Some Startups Fail. But in Melissa Mullen’s Case, It Doesn’t Mean the Entrepreneur Behind It Did.

Melissa Mullen’s quandary is likely familiar to many: She was tired of the revolving-door experience of online dating, and wanted a relationship to last. She realized that her most successful dates had been with people with whom she shared a sense of humor, and inspiration struck—a dating app that matches people based on what they each found funny.

The idea spread like wildfire. Mullen’s app, Smile, was featured on the Drew Barrymore Show, in the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Globe, and by the time it launched in the Boston area, in May 2022, more than 10,000 people had downloaded the app.

Mullen, who put the brakes on a graduate program in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University to focus on her startup full time, was recognized with a 2022 Innovator Award, a competition hosted by Northeastern’s Women Who Empower.

But there was a problem. For all those new users, very few stuck around, Mullen found. Then the U.S. economy tanked, inflation ballooned, and raising new rounds of funding proved nearly impossible. By the end of the summer, Mullen had shut the whole thing down.

“We just didn’t have a product that was exactly in line with what people wanted and needed,” she says. And without a clear direction forward, Mullen decided it was best to pull the plug.

“It was hard,” Mullen says. “There were a few weeks afterward that were challenging because you put your whole self into this thing, with the knowledge that it could fail, but you convince yourself that it’s worth it and that you’ll bounce back if it does fail. When it actually happens, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under you.”

Indeed, Mullen’s experience isn’t unique among startups—90 percent ultimately fall short of success—nor does Smile’s closure mean it was a failed idea. The media blitz that formed around Mullen’s concept and the 10,000 users who signed up sight unseen “are proof that the idea has legs,” she says.

Most important, it doesn’t mean that Mullen isn’t still an entrepreneur at heart. This is just what happens sometimes.

“Many ventures succeed and fail for a host of variables that we can neither predict nor control,” says Betsy Ludwig, executive director of women’s entrepreneurship at Northeastern, and a member of the Women Who Empower team.

“We’ve seen that women tend to tie their self-worth to the outcome of their venture. We’re trying to decouple this relationship. Men will fail at several businesses and keep going, just look at Adam Neumann of WeWork,” adds Ludwig. The businessman, known for his questionable business decisions and abrupt departure from WeWork amid a fraught initial public offering, just snagged a $350 million investment from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz for another real estate-related venture.

“Women then tend to take failure very personally, so they don’t keep innovating, they stop at the first sign of failure,” Ludwig says. “We want this award to be a validation of the woman as an entrepreneur and innovator, no matter the outcome of today’s venture.”

Mullen took some time to heal, and to process a whirlwind year. She read a lot, and eventually found the motivation to get back in the game, she says. She began a job at a new startup, AdeptID, in September—as a data scientist, not a CEO this time.

Mullen gained a lot from the entrepreneurial process, as tough as it was. She learned “pretty concrete things” about taking a product to market, she says, as well as lessons that are harder to put on paper. Mullen learned how to lead a company, plus how to manage a project and the people on that project at the same time. “I learned how to think more strategically,” she adds.

As to whether Mullen will ever found a company again, the jury’s still out—for now.

“As each day goes on, I become a little more open to it,” she says. “A lot of people say that entrepreneurship is like a bug: You catch the bug, and everyone goes through this phase of it being really hard until eventually they go back to working for someone else. But then you miss it, and it all happens again. I could see that happening for me.”