What Went Wrong With ibbe
Work on ibbe began in 2024, during class eleven, alongside a few classmates. That early version faded, but the idea gathered real direction once I pitched it to Anzilah, and later Varun, who joined as a co-founder. Most of that first year went into building the product and attempting to reach schools. By 2025, the team had grown considerably, largely because those already involved brought in their friends. We started imagining ourselves as an established company, when the reality was much closer to a small group still trying to prove whether the idea was worth building around.
This false sense of scale influenced our decisions poorly. I modelled our marketing on brands I considered ideal, such as Apple, without accounting for the fact that they operate as a trillion-dollar company. The restrictions I placed on our brand language slowed ideation considerably and made the work unnecessarily difficult for our marketing lead, who was putting in genuine effort despite those constraints.
That detachment from our actual size showed in other areas as well. Reaching schools proved considerably harder than we expected. When we finally secured one conversation, the people assigned to attend the meeting failed to show up. Looking back, holding back from going to that meeting myself was a clear mistake. A founder carries a real obligation to do the work directly early on. Acting like the head of a company with people available to handle every task, while the company is still finding its footing, leads nowhere useful.
Distraction also became a significant problem. Artificial intelligence was improving rapidly, and I kept using new models to build secondary things, such as an applicant tracker, a blog, and a steady stream of smaller tools. Much of that time felt like work for the company, though a fair share of it was actually feeding the satisfaction of building something new. Expecting the rest of the team to match that scattered pace became its own problem, particularly since most of what I built sat far outside our primary mission.
Perhaps the most damaging mistake was allowing personal relationships to affect performance standards. When you let someone slide on their responsibilities because of a friendship, the consequence reaches everyone watching. Your best people notice that effort has become optional, that relationships matter more than results, and that the standard is undefined. Without saying a word, they begin lowering their own bar, or they leave for a place where the bar still holds. Every double standard I allowed became an unspoken message that closeness to the founder mattered more than competence.
A recent conversation with one of our team members, Alvina Dhalait, highlighted these internal fractures rather clearly. She observed that our ambition to build an international project led us to rush, when deliberate, smaller steps would have been more sensible. More importantly, she identified a pattern of erratic effort that ultimately undermined the work.
" Inconsistency was one huge thing that affected ibbe. We did something one week and then for the next two weeks ghosted, and then the fourth week we were back to motivating each other to do better. Maybe that is not the type of work ibbe needed. It needed more everyday, genuine working on it, giving it time and attention. I understand how personal lives and tasks do come in between, but as an entrepreneur you are required to keep both lives separate"
Her assessment is entirely reasonable. We often treated our roles as favors extended to friends, which misreads what a team actually is. The people you bring in are the company itself, and every person either raises the floor or lowers it. Being ruthlessly kind means staying honest enough to bring in only people who are genuinely ready, and staying decisive enough to act quickly when a situation is clearly failing to work out.
The end of ibbe was not caused by a single catastrophic event, but rather by the slow accumulation of these unresolved structural problems. We had the ambition to build something substantial, and perhaps the technical capability to do so, but we lacked the steady discipline required to sustain it. When inconsistency becomes the normal way a team operates, the actual work stops progressing, and the project eventually collapses under the weight of its own unfulfilled plans. I suspect we spent too much time acting like a company instead of actually being one.
Nevertheless, the experience leaves behind a fairly clear set of instructions for whatever comes next. A project is only as strong as the standard it enforces daily, and treating a startup as an extension of a friendship rarely serves either the business or the relationship well. Building something worthwhile requires separating personal affinity from professional capability, maintaining a strict focus on the actual problem being solved, and doing the ordinary work consistently. That is a difficult lesson to learn, but a necessary one to carry forward.