Winding It Down Without Pretending It Was a Pivot

There's a whole vocabulary founders use to avoid saying a company failed. We pivoted. We sunset the product. We transitioned the team to new opportunities. I used some of those words myself, in the first few conversations, until I caught myself doing it and felt embarrassed enough to stop.

We wound Perfume Lounge down. It stopped working. I want to say that plainly, because almost nobody does, and the silence around it makes every founder going through the same thing feel uniquely broken. We weren't unique. We were just quiet about it, the way everyone is.

The part nobody photographs

The LinkedIn version of a shutdown is a single thoughtful post about lessons learned, comments turned off, posted once and never revisited. The real version is weeks of logistics that nobody wants to read about, because there's nothing inspiring in them.

Telling the people who trusted you with their careers, one conversation at a time, in the order that felt most fair rather than most convenient. Paying out what you can, and being honest in the same breath about what you can't. Closing GST registrations, settling vendors who'd extended you credit in good faith, working through the long administrative tail that outlasts the decision by months.

The decision to stop is made in a single afternoon. The actual stopping takes months, and it's all the part you can't post about.

Nobody warns you that the ending has its own project plan, and that you're the only one who shows up to every meeting on it.

What I'd defend, and what I wouldn't

I don't think shutting it down was a failure of character. I think the failure of character would have been the other option: keeping it alive on life support, burning other people's money and my own health to protect an ego that had gotten attached to the idea of never quitting.

There's a version of being a founder that treats every ending as a personal verdict, proof that you weren't good enough, weren't resilient enough, didn't want it badly enough. I've stopped believing that version. Some things don't work, for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard you tried. You can run them honestly while they're alive, and you can end them honestly too. Neither of those is the consolation prize. Both of them are the actual job.

That's the posture I try to write from now, on this blog and everywhere else. Especially here.