My first co-founder breakup hit hard.
It was 2021. I was still figuring things out.
We had just launched Tokfluence — an influencer discovery tool.
And we were three in the boat.
Me, Fabien (my partner in crime since forever),
and a sales guy we barely knew — never met him IRL.
At first, it clicked.
He pushed hard. Sales were coming in.
But as soon as we plateaued, he started drifting.
We had to let him go.
What went wrong?
↳ We never really validated the human fit
↳ We never aligned on long-term intent
↳ We never built visibility into sales operations
Tokfluence was our plan A.
But for him, it was a plan B.
His main business was an agency — and that was fine,
until his focus shifted and we started feeling the weight.
Worst part? We didn't see it coming.
No CRM, no tracking, no accountability.
When someone's in sales and you start wondering what they do all day... it's already too late.
What saved us?
The shareholder agreement.
Everything was written. Everything was clear.
It made the separation clean.
Lesson learned:
→ Talk long-term (or at least mid-term) from day one
→ Validate values, not just skills
→ Don't skip the boring stuff (like setting up Hubspot or a Notion sales tracker)
Now with BuddiesHR, I only build with people I'd go to war with.
Aka Fabien.
Because when things get hard — and they will —
you don't want to find out your co-founder had other plans.
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👋 Hey, I'm J.Y!
I'm the co-founder of BuddiesHR, the #1 suite of Slack apps.
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