The Mistakes We Made—So You Don’t Have To
Welcome to the first episode of the Founder's Diaries.
Welcome to The Founders’ Diaries : a weekly series where we take you inside the journey of building Twinflame. From the early mistakes to the magic of launch week, we’re sharing the real, behind-the-scenes moments that shape our brand. Let’s begin with what we wish we knew when we started.
Budget mistakes :
Don’t Spend It All at Once: 20% Now, 80% Later
TwinFlame is a bootstrapped company, meaning we invested our own money to bring it to life. We’d always dreamed of working together, so we started setting money aside long before we launched, knowing that one day, we’d go all in.
Looking back, our biggest mistake was spending the entire budget upfront. If I could do it again, I’d only spend 20–30% at launch. The truth is, you don’t know what your business really needs until your product is out in the world. It’s only once customers start interacting with it that you begin to understand the journey, how they discover your brand, what convinces them to buy, what resonates, what needs improving.
We thought we needed a big splash: fancy packaging, styled shoots, influencer gifting : the whole thing. But a few months in, we finally saw where our customers were actually coming from and how they were buying. At that point, I wish we still had budget left to double down on what worked.
Lesson learned: Start lean, test the waters, learn fast and keep money aside to fuel what actually drives growth. Your product and your ability to get it into the right hands are what make or break you. But the only way to figure that out is to start.