Sometimes, when people set their minds to a goal, visualize the outcome, and have faith in their hearts, the universe clears the path for them and effortlessly makes their wildest dreams come true. Unfortunately, for us at Habit Companion, that was far from what our journey looked like. Instead, our journey was filled with lots of mistakes and beta clients who loved to ghost us more than our online dating matches. We learned the hard way that the journey to success can be full of twists and turns, but ultimately, if you stick to that track long enough and are willing to adapt, you can find yourself on the right path.
The Birth of Habit Companion
It all started in late 2021 in the vibrant streets of Rio de Janeiro. I was on a self-driven mission to learn Portuguese. Why Portuguese? Let’s just say that I had a cute Brazilian teacher whose video calls helped me survive the loneliness of the pandemic. For years, I’d dreamed of learning a second language, and Brazil was the perfect place to fulfill that dream. Full of warm, friendly people and coupled with its lack of English speakers–to thrive, I’d have to learn the language.
In Rio, the beaches stretched out for miles. In the mornings, I’d go to the gym, head to my favorite cafe, and grab my regular, a café com leite and a croissant covered with brie. From there, I’d stroll to my language school or soak up some sun in Ipanema. When the early afternoon rolled in, I was all about business, working at my remote job and building my fledgling web development agency. But after work, underneath the stars, I was sipping deceivingly strong caipirinhas, meeting new friends on the street, and dancing in grungy clubs.
I’d always been a person with a lot of different goals. Besides learning Portuguese, I wanted to get fitter, build a business in the Philippines that created jobs and opportunities, and also create some kind of passive income that would help me fund my other dream: to spend a whole year dedicated to doing kind things for people.
But in that paradise, I struggled to make my dreams come true. Too many times, my friends would call me out to explore a new bar or try a new restaurant. Some days, it felt like I could understand every word that was sung by the singer in the bar; other days, I would struggle to order my food. My gym routine and business attempts often suffered because of my inconsistent sleep schedule. While I still made progress, I knew I could do more. I wanted to live up to my potential, but keeping myself motivated was hard, especially alone. I just wished that I could find someone who cared if I succeeded–someone to help support me in my weirdest of goals and craziest of dreams: a cheerleader, a motivator, a coach, and a friend–none of my friends. They were lazy or busy with their own lives. But maybe someone who I could hire. I wanted someone who was going to call me, wake me up, and get me out of bed to start my day right.
I looked online for some service, but I couldn’t find anything like that. At that moment, the idea struck. Why not build it? There were probably lots of people like me who needed a little bit of support. I’d always been a person who loved to see people succeed and had great ideas to help them. Why not build a business around that concept? Thus, Habit Companion was born. It was going to be a team of people who helped make others’ dreams come true.
I thought I had the secret sauce to help people succeed. Boy, was I wrong.
Getting Ghosted
Fast forward a few months, and I was in the Philippines, the land of my birth–the land of missed opportunity–where, like my parents, people emigrated to escape poverty. I was a big believer that a good job could change a person’s life, and I wanted to create jobs there so people didn’t have to leave their homes and their families just to build something for themselves. From there, I would build my team, and together, we would find the best strategies to help our clients accomplish their goals.
During the first few months, it was all about learning. I hired an assistant and started to test out our service. The core part of our business was our kickoff call. The idea was that we would set up a plan with our clients, where we’d call them up, stay on the line until they took action, like getting to the gym or starting work, then hang around for a bit to make sure they stayed on track. We would be the thing that would get them up off their butts to finally start going after what they truly wanted. It sounded like a great idea to me, and when I sold it to our beta clients, it sounded like a great idea to them too.
Little did we both know, it was a terrible idea.
When we started to actually test the kickoff call with real people, we started to slowly discover that people hated it. Out of the handful of test clients we had, a quarter of them would ghost us around the second or third kickoff call. One day, a beta client accidentally picked up her phone, and I remember being on the line, hearing her talk to her friend about how she was planning to let the phone ring to voicemail. My heart sank, but I learned a valuable lesson: what people think they want and what people really want can oftentimes be two different things.
The Hard Knock Lessons
After being ghosted, we scrapped our initial idea of basing our core service on the kickoff call. We realized that, when someone is struggling to do something and you’re the thing in their environment that reminds them to do that thing, they start to hate you too. Then they avoid you.
Thankfully, we didn’t let being hated stop us. We were pretty flexible in the beginning, and we were flexible with our calls. Eventually, our calls morphed into something different. A lot of people just wanted to talk about their goals, have someone follow up with them, and get feedback on how they could do better. When our calls changed into those types of calls, we started to really see some successes. We helped our initial clients start their business, find a new job, run their first 5k, and initiate the process of homeownership.
In fact, while we initially started out our service with one free month of testing, some people actually stayed with us and began to pay us within the second month of offering our service to the public. One person even signed up for a year. So in that mess of doing the wrong thing, we found that somewhere we were doing something right. Even though it hurt being ghosted, it needed to hurt so that we could find ourselves on the right path.
From Being Ghosted to Being Believed In
After we decided to stop focusing on the kickoff calls, we tried our new service with another batch of beta clients. We had about four people who signed up with us during that month, and thankfully, not a single person ghosted us. In fact, we were pretty shocked with what happened that month.
Normally, we assumed that not everyone was going to sign up and continue with us, but out of the four people who signed up with us, one of them stopped her service because she ran into financial difficulties and couldn’t pay us in the following months. She started to feel guilty about using our service, so she dropped out.
No big deal. At least, she didn’t ghost us.
One other beta client felt like she was getting good service, but she couldn’t continue on with the program at the time because she was going to Colombia to visit family. However, despite the fact that our service was free for the first month, she chose to pay us anyway. A happy surprise!
Another beta client was running into long-term health issues that prevented her from fully utilizing the service. She dropped out too, but before she did, she actually asked if she could work for us. I was stunned and had no idea how to respond, but it was thrilling, knowing that someone believed in what we were doing so much that they wanted to actually be a part of it.
Finally, our last beta client of the month, who I thought wouldn’t continue the service with us, decided that he liked us so much, he was willing to sign up for a year of our paid services. That was our second person who signed up for a year! After that, I realized that we had something.
The Journey Continues
I’d like to say that we’ve learned our lessons and made our mistakes, but the truth of the matter is, we still make mistakes. There’s a lot less mistakes, but to be honest, we want to keep making some mistakes. Because if we never make a mistake, that means we’re not experimenting, we’re not growing, and we’re not learning.
It’s true: we’re still not perfect, but perfection isn’t what we shoot for. Growth and progress are where it’s at, and that’s where we want to be. Just like our clients, we’re not satisfied with where we are, and we’ll probably never be, but just like our clients, we’re getting there–one goal at a time.