Delite

In late October 2016, Pat Walls and his two co-founders—one of whom was his roommate who owned a pet products business—identified a real pain point. The roommate was selling products to hundreds of different retailers and the process of getting orders and invoicing all of those businesses was extremely time-consuming. They wanted to build a way for customers to submit orders through a secure web form without needing to log in or deal with complex systems. They named it Delite and envisioned creating "delites": customizable order forms that could be sent to customers.

With Pat as a software engineer and his roommate also having coding skills, they immediately started building. The MVP took about two months to complete and included the core functionality: the ability to create customizable "delites" and send them to customers, who could then fill out orders and pay with a credit card. After finishing the MVP, they spent about four months acquiring customers and adding features. They even applied to Y Combinator and made it to the video interview stage, though ultimately got rejected. Rather than quit at that point, they evaluated the business and decided to shut it down.

Getting customers proved far harder than expected. They targeted small to medium businesses like small-scale manufacturers that did most of their sales in-house, and they chose the pet products niche specifically because one co-founder was well-connected there and many businesses weren't yet leveraging much technology. They built lists of potential customers and started cold calling and emailing. Response rates were low, but they acquired a few customers through persistence, multiple emails, sales calls, and live demos. They got creative with outreach—attending a health food trade show in San Francisco where they handed out personalized business cards and got many leads and a few customers. They also obtained another trade show attendee list and email blasted around 1,000 people, netting a few more customers. Within a couple of months, they had 5-10 customers willing to try the product.

The cold outreach and trade show strategies generated leads and early customers, but the fundamental problems ran deeper. Delite was solving a "nice-to-have" rather than a necessity—something customers knew they needed eventually but kept putting off because they were busy. The product tried to automate something core to their customers' businesses (sales and order management), which meant switching to it required significant operational changes and hand-holding. The non-tech-savvy target market was hesitant and required multiple sales calls and demos per customer, plus extensive post-sale training. Once customers signed up, actual usage was low. Additionally, the co-founders couldn't commit full-time—they all had day jobs, which meant they had to jump on sales calls and customer support emails during work, leaving coffee shops to take calls. Finally, the product lacked integrations with tools like QuickBooks that customers were already using.

Delite ultimately failed because the market need wasn't there and the team couldn't sustain the effort. Pat reflected that in retrospect, he should have pre-sold the product and validated with 5-10 paying customers before building, charged money from day one (free products signal weakness in B2B), and doubled down on cold calling with a more disciplined follow-up process. He noted that he wasn't passionate about solving that particular problem, which may have contributed to losing motivation after the YC rejection. Rather than regret it, Pat learned valuable lessons and later founded Starter Story, a platform interviewing entrepreneurs on how they got started—something he was genuinely passionate about and could work on nights and weekends while maintaining his full-time job.