The Hidden Cost of Abundance

We launched twelve initiatives. None became a business. The real mistake came before we built anything.

In early 2022, Soluntech was doing very well. Business was growing, we had healthy cash reserves, and the market for software development services in the United States was particularly strong. After years of building the company, it felt good to have the financial freedom to explore opportunities without constantly worrying about cash flow.

I've always enjoyed identifying problems and figuring out how technology might help solve them. I wanted Soluntech to create its own products and develop new sources of revenue beyond our existing services business. But running a growing company demanded most of my attention, and I couldn't dedicate the time I wanted to innovation.

So I decided to delegate it.

We had a talented, creative person on our team who was particularly good at coming up with ideas. I believed that, with enough autonomy and resources, he could lead an innovation department capable of developing new products and eventually generating revenue for the company.

It seemed reasonable. We had the money, the technical capabilities, and someone I trusted to lead the effort.

Looking back, I realize how much I was taking for granted.

Twelve initiatives, no customers

We created an innovation department with a team of at least five people, including developers, designers, marketing, sales, and leadership. We also invested in infrastructure, software, and everything else required to develop and launch new products.

The approach was straightforward: generate ideas, build products, and increase our chances of success by pursuing multiple opportunities.

Over the life of the department, we worked on approximately twelve initiatives. There was always something happening, and from the outside, it probably looked like a company investing seriously in its future.

Two of those initiatives illustrate how we were thinking at the time.

One was an NFT.

This was during the period when digital artwork was selling for extraordinary amounts of money. We watched people pay prices that seemed almost impossible to justify for assets that, to us, looked like digital images. It was fascinating, and we saw what appeared to be an opportunity.

So we assigned people to create an NFT and try to sell it. The team spent weeks developing and marketing it, but we didn't make a sale.

Today, the question seems obvious: why would someone want to buy our NFT specifically?

We had observed that people were spending money in a market, but we hadn't established why they would spend it on something we created.

Another initiative involved using blockchain to issue tickets for concerts and other events.

Blockchain was attracting considerable attention, and we thought ticketing might be an interesting application. The technology could potentially help with authenticity and fraud prevention, both legitimate concerns in that industry.

But companies like Ticketmaster already had established systems for issuing tickets and addressing fraud. We were proposing an alternative that introduced additional complexity for customers, including the use of digital wallets.

We hadn't sufficiently established what problem our solution would solve better than the alternatives, or why event organizers and ticket buyers would want to adopt it.

Neither initiative attracted customers or generated sales.

In fact, none of the twelve initiatives did.

I don't think experimenting with NFTs or blockchain was inherently a mistake. At the time, there were reasonable questions worth exploring about both technologies.

What I question today is how much effort we committed before answering some fairly basic commercial questions.

What I got wrong about delegation

Initially, I thought my mistake had been delegating innovation.

As a founder, you feel the financial consequences of decisions differently. You're responsible for the money being invested, the employees depending on the company, and the future of the business. I began to think that perhaps nobody else could approach innovation with the same sense of ownership.

But over time, my perspective changed.

The people involved were doing what we had asked them to do. We had given them a budget, a team, and a mandate to generate ideas and develop products. They were operating within a system I had approved.

The real mistake wasn't delegating innovation. It was delegating decisions about what deserved investment without establishing a sufficiently disciplined process for validating those decisions.

We should have been asking who the customer was, what problem we were solving, how existing alternatives fell short, and what evidence justified committing more resources. We also needed clear criteria for deciding when an initiative should stop.

Instead, we had created an organization that was good at generating work without being equally good at questioning whether that work was necessary.

And because we had the financial capacity to support it, we allowed that situation to continue longer than we should have.

When abundance changes your judgment

I think there's something about financial success that entrepreneurs need to be careful with.

When money is limited, you naturally question expenses. You look for ways to test ideas cheaply, delay hiring until necessary, and make existing resources go further.

But when business is good, those habits can gradually weaken. You hire because you can afford to. You create departments because they seem like the next logical step. You approve investments based on what might happen, without demanding the same evidence you would have required when money was tight.

That's what happened to me.

In 2022, I wasn't thinking that we were spending irresponsibly. I genuinely believed we were investing in Soluntech's future. I wanted to diversify our revenue, create new products, and take advantage of the financial position we had worked so hard to achieve.

The problem was that I had begun treating our financial capacity as a justification for investment, rather than simply one of the conditions that made investment possible.

And somewhere along the way, I had also started assuming that the good times would continue.

Then the market changed.

During the second half of 2023, Soluntech began experiencing a decline in revenue. Much of our business came from the United States, where reduced venture capital investment was affecting the companies and market segments we served.

Clients became more cautious, investment slowed, and the conditions that had supported our previous growth were no longer the same.

It was during that period that I decided to close the innovation department and let the entire team go.

We had invested substantial resources in initiatives that hadn't attracted a single customer or generated sales. With the market deteriorating, continuing to finance that operation no longer made sense.

It was a difficult decision. These were people we had hired, people who had dedicated their time and effort to projects I had approved. But I couldn't continue justifying the investment.

Unfortunately, the broader business didn't recover quickly. We didn't return to growth in 2024 or 2025. It was only in 2026 that we began seeing growth again.

The innovation department didn't cause that downturn. The market conditions were a separate issue. But those difficult years forced me to reconsider how we had been allocating resources when business was strong.

Hiring people and creating departments means committing to recurring expenses. Those commitments don't disappear when revenue declines. And reversing those decisions affects real people, not just numbers on a financial statement.

I had made investments based on what we could afford at the time without sufficiently considering what would happen if our circumstances changed.

That was a difficult lesson.

What I want to remember now that we're growing again

I haven't stopped believing in innovation. I still want Soluntech to explore opportunities, create products, and build businesses beyond what we do today.

But I approach those ambitions differently.

I now believe the starting point should be a problem we understand well enough to justify exploring. Ideally, one we've encountered directly or discovered through conversations with people who experience it regularly.

From there, the objective should be to learn as much as possible while committing as little as necessary. Build something small, test assumptions, talk to potential customers, and let the evidence determine whether further investment makes sense.

That doesn't mean every experiment has to succeed. Sometimes discovering that an idea isn't worth pursuing is a valuable outcome, provided you learn it before spending too much.

Interestingly, artificial intelligence has made this lesson even more relevant.

In 2022, developing a product often required a dedicated team and considerable time. Today, AI allows us to research opportunities, explore solutions, and build early prototypes much faster and with fewer resources.

That's an extraordinary advantage. But it also creates a familiar temptation.

In 2022, we had enough money to build products before knowing whether anyone needed them. In 2026, AI makes it easier than ever to repeat that mistake.

The technologies are different, but the responsibility to exercise judgment hasn't changed.

Now that Soluntech is growing again, I sometimes think about the decisions I made four years ago. I still have ambitious plans, and I know there will be opportunities that are worth taking risks for.

What I hope has changed is my ability to distinguish between an opportunity that deserves investment and an idea that simply looks exciting.

I learned to be more careful with resources during years when we had to be.

The challenge now is remembering those lessons when we no longer have to.

Because it's relatively easy to be disciplined with money when you don't have much of it. Maintaining that discipline when business is going well is much harder.