What is Buo?
Buo is an online store that helps people save money on their groceries and non-food products by sourcing and selling surplus products to day to day shoppers that would otherwise go to waste. Our approach supports producers, wholesalers and distributors to find new markets for their surplus stock, avoiding waste and reducing the environmental impact caused by it.
My role
I was the CEO of a 25+ people team, where I built and lead a team of 25+ people, launched 3 products, raised over 2.5M€. My main responsibilities were running the day to day operations of the business, leading the exec team & managing the product.
Why it failed? / Learnings
Despite generating early traction (+800K€ in sales in the first 10 months) and having a real impact (over 200 tonnes of food saved & 330k€ saved by 8.5K families), there were some fundamental issues that we did not manage to fix:
- Terrible gross margins & intensive operations → The margins where too low to support our costly operations, we lied to ourselves thinking that with high volume it would be fixed → Lesson for future Carlos: Build a lightweight ops business with great gross margins. Do not make fake assumptions
- Scaling and Fundraising Too Early → We created an unsustainable business by wanting to go too fast. We raised 2.5M€ and scaled the team and operations prematurely, which prevented us from building a sustainable business from the ground up. This resulted in burning unnecessary capital. By the time we realised that our business model needed to change, we had become too big and too tangled up to adapt effectively. → Lesson for future Carlos: Do not raise money if it’s not an absolute necessity, do not hire if it’s not an absolute necessity . Successful businesses take time, be patient, stay lean for as long as possible and think of it as It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
- Too many pivots & lack of focus → We never had a clear long term strategy & built an opportunistic businesses, which meant that we easily got distracted and pivoted to see short term results in order to show results to investors (with whom we should not have raised money from in the first place) → Lesson for future Carlos: Strategy & long term vision is key. We worked our asses off & executed like crazy only to to realise we were always moving in circles and not in a clear direction. We pivoted a few times due to a clear lack of long term strategy & that burned out the team as we felt like were always swimming against the current. Find the fast moving water.
- No founder-market fit → We did not have industry expertise, we were not obsessed with the problem we were trying to solve and more importantly the founding team was not aligned with the end goal. → Lesson for future Carlos: Make sure that what you build and who you build it with are very aligned with what you want to do in life, otherwise, in the long term it will never work out.
