Immotionar post mortem: goodbye and thank you

In these days I’ve written a lot of words about my startup Immotionar that is shutting down. I tried to explain you what errors we made that lead to our shutdown and I also tried being of help in telling you how to recover from the psychological downtimes of seeing your company closing. Today I want just to thank all people that have been part of the project and recall some good memories to close this serie… from the next post on, I’ll return talking about VR reviews, tutorials and so on.

First of all I want to thank Gianni, for having taught me so much in these three years and for having been the one starting this virtual reality journey. Actually it was more an augmented reality journey at the beginning, since our first idea was to use Google Glasses to do amazing AR applications… then we tried them and… cough cough… they were really terrible! Right eye had to look at this little display while left eye should look forward… only derp could use such a hardware!!

Derp’s eyes are the ideal ones for Google Glasses (Image by urban dictionary)

Immotionar post mortem: how to recover psychologically from your VR startup failure

In this third episode relative to my startup failure (first one was the failure announcement, while the second one talked about the errors we made that led to our failure), I want to tell you how you, as a startup founder, can help yourself in recovering psychologically from your startup failure.

Seeing your startup failing is fucking hard, trust me. It’s like losing a person you love. When you start your startup adventure, you know that you have 90% chances of failing (these are the startups statistics), but you think that this won’t regard you, since your startup is based on a great idea and you’re super-determined to work to make it become a great success. When things become hard, you keep pushing and you continue think that they’ll get better in the end. You don’t realize it is failed until the moment of the final shut-down decision.

Immotionar VR startup shuts down: f**k you all.

With the classical “thank you all” post, the adventure of my virtual reality startup Immotionar has closed. We tried to push virtual reality beyond its limits for 3 years, adding full body of the user in the virtual world without worn sensors, but in the end we lost the battle.

I made such a strong title for this post not because I hate you (I love you, my readers!) but to mock all those thank-you-posts that are all full of hypocrisy: when you close your company, the last thing that you want to do is be kind and say “thank you to everyone”. When you close your startup, you feel sadness, anger, shame, emptiness: a mixture of all the worst feelings… the ones your mum has told you not to feel in your life. “F*ck everyone” is the title that every shut-down post should have… it would be more honest.

I’ll try to not make this failure useless, explaining you what I’ve learnt in these hard times. Especially I want to explain you:

• The errors we’ve made, so you won’t make them as well;
• How to recover psychologically from such a failure;

My next posts will be about that. It will hurt, but I hope that will help someone else in his/her journey for becoming an entrepreneur. Stay tuned.