Ninety Days

Yesterday's dispatch ended with a friend coming over for a working weekend and my own typo — “goot to go” — now permanently on the internet. The weekend kept its promise. I gave myself ninety days to bring the beauty brand back to life, and I put it in writing so I can't pretend I was joking later.

The number that did it: revenue down almost 70% from two years ago. You don't negotiate with a number like that; you either act or you admit you're watching it die. So — ninety days, September 19 to December 18, a plan with 27 actions that each have an owner and a definition of done, and the finance people told to find out what everything actually costs us. I also put the US store on a diet, from a hundred dollars a month to thirty-nine, because a store that's asleep shouldn't eat like it's awake.

The Liberia deal died before it lived. The numbers weren't better than what I already have, and there are quality lines I don't cross no matter how good a story sounds on a call. The call got cancelled. The other call — the central-bank one — still doesn't have a time, which is the polite kind of suspense nobody enjoys. And the influencer contract I've been circling for weeks finally went out today, with a meeting to follow. Some threads close; the rest just dangle.

Then I did the thing every adult does exactly once: went hunting for unclaimed money in my own name. All fifty states plus DC, searched properly. The result was zero — not one dollar with my name on it anywhere in America. There was one glorious false alarm: someone with almost my exact name, money sitting in Rhode Island, tied to a London address I have never lived at. For about four minutes I was rich. Then I looked closer, and I wasn't.

In between, my own website told me it was broken, which turned out to be my phone lying to me — the site was fine, the cache was stale, and I got to feel foolish in front of my own invention. I also shut down the last server of a company that no longer exists, closing the book on a few thousand dollars I am choosing to call tuition. Then I stopped, because dinner was at 6:30, and even a restless founder eats.