Walking away

This morning I woke up deep in thought about the thing that occupied most of my time in 2016 — Tinua.

For those of you who I didn’t know back then, Tinua was the name of a startup I was trying to launch after having an “aha” moment in a Starbucks when I had $0.17 left on a gift card and threw it in the trash.

I wondered how many times that’s happened, and what happens to all of those gift cards that go unused. Was there a way to do something more meaningful with the money we were wasting?

So the journey began — together with three incredible friends, we started working towards building an app and subsequent technology that would enable gift card funds to be donated to the charity of a person’s choice.

That year, we spent time learning about the technology behind gift cards, the difference between “open loop” and “closed loop” gift cards, the financial implications they carry, and the different state-by-state laws that dictate the outcome of their unused balances.

We created a MVP, gave pitches on the concept, researched patents and met with a patent-holder who had tried building technology to solve the same problem. We landed a meeting with a few national and regional retailers willing to talk to us about a potential pilot, and had two investor meetings.

But in the end, it just didn’t work out.

I could walk you step by step through why I think it didn’t work, but sparing all of the details, I’m not sure I had the right background, or even the right angle. As I’ve been able to grow as both an entrepreneur and a product person since this time, I’ve come to learn about the many things that dictate an idea’s success.

Like are you solving the right problem?
And if you are — do you have the right solution to that problem?

I now know this to be product management 101, but for a lot of us, you stumble into an idea or product or entrepreneurship mostly by accident, so you learn the lessons when you learn them.

Since this idea, I’ve had the great fortune of a career that has allowed me to continue learning more about both the art and the science of trying to answer those questions, because it’s not always easy.

Despite the many programs to help entrepreneurs navigate the best way forward with their ideas, I think learning to truly ask the right questions is more the result of growing as a person and a lesson in humility — which maybe only comes with time and with failure.

In the case of Tinua, I think we stumbled on a valid problem — but maybe the real solution was a lot less exciting, way more technical, and way more behind the scenes and we just missed it.

Either way, I do feel confident that we stumbled onto something, because for the last 5 years, people still ask me about it. They still tell me they’re saving up their unused gift cards just in case we need them or decide to try again.

This gives me some level of confidence that the idea resonated with people, and when I watch this video and remember our passion, it certainly still resonates with me.

In 2017, we walked away from the idea, which may have been the most powerful lesson of all — walking away from an idea that’s just not working out and being okay with failure.

But it didn’t really feel like failure.

There was so much value in that season, from the technical and process knowledge we all gained, to the hard lessons you inherently learn whenever you try to create something from nothing, and the ‘art’ side of learning to work with fragments, gut feelings and puzzle pieces.

There is also the issue with you, the person with the idea that’s learning and creating all at the same time.

For me, walking away from the idea behind Tinua placed me at the beginning of my own recovery journey, which was the process of stepping out of my own chaos and into simplicity and clarity and grounding in the entirety of my life.

These two ‘snowball’ decisions — saying no and then saying yes — ultimately created the space for another idea to grow, an idea for a ‘pre-treatment’ program and a safe place for people to start their journey recovering from addiction.

In this next season of my life, with clarity and passion and this other idea in hand, I met a woman at random who heard about this idea and was just as moved as we were.

Another person resonating with an ambitious idea — so much so, she ended up donating a half a million dollars to help us launch Doc’s Recovery House, which as of this coming Tuesday, will have been a tangible “thing” for three full years.

The right problem.
The right solution.
But also — me in the right season.

So as I reflect today, I am so thankful for Tinua and all it taught me by not working out — I am also so amazed at the interconnectedness of the things that make up our journey, and the connectedness of the ideas that end up becoming tangible things.

And who knows…maybe the idea behind Tinua will boomerang back one day in a different shape, or when I have more experience, or maybe the angle will be entirely different. Or maybe someone else will solve the problem in the meantime, and I’ll just get to watch and learn from how they did it.

I’m just excited to trust the process — and thank goodness failure is a part of the process. It’s the best gift of all, shaping us and the ideas that we’re able to walk into as a result of walking away first.