When Kaitlyn Allen shut down her startup, she expected to feel like a failure. Years of work, a mission she believed in, and a product she’d poured herself into were coming to an end. Instead, as she drafted the final email to her customers and investors, she felt something surprising.

Relief. Clarity. Even gratitude.

Allen had founded MendIt, a platform designed to connect people with local specialists who could mend and repair clothing. The idea was simple and, on paper, compelling: help consumers extend the life of their wardrobes, reduce textile waste, and save money by fixing what they already owned instead of buying new. It was a bet on the growing interest in sustainability and the circular economy.

She built the company the way many modern founders do. She started with a problem she cared about: the mountains of clothing that end up in landfills every year and the difficulty of finding someone trustworthy to repair a torn jacket or a broken zipper. She interviewed potential users, mapped out the customer journey, and launched a minimum viable product that allowed people to search for and book local repair professionals.

On the supply side, MendIt recruited tailors, seamstresses, cobblers, and independent repair shops. Many of them were struggling to attract younger customers who were used to doing everything through their phones. MendIt promised to bring them new business and help keep their skills alive in a disposable age.

On the demand side, the pitch seemed tailor-made for a generation that talks constantly about sustainability. Social media is full of posts about capsule wardrobes, secondhand shopping, and climate anxiety. Allen assumed that a significant portion of those people would happily pay to repair a favorite pair of jeans or a winter coat.

But as the months went by, the numbers told a different story. Sign-ups trickled in. Some users booked once, then never returned. Many people loved the idea in theory but balked at the price or the effort in practice. It was often cheaper and faster to buy something new than to repair something old. The emotional satisfaction of “doing the right thing” rarely translated into repeat transactions.

Allen tried everything founders are told to do. She refined the messaging, experimented with pricing, and tested new features. She partnered with sustainability influencers, ran local campaigns, and explored corporate collaborations. She spoke with apparel brands about integrating MendIt into their customer service offerings. The feedback was polite, even enthusiastic. The revenue was not.

At some point, she realized she was no longer iterating toward product-market fit. She was fighting gravity.

That realization is where many founders spiral. Entrepreneurship culture often treats a startup’s outcome as a verdict on the founder’s worth. If the company succeeds, the founder is visionary and brilliant. If it fails, the founder is naive, misguided, or simply not good enough. The story gets flattened into a binary: winner or loser.

Allen refused that narrative.

In a message she sent to a business columnist after deciding to close MendIt, she wrote that the “purported demand for innovation in the fashion and apparel industry is just not there in a meaningful way, at least for repair.” Then she added a line that reveals the mindset shift that turned a shutdown into a win: “But at least I gave it my all, and I’m so glad I did, because I would have always wondered.”

That sentence reframes the entire experience. Instead of measuring success solely by the company’s survival, she measured it by whether she answered a nagging question: Could a repair marketplace work at scale in today’s fashion economy?

Now she knows. And knowing, she decided, is better than wondering.

This way of thinking runs counter to how many people approach big decisions. We often treat every leap as a permanent commitment and every outcome as a referendum on our identity. That mindset makes us risk-averse. If failure means we were foolish to try, then the safest path is to never try at all.

Behavioral scientists and psychologists have long argued for a different approach: treat major decisions as experiments. In an experiment, the goal is not to prove you were right. The goal is to learn what is true. A scientist does not consider a disproven hypothesis a personal failure. It is simply data.

Allen, perhaps without using that language, ran an experiment. Her hypothesis was that there was enough real, paying demand for clothing repair to support a scalable platform. She designed a test in the real world, with real customers and real partners. The result was clear: the demand, at least in the way she structured it and in the market she targeted, was not strong enough.

Seen through that lens, closing MendIt was not an admission of defeat. It was the logical conclusion of an experiment that had run its course.

The benefits of that experiment are tangible. Allen now understands the economics of repair in a way few outsiders do: the margins, the logistics, the psychology of consumers who say they care about sustainability but still default to convenience. She has built relationships with craftspeople, retailers, and sustainability advocates. She has learned how to build a product, pitch investors, manage a team, and navigate the emotional roller coaster of startup life.

Those assets do not disappear when a company shuts down. They compound.

Founders who have been through a failed startup are often more attractive to investors the second time around. They are less likely to romanticize the grind and more likely to recognize early warning signs. They know how to ask better questions. They are quicker to distinguish between a problem that can be solved with iteration and a structural reality