4-Year Founder Journey
Share
A story about how a French founder pivoted his startup "Time Left" multiple times over 4 years before finding success with stranger dinners.
In 2020, after selling his media company, the founder started Time Left - named after calculating he had 600 months left to live. His first version was a bucket list app, but people would create lists and never do anything with them.
In 2021 (year 2), he pivoted to make it like "Tinder for bucket lists" - connecting people over shared dreams. But again, people would message but never actually do activities together.
2023 (year 3) passed with no progress. By 2024, with 9 months of cash left from his initial $2M raise, he had an honest conversation with himself. He made new rules:
- Must launch in 2 weeks without technical team
- Must generate revenue (after 3 years of $0)
- Must be group activity-based without relying on photos
He launched "Time Left Dinners" - connecting strangers for dinner. Started with 4 tables of 6 people, making $110 his first Wednesday. Used just Typeform, WhatsApp, and Stripe. For 3 months, he manually matched people himself.
Eventually built a simple app and scaled by removing the requirement to personally visit restaurants. Within 10 months, the business grew to $10M in annual recurring revenue, hosting hundreds of weekly dinners across multiple cities.
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.