The night we almost stopped.

We haven't written about this before. We wanted to be honest about it, not dramatic.

Making the sunscreen was the good part. Setting up the company nearly ended everything.

Things that should take a week took months. Company registration. Licences. A bank account that kept getting rejected over paperwork. Every step depended on someone else's desk or someone else's website. Something broke at almost every step.

None of it was about sunscreen. All of it came at odd hours, across time zones, on top of an already full life.

One night, after a long week of this, one of us said what we were both thinking: maybe this isn't meant to be. We looked at what it would take to close it down and walk away.

Then we did something different. We sat down together and talked it through properly. Rested. In daylight. On purpose. A few things became clear.

The paperwork is a one-time toll, not the whole road. Starting a company from far away is hard — and now it's done. It says nothing about whether the sunscreen is good.

We had built this to be easy to stop: small steps, each one cheap. And what we were really spending wasn't money. It was time and attention, at a busy point in our lives. So we asked: is this worth some of that? Once we were rested, the answer was yes.

So we're not stopping. We'll build it the way we always said: small, careful, one honest product, no drama.

A few days after that talk, the new samples arrived.

If you're reading this, you're part of why we didn't give up. If you want in early, the waitlist is open.

— Aashish & Rishitha, 78 Labs