I raised $8M young and made every mistake. Here is the one that matters now.

I raised eight million dollars in my early twenties and made every mistake in the book. I am not being modest about that, and I am not performing the founder-humility thing either. I mean it literally. If there was a way to misallocate money, mishandle a team, or learn a lesson the slow expensive way, I found it. So when I talk to a maker who is in the thick of it now, I am not talking down from anywhere. I have been on the floor.

Let me give you the short version of the arc, because it matters for the one mistake I actually want to talk about.

I started building games at thirteen with a friend. He was the artist, I was the programmer. The thing we made together was better than either of us could have made alone, and that feeling, one plus one equaling three, got me addicted to building with other people for the rest of my life. Every company since has been a version of that. Microsoft for a stretch, including winning the Imagine Cup in 2004 and a couple of patents. Then Kobojo in 2008, a Facebook game from zero to a million users organically, a hundred and fifty thousand euros a month, the eight million raised, and most of the mistakes. Then EVERYDAYiPLAY, where we built a game that won Facebook's Best New Game and sold to Playtika inside six months, my first real exit. Then Lucky Duck Games, my brother's idea, a quarter million dollar Kickstarter that grew into seventy people and twenty million in annual revenue, sold to a strategic acquirer in 2024.

That is the resume version. Here is the version that actually taught me something.

For all the money and the exits, the mistake that kept repeating, mine and then everyone's I watched after, was the same one. I treated building the thing as the job, and distribution as something that would sort itself out or that someone else would handle. At Kobojo we got lucky with organic timing and I mistook luck for skill. When the channel shifted, I did not have the discipline to know why it was working or why it stopped. I changed things I did not understand. I have watched a hundred founders since do the identical thing, and I did it first.

The lesson took me an embarrassingly long time to actually absorb. Making a product is half of the build. The other half is finding the people to use it. One without the other, there is nothing. Not a smaller thing. Nothing. A great product with no distribution loses to an average product with great distribution every single time, and I had to lose to that a few times to believe it.

So that is the old mistake. Here is why it matters more now than it ever has, which is the real reason I am writing this.

The cost of building has collapsed. Vibe coding, AI tooling, the whole stack means a person can ship a real app in a weekend that would have taken a team a quarter a few years ago. That is genuinely wonderful and it has a brutal second-order effect. If everyone can build, then building is no longer the scarce thing. Distribution is. The exact half that nobody trained any of us to do is now the entire game, at the precise moment that ten times more apps are being shipped into the same silence.

And distribution itself just got rewritten. The cookie is dead. The old playbook, make one great ad and let precise targeting find your person, is about four years out of date and most indie makers are still running it. The algorithm does the targeting now, and it learns from the creative. Which means the work is not one hero ad anymore. It is many persona-tailored variations, enough volume for the system to find your buyers. The script is flipped completely. The creative is the new cookie.

Here is where I have to be honest about my own bias, because there is a version of this that is just an old operator yelling about how things were better before. That is not what this is. I spent the last eighteen months processing eight million dollars of a friend's live ad spend, pro bono, specifically to stress-test whether my instincts still held in the post-cookie, AI-era world or whether I was the guy running the 2021 playbook without knowing it. I wanted to be proven wrong against real campaigns, not against theory. What I found is that the fundamentals hold and the tactics inverted. The discipline of test, find where it breaks, kill or scale on pre-committed criteria, that is more true than ever. The how, the creative volume, the broad-audience modeling, the persona-first approach, that is almost the opposite of what worked four years ago.

Which brings me to the mistake I see makers making right now, and why I built what I built.

The mistake is concluding, after a quiet launch, that the product was wrong, and going to build another one. I understand the pull. Building is the part you are good at and the part that feels safe. Distribution is the part that feels like a black box and a money pit. So when an app goes quiet, the path of least resistance is to start over, because at least building is something you know how to do. I have felt that exact pull. It is the most expensive instinct in indie development, because you abandon something that might have worked and pay full price to build again from zero, and the new thing will hit the same wall, because the wall was never the product.

I built ZenLaunch so that a maker does not have to keep paying that price alone. The model is simple and it is the opposite of what burned most of you. No retainer. I put my own money on your app for thirty days to find out, on real numbers, whether it can scale. If it can, I fund the user acquisition properly and we share the upside, so I only win when you do. If it cannot, you get a straight answer and you keep your own money, and you redeploy with pattern recognition you did not have before. Skin in the game, not an invoice.

I want to say one thing about why this is the work I chose, because it is not really about the money. Money is the gas of the car. If the only point of the car is to make gas, you have built a pointless car. I have always been most at home next to a creative person, the artist to my programmer, the maker to my growth half. They tend to unload their anxiety on me, and I tend to help them find the space to build and to sell. That is the thing I am actually good at and the thing that means something to me. ZenLaunch is just that, at scale, for the makers who got handed the impossible job of being everything at once.

So if you launched into silence and you are sitting with the quiet conclusion that the product failed, I would ask you to hold off on building the next one for thirty days. Find out the truth about the one you have. That is the whole offer, and it is the thing I wish someone had done for me at twenty three.