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- 🚨 COVID Boom, Post-Pandemic Bust
🚨 COVID Boom, Post-Pandemic Bust
How FrontRow mistook a short-term trend for real demand
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.
Today’s story is about how an edtech startup died due to small market size. Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → FrontRow
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Threw features at the problem
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Market size matters if you want to build a VC-backed company
🔗 The Runway Insights → The cold email handbook for founders
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → CHK, an Indian footwear startup, raises $2.5M led by Accel to boost production
☠️ 1 Failed Startup: FrontRow
🚀 The Rise of FrontRow
🇮🇳 Founded by Ishaan Preet Singh, Mikhil Raj, and Shubhadit Sharma in 2019, FrontRow was a platform where individuals could learn from their favourite celebrities in sports, arts, and entertainment — like learning cricket from a renowned cricketer or comedy from a celebrated comedian.
The mission? To revolutionise hobby learning with celebrity instructors.
The Problem — ❤️🔥 Traditional education systems often overlooked extracurricular passions, leaving many without guidance in their areas of interest.
The Solution — 💃 FrontRow offered celebrity-led courses in non-academic fields (i.e. music, comedy, and sports), bundled with live Q&A sessions, competitions, and a learner community.
It provided fun, accessible, and high-quality instruction from the very figures who had mastered these crafts.
This approach not only democratised learning but also inspired countless individuals to pursue their passions with renewed vigour.
🥋 In short, FrontRow was like the “Masterclass for India” to help people get better at their passions.
🚀 After securing $3.2 million in seed funding just before the pandemic lockdowns, FrontRow launched in November 2020. 🔥 The response was overwhelming — over 200,000 downloads within months and $1 million in annual revenue shortly after. The app became a sensation, with users sharing heartwarming stories of their learning journeys. They even faced challenges like site crashes due to high traffic and received acquisition offers! |
📱💰 In 4 years, FrontRow’s growth was crazy:
~400 team members
750 amazing teachers
100,000 learners attended a live class
270,000 paid users (enrolled for a paid course)
$2.1 million people downloaded the FrontRow app
🤑 Not just that, FrontRow also raised a whopping $14 million Series A led by Eight Roads Ventures & GSV Ventures in Sep 2021.
It felt like they had struck gold in the edtech space.
📉 The Fall of FrontRow
Despite the initial success, FrontRow faced challenges that led to its closure.
The founders realised that the demand for hobby learning was smaller than anticipated and insufficient to support a venture-scale business. This realisation came even after 2.1 million people downloaded the app and over 270,000 paid for courses.
📌 Here’s what happened to FrontRow:
The market for hobby learning was way smaller than we believed, and unlikely to support a venture-scale business.
🛫 The lift off + blitzscaling + edtech boom = Crazy Traction

Late 2019 - Early 2020 — Ishaan and Mikhil start brainstorming ideas around hobby learning.
Mar 2020 — 💰 Secured $3.2 million seed funding led by Lightspeed, Elevation Capital and Deepika Padukone before the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Onboarded instructors and ran a bunch of pilots for 6 months.
Nov 2020 — Launched FrontRow with courses in comedy, singing, and cricket along with community features.
Mid-2021 — User base grew rapidly and hit $1 million annualised revenue.
However, the marketing cost ballooned to over 100% of revenue and the course completion stayed below average.
In short, they got an initial burst in growth, followed by a low plateau.
Sep 2021 — 💰 Raised $14 million Series A led by Eight Roads Ventures & GSV Ventures.
Live course experiments took off and FrontRow launched a live course subscription priced at $200 for 6 months.
Hit $1 million annualised revenue in live learning in 3 months.
🤯 Rejected an acquisition offer + went all into growth mode.
Mid-2022 — ⛰️ Revenue peaked at $4 million annualised revenue.
Hit 400 people in team size
Moved from MVP (WhatsApp + Zoom) to a real product.
Crossed 1 million downloads + 200,000 paid users.
⚠️ However, signs of plateauing emerged.
Unable to figure out the next lever of growth despite predicting the plateauing early.
Realised demand was weaker than expected (no market pull).
Couldn’t hit profitable unit economics.
📉 Small market + Hard to scale = No PMF

May 2022 — 🪓 Laid off about 145 employees, approximately 30% of its workforce, citing tough market conditions.
Focused on fixing the unit economics.
Got to breakeven at a $1.5 million ARR.
But it didn’t feel like PMF anymore (as shared by Ishaan) — weak pull or demand.
Oct 2022 — 🪓 Laid off another 130 employees (90% of the team) amid financial struggles.
The company was left with around 35-40 employees.
Nov 2022 - Jun 2023 — 🧪 Worked on multiple experiments in the hobby learning space, attempting to find product-market fit.
Worked on 2 problems in hobbies — online learning for adults and offline learning for kids.
However, both problems didn’t work out after realising that the markets were small for a venture-scale business + hard pivot wasn’t what founders wanted to “brute force” a new market.
30 Jun 2023 — 🙏🏻 Explored a couple of potential acquisitions of the IP and the team but ultimately decided to shut down operations.
The founders concluded that the market for hobby learning was not large enough to sustain the business.
🫡 Returned the remaining capital to investors.
