Spotlight Drop: The Ghosting That Almost Derailed Our Launch

This week’s Spotlight Drop comes straight from FiC’s own co-founder Cathy — and it’s a doozy. A real story of trust, panic, and the kind of founder lesson you only learn the hard way.

🧨 The Setup

We were three days out from launch when our developer vanished.

The landing page was live. Early users were waiting. Excitement was building.

Then suddenly — radio silence. No updates. No commits. No explanation.

We had trusted this person to build our MVP from the ground up — auth, backend infrastructure, the works. It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. Or so we thought.

😬 The Mistake

Here’s the truth: we didn’t vet them properly. We were so eager to move fast that we skipped the hard questions.

No portfolio deep-dive. No technical interview. No trial project. Just a few conversations and a handshake.

As the silence stretched on, we started digging into the codebase ourselves. That’s when the second wave of panic hit:

• Critical flows were broken

• Features didn’t exist

• Barely any documentation

What looked “almost ready” on the surface was held together with digital duct tape underneath.

🧠 The Lesson

It was one of the most gut-wrenching moments in the Kaie journey — not just because we were ghosted, but because we were blind to how fragile our product really was.

We had set ourselves up for this failure.

We scrambled to bring in help, rebuilt what we could, and somehow made the launch happen anyway. But that week taught us a lesson we won’t forget:

You don’t need to be technical, but you do need to:

• Ask the hard questions

• Vet thoroughly

• Track real progress

• Own access to everything

• Know what’s actually working (not just what looks like it is)

Since then, we’ve restructured how we work. We’re rigorous with vetting, documentation, and check-ins. We run product like a system — not a scramble.

Because founders don’t just build products. They ghost-proof their companies.

That’s part of the job too.

💬 Got a fail of your own?

We’re still collecting founder flop stories from the wild. What went wrong, what you learned, how you bounced back — we want it.

→ Submit anonymously here.

→ Reply to this email

→ Tag us with #FiCFailForward

⚡ Builder Boost

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Let’s keep it real. Let’s keep building.

— The FiC Team