Tandem

Tandem emerged from a year-long hackathon series where Nick Raushenbush and a group of friends explored multiple startup ideas. Along with co-founders Tristan and Kevin (and two others, Finbarr and Damien), they built roughly 5 different concepts before settling on Tandem: a live streaming platform for fitness—essentially "Twitch.tv, but for fitness." The idea rode the wave of live streaming's rising popularity and the growing fitness influencer space.

The team built Tandem from scratch in about 6 weeks with no external funding. They took a surprisingly disciplined approach to validation: before launch, they contacted approximately 5,000 fitness professionals across Instagram, YouTube, fitness associations and organizations, fitness marketplace apps, and fitness conferences. The response was strong enough to move forward. They successfully onboarded about 50 content creators, suggesting initial market interest.

At launch, Tandem gained viewership primarily through Product Hunt and Facebook posts. The initial traction looked promising—they had paying creators and viewers engaging with the platform, which seemed to validate the core hypothesis.

While the validation process was solid and the team was strong, several critical factors doomed the project. First, the content itself wasn't engaging. Nick reflected: "We thought it would be good to be able to see a live stream from a fitness influencer, and it's just not as engaging as viewing live action gaming." Second, mobile streaming quality was a technical hurdle in that era (the project ran in the mid-2010s). Third, Facebook and Instagram turned out to be the ideal platforms for fitness content distribution, making Tandem redundant. Finally, the monetization model proved unsustainable—even though they offered better terms than existing platforms, the economics didn't work.

Burnout also played a role. Nick had been grinding on startup ideas for about a year, and both he and Tristan were fatigued from previous ventures. While they had executed well and had a solid team and network, they lacked the drive to pivot or persevere.

Tandem's failure became a crucial education for Nick. The experience taught him "the value of true market validation." He realized that Tandem lacked evidence of genuine user value creation, a lesson he carried forward to Shogun, his next venture. When Shogun showed paying SaaS customers—concrete, financial validation—Nick felt confident to persist. He and Finbarr worked part-time on Shogun for a year before going full-time in May of the following year.