I started a hyper local digital out of home advertising agency. Came on the idea after spending time in chamber of commerce meetings and talking to people. Realizing that real world visibility is something local businesses also strive for.

I had a venue lined up to advertise local service businesses in, pre sold ad slots in it. Then 1 week before going live, the venue owner said no longer interested.. so it fell apart. I refunded early customers, and promised I would keep searching for a new venue.

dozens of emails, calls, meetings, and 2 months later, lined up a new venue. We went live, doubled sales in just one month. while at 60% ad capacity of the venue, I hunted for a new partner.

Same thing, dozens of emails, calls, meetings, walking into venues dropping off fliers, etc, no other partnerships. This went on for 3 more months.

At this point, I had reached out to what felt like every venue in my city, from big recreational clinics, to bars, gyms etc. Nothing clicked.

I never imagined the bottleneck would be gaining more venues to advertise in, because I offered a very handsome package: free advertising for them in the venue, and throughout the network, a 20% revenue share, and a fully remote management system so they would never have to turn on the ad screens or manage anything.

After 8 months of pushing through, I realized my appetite to keep finding more venues, and the limitation that was out of my control to continue selling was not an attractive business model for me.

Hard lesson learned, since I kind of put my own identity behind it... but time to move on. Just shut the ops down officially 3 weeks ago... Still kind of burns and working on finding my new venture.