FrontRow's journey underscores the challenges of scaling a niche edtech platform.
💪🏻 Honestly, despite FrontRow’s failure, I see that as a win. Building a startup is really about constantly running experiments to validate our hypothesis with risk capital from VCs to find PMF.
If the experiments work and you can find PMF, good. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. VCs understand the game. As a founder, we just have to do what’s right for us, customers, employees, and investors.
✨ Risk capital + founders who are willing to take risks = Magic happens
🧠 Even though FrontRow has closed down, its story and learnings are valuable to many founders who want to build edtech companies in future.
Want to learn more about FrontRow’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Threw features at the problem
We launched a lot of features - gamification, competitions, WA groups, open mics, chat, events, instant feedback and more! I think we’d gone from a strong PoV on what to build to throwing features at the problem, and that showed in the output.
We always hoped the next one would be a game changer but we never got to retention metrics that showed real PMF.
One of FrontRow’s biggest mistakes was believing that adding more features could solve core business challenges.
🎯🎯🎯 When user engagement started dropping, instead of reassessing the fundamental market demand, the team kept launching new features, hoping that something would stick.
Instead of solving the core issue — whether users truly valued paying for hobby-based learning — these features increased complexity without significantly improving retention or monetisation.
Mistake 2: Blinded by false positive in COVID-19 lockdown
In hindsight, what we’d seen initially was a lockdown false positive, when time for leisure had massively expanded. Now, hobbies had gone back to being low priority.
During COVID-19 lockdowns, people were stuck at home and had more free time, which led to a temporary surge in online learning, including hobby learning courses.
👀 This created temporary pandemic-driven behaviour (instead of long-term consumer habits).
FrontRow saw a rapid increase in users and engagement (false positives), making it seem like there was a huge market for hobby learning. This led the team to scale aggressively, hiring more people and expanding operations under the assumption that this growth would continue post-pandemic.
Once lockdowns ended, demand for hobby-based learning dropped sharply as people resumed normal activities. By the time they recognised the demand drop, they had already raised significant capital and built a large team, making it difficult to pivot quickly.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: More features ≠ More growth
No features could save you if your users don’t truly need your product or you’re not solving their problems.
🌟 Key Takeaways:
🩺 Focus on the core problems (not the symptoms)
Before adding features, ask, "Will this solve our core problem?"
Zerodha (India’s biggest stock brokerage) didn’t keep adding features.
Instead, they simplified investing and reduced costs — solving a real pain point.
⛰️ New features don’t fix a broken PMF
Before building new features, fix the core experience.
If engagement or retention is dropping, find out WHY before launching anything new.
Kill unnecessary features — simplify and focus on what users actually want.
Retention = PMF
For FrontRow, it didn’t really solve a painful and frequent problem:
It wasn’t premium enough to be MasterClass
It wasn’t essential enough to be Unacademy
It wasn’t cheap enough to be Udemy
It was a vitamin, not a painkiller.
Lesson 2: Don’t confuse temporary trends with long-term demand
During lockdowns, people were stuck at home with extra time and fewer entertainment options, making hobby learning seem like a booming market.
When the world reopened, demand collapsed — hobbies were no longer a priority.
By the time FrontRow realized this, they had overhired, overspent, and scaled too fast.
🌟 Key Takeaways:
📈 Watch for signs of real PMF (not just early traction)
Real PMF means users stick around even when life gets busy.
If engagement drops as soon as external factors change, you don’t have PMF.
Netflix saw a huge COVID spike, but unlike FrontRow, they retained users post-pandemic because their value proposition was strong.
Clubhouse, on the other hand, exploded during COVID, then collapsed when normal life resumed.
Find signals, not noise.
🤓 Don’t over-hire or overspend based on short-term growth
Scale only when unit economics work and demand is proven (not just funding).
Keep a lean team until the PMF signal is very strong.
More employees = Higher burn rate + slower iteration
Lesson 3: Market size matters if you want to build a VC-backed company
At first, FrontRow looked massive — millions of hobby learners, tons of celebrity instructors, and early traction from COVID-driven demand. But in reality, the real paying market was much smaller than expected.
🌟 Key Takeaways:
💰 Here’s why VC-backed companies need big market to win
Venture capital operates on a high-risk, high-reward model. Most startups fail, so VCs rely on a few huge winners to return their funds.
Out of 10 investments, typically 6-7 will fail (returning little to nothing), 2-3 will give modest returns (2x-5x the investment), 1 startup must return 10x to make the fund successful.
This means your startup must have the potential to be a billion-dollar company — otherwise, it’s not worth the risk for VCs.
In the context of FrontRow, their real paying market (hobby learners who would repeatedly pay) was too small.
Even with 270,000 paid users, they struggled to scale beyond $4M ARR — nowhere near the scale for a VC-backed exit.
🤑 Bootstrapping is the new way of building companies
Not all businesses have venture scale. In fact, most businesses in the world are SMEs (not really at venture scale), but they are very profitable with decent market size.
So yes, you don’t always need to raise from VCs to build startups. And yes, bootstrapping should be the default way of building businesses because you have more control and can grow on your own terms. Your business, your way.
🔗 The Runway Insights
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
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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.
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See you again next week.
- Admond
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