Zien shut down. I left at the end of 2023. I don't have any financial interest in the company, but I'm still concerned about the people left behind. Now is an opportune time to reflect on what I've learned.

What I would do again

Bootstrapped for the first three years. Having no investors after a short-term return allowed us the time to experiment.

Prototyped early and quickly. Using no-code tools to get things out the door quickly allowed us to iterate during limited evenings and weekends.

Accountants. Once we had created the limited company. Outsourcing the payroll and bookkeeping saved us hours of time and hassle. When we came to claim research and development tax credits, that would not have happened without their support. Their fees were money well spent.

What didn't work

Zien was not a tech company. It was more of an online gallery enabled by technology. Software may be eating the world, even in Art, but a Shopify site would have worked just as well and would have been quicker and cheaper to set up.

Slow feedback cycles. Typically, each piece of Art took around six months to produce. The company still needs to pay for salaries all that time. That is too long to iterate quickly and find product-market fit.

Drop-based revenue is terrible for cash flow. Each drop needs to build an audience, if not from scratch. At least from a lower level, each drop. As a company, you need a larger scale to have a deep pipeline to support the work, especially with a six-month cycle for each project. Zien never got to that scale.

B2C is hard, and Bootstrapping two-sided marketplaces is demanding. The slow feedback cycles made getting a product-market fit much more difficult. Rob Walling always advises defaulting to B2B. I would agree; fewer customers who pay more each is simpler.

Selling expensive items to wealthy individuals is a lucrative business. The downside is that it is challenging to break into. Rich people want white-gloves service. Most brick-and-mortar Art galleries don't make a profit, and sprinkling digital pixie dust on the business model doesn't solve that problem.

What I would do differently

Take the money when you don't need it. During fundraising, Zien had more potential investors than we signed terms with. We hope to raise later with better terms. We should have taken the money. If we had more time, we could find our product-market fit.

Chatbot-based interface. Yes, it is currently very hyped. The direction, I still think, is correct. We will see many more services using text or voice-based interfaces. Support was lacking or inefficient from 2021 to 2023. That wasn't an excellent fit for our target market at that time. Art is and was a very analogue business.

Dual digital/physical items. Works that span both the digital and physical have a future. Such works offer a much greater space to explore, artistically and from a business perspective. Not just in Art. Gaming offers one area, especially when you could bring your physical Warhammer 40K army into the game, expanding on Amiibo or LEGO Dimensions.

Lessons Learned

Freemium isn't a great business model. It's challenging to get people to pay later. Charge from day one.

Getting de-banked. We had our bank account closed. I've no bad feelings towards the bank. We followed the rules, but the bank still perceived Zien as a risk. Having more explicit legal rules would have helped. We were aware that we operated in an area with certain risks. We should have planned for those risks, like having multiple bank accounts.

Platform risk. WhatsApp switched off the Zien chatbot without warning or notification, which took a few weeks to fix. Again, we should have threat-modelled the risk and had a plan to mitigate it should it happen.