MLO Technologies looks like an overnight company on the internet. It wasn’t. We found product-market fit in our third real attempt, and the two failed swings cost roughly 18 months and a small mountain of self-funded cash. Five mistakes I made before the company actually worked:

1. Hiring engineers before customers

The instinct was: build the thing, then sell it. Reality: I burned six months building features no one needed because I had engineers I had to keep busy. The version of MLO that works sold the first three contracts before the engineering team grew past me and one senior dev. Headcount lagging revenue isn’t a constraint — it’s a forcing function.

2. Selling to anyone who would pay

For a year I took every contract, regardless of fit. The result: a product surface area shaped by 11 different customers with nothing in common, and a team thrashing between codebases. We narrowed to a single customer profile in Q2 of last year, and revenue per engineer 3x’d within two quarters. Saying no to revenue is the highest-leverage decision a founder makes.

3. Underpricing on instinct

Our first pricing was 60% below what the market would pay. I framed it as “easy yes” pricing. The actual effect: customers undervalued us, asked for unlimited revisions, and churned faster than higher-priced peers. The price you charge tells the customer how seriously to take you. Underprice and they don’t.

4. Founding without a complementary co-founder for two years

I tried to be the technical, sales, fundraising, brand and ops person at once. The five-company piece I wrote covers some of how I structure now — but inside MLO specifically, the company didn’t level up until a real operations partner joined. Solo founders have higher variance; the upside cases are rare and the burnout cases are common.

5. Optimising for vanity revenue

One year we were proud of crossing a particular ARR number. The next year we found out half of that revenue was unprofitable once we accounted for support cost. We fired customers, the top-line dropped, and net margin doubled. Profitable revenue is the only revenue that compounds.

The meta-lesson

Each of those mistakes had the same root cause: I optimised for what looked like progress instead of what actually was progress. Headcount looks like progress. Top-line looks like progress. “Closed deals” look like progress. None of them are. Cash flow per employee, customer retention, and quality of the next inbound lead — those are the real metrics, and they’re harder to look at because they’re often less flattering.

The advice I’d give a year-zero founder

Start narrower than feels comfortable. Charge more than feels comfortable. Hire later than feels comfortable. The discomfort is the price of admission to a company that actually works.

Pre-product-market-fit and want a second pair of eyes? Reach out.