The Dream Kept Getting Smaller

What did year-one me genuinely think SushiVid would become?

I thought we would be the JobStreet of influencer marketing. The Grab of influencer marketing.

I really believed it.

And I thought all the influencers were like me.

When I was an actor, I was hungry. I would diligently send out my rate card. I would go out and meet people, give out my name cards, my call cards. I would create presentation slides on why I was the one suitable for the role.

I was eager. I was proactive. I pitched myself.

So I built a platform assuming everyone else would do the same.

They didn’t.

That was my first big lesson as a founder: I built a product for myself, and assumed the market thought like me. Most people don’t behave like that. It’s not that they were wrong. They just weren’t me.

I didn’t really have an end goal for revenue. But around that time there was a company called FameBit that got sold to YouTube, and I thought: that could be my benchmark. That’s what success would look like.

It didn’t happen. None of it happened the way I imagined.

Here’s the part that’s harder to talk about.

Before SushiVid, I worked at a startup where I felt the founders were overly aggressive. They didn’t care about the wellbeing of their employees. I was very sure I wasn’t going to be one of them.

Then I became a founder myself. And in hindsight, I understood: yes, that is what it took. Sometimes you have to be heartless.

But I was never heartless. So it was hard.

I really wanted to be a founder with a heart.

Meanwhile, the dream kept shrinking. Every year I had to revise it. JobStreet for influencers became a marketplace. The marketplace became an agency-like business. The exit became survival.

The dream kept getting smaller and smaller. And every time it shrank, I felt like more of a failure.

For a long time, when I asked myself “what part of the dream actually came true?”, my answer was: none of it. Oh my God, none of it.

But I’ve been sitting with that answer, and I don’t think it’s true anymore.

Because one part did come true.

I wanted to be a founder with a heart. And that part I kept true to myself. Through every down round of the dream, through every revision, through every year the picture got smaller.

I was wrong about the market. I was wrong about the influencers. I was wrong about the exit.

I wasn’t wrong about who I wanted to be.

Maybe the dream didn’t get smaller after all. Maybe it just got more honest.