Zinnia reposted this
I’ve written this post 100 times and kept deleting it. We are shutting Zinnia down. I had a different version drafted. “Zinnia has been acquired by XYZ.” And to be transparent, we did explore acquisitions. Some looked good on paper. One was mostly for optics. But none of them felt right. They either didn’t align with our belief in human-first selling, or they weren’t truly acquisitions in the way people imagine when they hear the word. I could’ve taken the easy headline. I could’ve added “2x exited founder” to my LinkedIn. But I couldn’t do it. My entire ethos has been built around ruthless authenticity. So here’s the reality: We lost access to our primary data source. We started Zinnia in a pre-LLM world. The market changed fast. Companies don’t need more AI tools right now. They need help understanding how to actually use AI. AI consulting became 10x our SaaS revenue. So we called it. And I’m proud of that decision. I’m proud of the product we built. I’m proud of the customers we helped. I’m proud we gave it everything we had. And more than anything, I’m proud of the team behind it all. I’m especially grateful for the lifelong friendship I built with my cofounder, Marco Dell'Olio. Thank you to every customer who trusted us, every investor who believed in us, and every person who followed along and cheered us on. We named the company Zinnia because zinnias are known for growing quickly and thriving through difficult conditions. We wanted to help revenue teams do the same. In the end, I think I grew more personally than the company ever could. And ‘Resilient’ has become my middle name. This isn’t the end of our story, just the end of this chapter. I will share more on what we learned and what's next soon, but for now, thank you indefinitely for the support. 💛