🤝🏻 2024 Review

Hey Founders,

Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.

🕺🏻 Happy holidays! As we’ve come to the end of 2024, it has been a hell of a sprint this past year publishing The Runway Ventures — so I think it’s time to see how far we’ve come, how it was started, and my vision for the newsletter (next 1-5 years).

Let’s get to it! 🚀

📈 2024 is crazy

I began the year by sending my first ever newsletter to 27 people, and am closing out the year today by sending to 11,217 readers.

You know what’s the craziest part? One of my 2024 goals is to hit 10,000 subscribers, and we achieved this just a few days before the end of 2024. 🤯

I’ve always enjoyed writing, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. Each newsletter takes me between 1-5 days (sometimes weeks) to research, write, edit, and publish.

It honestly required a ton of sacrifice and discipline. Whenever I was asked about my plan for weekends, my answer has always been the same — writing newsletter (and my friends would often roll their eyes 🙄😂).

Writing is easy, but writing consistently week after week — that is tough, very tough. But guess what? I’m truly proud because I know I ship something meaningful every week.

All that said — launching The Runway Ventures has become one of the best investments I’ve ever made. Many of you have told me how much you’ve learned from these failed startup stories, and it still gives me goosebumps when I think about it now.

You’re exactly the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing every week.

🔥 Why The Runway Ventures exists

Maybe you might not know why the hell I’m writing failed startup stories with The Runway Ventures, so here’s my WHY.

My first startup failed terribly. Closing down was the darkest period in my life, not to mention the 2-month depression that came after that.

After talking to many successful founders, I saw a “pattern” and couldn’t unsee it. I realised most of them are successful because they learn from mistakes. Most importantly, they learn from other people’s mistakes.

They learn why and how other startups failed, the mistakes made by founders, and how not to die. That’s why Staq failed. That’s why 99% of startups died because founders made mistakes.

Look around you. How often do you see founders share their mistakes and lessons learned? Almost little to none. This is especially true in Asia where being vulnerable to share mistakes is a sign of weakness. It’s a cultural taboo.

That means if we don’t capture this wisdom (mistakes + lessons learned), history will keep repeating and many founders will repeat the same mistakes made by others in the past. Many startups will die, founders will quit, the rate of innovation will be slower, and the rate of societal value creation will be lesser.

🔥 This is a f**king big problem. That’s why I’m building The Runway Ventures. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s time to help more founders not die. It’s time to fix the startup ecosystem.

Many people asked me what’s my vision for The Runway Ventures.

Here’s my answer…

🎯 Short-term goal (next 1 year)

• Hit 30,000 subscribers

• Maintain open rate (>45%) and CTR (>5%)

• Expand failed startup stories to cover more regional countries in Asia

🚀 Long-term goal (next 3-5 years)

Become the go-to platform for founders to:

• Access knowledge (failed startup stories)

• Access resources (how-to guides from 0-1 and 1-100)

• Access network (connect founders-founders / founders-investors)

• Access talents (find your ideal employees easily)

• Access capital (connect founders-investors + angel syndicate fund)

• Access tools (get the right tools with steep discounts / free)

Yes, ACCESS.

Writing failed startup stories is just the beginning, and we're just getting started.

Thanks for the amazing 2024. Happy New Year, and see you in 2025 ✌🏻.

That’s all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond

Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.