Farewell to Candidly
A Journeys End
I am ready to have this conversation. This post has been sitting in my draft for over 4 months, but it’s time to close this chapter. We made the tough call to shut down candidly back in April and for the months that followed, I’ve disconnected to try to appreciate the journey that lasted over 9 years in building this company. I engineered my life to do nothing else but bring Candidly to life. I ate, slept and breathed Candidly’s mission and I was ruthless. If you were a doubter and not a believer I was ruthless to ignore the noise and move with conviction. This is particularly painful because 2022 was the best year in the history of the company, but in the space of 3 months, a funding round falling through, an acquisition with a partner that was not poised to make a deal and our bank (which agreed to give us a line of credit for 6 months) dying within weeks of our request.
In the end, the buck starts and ends with me. I take full responsibility for Candidly failing. It’s that simple really. I still believe in a world where we are not the ones to capture our most meaningful life experiences, it just wasn’t ours to build.
What Went Wrong
In the history of the company, 2022 was our best year, from a gross revenue standpoint. We discovered an untapped distribution channel that enabled us to acquire customers at an unprecedented speed and volume — invitation platforms — think someone creates a birthday invitation and sends out RSVP requests, then they get a recommendation to book a photographer. For some partners we were able to make the unit economics to work as we scaled but for some others, this was very very challenging. We felt we could eventually optimize our funnel for the challenging partners and get it work over time, but as we grew it got worse and also some of these partners decided to charge us more as they figured we’d be a new source of revenue growth for themselves.
We were working to close a $5M round in Jan 2023, and then it fell through. I am a builder and I wanted to close the round to get back to work asap, so I prioritized speed over running a thorough process for this round. This was my fault.
I’ve had some people ask me, why didn’t I just scale the company down and run it with a skeleton team? We got an offer from existing investors to pump in another $1.2M into the company to keep going…I ultimately felt this was a sunk cost fallacy for all parties involved. Some context: over the last 8+ years we set out to build the best consumer marketplace for booking a photographer for your event. We got pretty close, we had a best in market product that made booking a photographer as easy as ordering Doordash/Uber. We believed that this coupled with an attractive price point, would lead to consumers using this more frequently, think once a quarter….but that didn’t quite happen. We had roughly 17% of our customer base use us once per quarter, another 27% twice a year and 40% once a year. Repeat was at a paltry 19% YoY.
Potential
With the knowledge of our unit economics challenge, I set out to identify other ways to grow our TAM and improve margins. We noticed that our users always asked if we had drones, so this got us thinking about a potential upsell….I spent the second half of 2022 coding a solution that would allow us to auto-power small drones indoors for private events. We didn’t want to do hardware for obvious reasons, so we decided to build on top of existing drone cams in the market, specifically on the Air Selfie’s NEO pocket cam and Snaps Pixy. This had the potential to 2x the AOV with a 80% take rate on drone covered events since it was going to be autonomous. This ended up being a huge project to undertake for our small but mighty team. $5M wouldn’t even scratch the surface on this.
We were also gearing up to launch Candidly PRO, which would service corporate event space, higher ticket size, better margins and repeat, but this was all predicated on closing the round and a potential massive partnership with a major event management platform.
Honestly, I couldn’t figure out how to make tangible progress with just $1.2M in new money and a skeleton team, it felt like kicking the can down the road for the inevitable….mind you our secret sauce, leveraging AI to handle post processing was quickly eroding with latest advancements in the space.
In the end, the writing was on the wall. It was time to call it quits.
Thank You’s
It takes a village and I want to express my sincere gratitude to everyone who helped me. I personally want to call out a handful of folks: this could easily be a post on its own…
Heather Le — to my co-founder, I love you. I love what we did and I love how we did it. I am sorry it didn’t pan out as we expected or dreamt of, but I would not have taken it any other way. Sam Baber, being our coach in the first year of us launching candidly.com, was the smartest decision we ever made as co-founders. As we discussed over our call recently, I don’t regret any part of this journey and will gladly sign up to do another one with you.
Maria Walley — for being the OG co-founder, wouldn’t make it to Austin without you.
Brad Zapp — for being the first VC to believe in me blindly, I’m sorry I sucked at golf but I appreciate you trying to teach me.
Tosin Kolade and Eryck Dzotsi — my college buddies who took the risk of investing their savings in me. For being the first believers and investors.
Gordon Daugherty— Helping me grasp the fundamentals of launching a company and building what consumers want, having lunch with my parents and letting them know I wasn’t crazy and for so many other things that I can’t fit it in here.
Josh Baer — for plugging a guy from Cincinnati into the Austin ecosystem. You were right about distribution, should have listened earlier and thanks for so many other things.
Derek Keller — for talking me off the ledge during covid and getting me the ticket to SF to pitch Mike Maples Jr, who committed to invest on the spot.
Brett hurt — not only where you an investor, you were a user and also encouraged us as we grew, always responding to our investor updates and offering to help in any way you could. Thank you.
George Azih — for writing me a 6 figure check over our first 30 minute phone call without even knowing me.
Ryan Merket — where do i start, you went from an investor to a friend, you invested in every round, you were my first call or text when shit hit the fan. Thank you for always being there for me.
Seyi Fabode — you are my compass for sense and calm, an investor but also a great friend.
Amos Schwartzfarb — for introducing me to the Techstars community and for being there during the downtimes, I appreciate you.
Erik Moore — for taking a chance with me, I am sorry we didn’t achieve what we set out to do.
Mike Maples Jr. — last but not least, my gratitude to you for choosing to dream with me, to imagine what it’d take to define a new consumer category, for the phone calls, the check-ins and the countless words of encouragement, to quote you:
Arlan Hamilton, Brock Saunders, Chicago Early and the team at Palm Drive — there are a handful of investors who blindly trusted me with their funds without even meeting me — I still hope to meet you all someday, I am sorry the result wasn’t what we all expected.
What’s Next
If you’re working in this space and need insights, feel free to reach out. As much as it is farewell to candidly and bye now for me, one thing is for sure… I will be back, as a founder again. Thanks, Onwards and Upwards.
Best,
— Sam E. Ulu
