, emails, and paper bills, it's not always simple to change ingrained company procedures for a startup.

"I was having trouble understanding the landscape of suppliers, trying to figure out who would provide our juice concentrate, citric acid, cans, labels, and everything else. I started to understand that there was a chance to open up this process and make it more transparent after speaking with other firms about some of their problems, said Cartwright to TechCrunch+.

Cartwright worked as a summer intern at Bessemer Venture Partners, where she examined e-commerce marketplaces, around the same time that she was having trouble with her idea for a seltzer company. She was unknowingly creating the foundation for her startup idea at the time.

The company began operations in February 2020, just as the pandemic started to spread, which may have been a portent of things to come. Yet, things started out well: She was able to raise more than $300,000. She utilised that cash to look for a co-founder who had better technical skills. She eventually formed a partnership to develop ShelfLife with John Cline, a seasoned engineering manager who had previously worked at Google, Blue Apron, and eBay before joining Cartwright.