The Startup Didn’t Make It—But I Did
From the Unleashing Snout Series: What One Founder Learned When She Walked Away.
What really happens inside a PetTech startup from day one? The late nights, the big wins, the frustrating roadblocks, and the surprising realizations—we're pulling back the curtain on all of it.
Hi, I’m Emma Suarez-Berumen, and I’m the founder of Snout—a PetTech startup on a mission to make dog training more effective, accessible, and deeply connected to real-life moments with our pets. At Snout, we’re building a milestone-based training platform where science-backed techniques meet smart technology, helping dog parents train with confidence and purpose.
Our vision is simple but ambitious: empower every dog owner to build a strong, healthy relationship with their pup through better tools, better guidance, and better outcomes.
In this new blog series, Unleashing Snout, I’ll be sharing the behind-the-scenes story of how we’re building this company from the ground up. Expect honesty, lessons learned, and hopefully a few aha moments along the way. Whether you’re a fellow founder, dog lover, or just curious about what it takes to start something from scratch—we’re glad you’re here.
Let’s dive in.
After dipping my toes into the startup world once before — and walking away with a successful exit — I was ready to dive headfirst into building something new. This time, I wasn’t just joining a team or testing the waters. I was leading it. I had an investor on board from day one, a vision to execute, and a whole lot of confidence fueling the fire.
This was going to work.
This was going to succeed.
I had seen enough, learned enough, and failed enough to know what to expect. Nothing could surprise me now. Right?
Wrong.
The investor who brought me in had a vision of starting a senior care agency. He had connections, experience, and a plan — sort of. What he needed was someone to get the groundwork in place. I was tasked with building the entire foundation: documents, processes, guidelines — all the behind-the-scenes structure that would keep future hires from walking into chaos.
No problem, I thought. I’ve done this before.
Besides, we’d have a team soon. We’d kick off our customer discovery phase, explore real market needs, and wedge ourselves right into a juicy opportunity.
That was the plan.
Until it wasn’t.
As I was finalizing the documents, setting up onboarding processes, and preparing the groundwork, the investor dropped a game-changing directive: it was time to start interviewing. I crafted the questions, got them reviewed, and posted job listings for roles we deemed essential—Marketing, Accounting, Sales—the core team we needed to get this venture off the ground. We locked in salaries and equity splits, expecting this to be the moment our startup would finally come to life.
I began conducting interviews and shared everything with him: notes, recordings, and my suggestions. His response? “Let’s hold off on making any decisions for now. Focus on customer discovery first.” In effect, that meant I was expected to handle customer discovery—and every single interview—alone.
So I did. And let me tell you, the competition in the market was fierce. There were countless competitors, each jostling for a slice of a very narrow space. The customers? They had a lot of opinions and needed a strong reason to switch providers to us.
Throughout this process, the investor kept insisting that we could outperform the competition if we simply threw everything at it—and by that, he essentially meant I should do it all. I became the face of our startup: relentlessly attending events, conducting interviews, trying to get potential customers excited about our brand, and ensuring our name wasn’t lost in the noise. I juggled managing our website, defining our value proposition, and handling everything from IT to design, sales, and partnerships.
For months, I was a one-person army. While I was out there wearing multiple hats, the investor was constantly issuing orders, questioning why we weren’t getting the results he envisioned. I repeatedly told him that I couldn’t sustain this massive workload, especially since I was receiving equity instead of a salary.
I had to manage every administrative detail while pushing forward relentlessly. For a year and a half, I soldiered on. We started generating revenue, but I was utterly spent.
Exhaustion.
Frustration.
Burnout.
I couldn’t help but recall my first startup—remembering the crushing pressure the previous CEO endured, being the sole person holding the fort.
I devoured books on every subject under the sun, yet progress was minimal. Finally, I reached a breaking point. I told him, quite frankly, that I couldn’t do it any longer without a dedicated team and proper support. We exchanged our viewpoints, and he suggested that maybe I needed to go through a program—a structured learning experience—to acquire the skills and knowledge I was lacking.
I needed to learn everything. And fast.
Like, yesterday fast.
I was still young, sure—but if I wanted this startup to succeed, I had to catch up immediately. I was determined to prove to the investor, and honestly, to myself, that I could do this. That I had what it took to turn an idea into a company. To build something real.
So I started researching accelerators.
Of course, there was Y Combinator—but we weren’t quite there yet. We were still at that messy, pre-seed/seed stage, looking for structure, clarity, and traction.
That’s when I found Founder Institute—an accelerator built exactly for early-stage founders like me. It felt like the right place, the right time, the right level.
I applied. I got in.
The program started in two weeks, so I did the most logical thing I could think of: I caught up on the sleep I hadn’t had in the last three years.
While I waited, I attended a few of their webinars. And in every single one, there was a recurring theme:
You have to love what you're doing. You have to believe in the mission. If you're just chasing money, your startup probably won’t make it past year two.
And then—just like that—it hit me.
I didn’t love what I was doing.
I wasn’t passionate about the mission of this startup. I had been pushing forward out of pride, out of pressure, out of fear of failure—but not out of purpose.
So I took a hard look at the past year and a half. The burnout. The pressure. The loneliness. The feeling of fighting for something that didn’t actually light me up.
And I made a decision.
I was going to leave.
I sat down with the investor, told him the truth, and wished him well in his endeavor. We gave it a shot—but it wasn’t right. And with that conversation, the startup we had built quietly came to an end.
But not my journey.
I was still enrolled in Founder Institute. I wasn’t going to waste that opportunity.
I just had to figure out… what was I meant to build instead?
One evening, not long after stepping away from the startup, I found myself sitting on the floor with Luna.
She was curled up next to me, calm for once. And as I looked at her, I remembered everything we had been through. Her separation anxiety. The training attempts. The desperation. The endless internet rabbit holes. The guilt. The exhaustion. The love.
And then, almost like a whisper, I remembered something else:
An idea I had pushed aside somewhere between burnout and survival mode.
What if there was a training app that didn’t just give me a checklist of things to do—but actually understood where I was in my journey?
An app that could track my progress, track Luna’s behavior, and adapt to us.
Something that grew with us.
That said: “Here’s exactly what to do next—based on how you’re doing, and how your dog is responding.”
Not a generic set of instructions. Not a YouTube video that assumes every dog fits the same mold. But a smart, supportive guide tailored to the real-life messiness of dog training—especially with a pup like Luna.
That’s when the clarity came rushing in.
This was the mission I cared about.
This was the problem I wanted to solve.
Because if I had struggled this much—me, someone who devoured every dog training article out there—then I knew there were others out there struggling too. People like me who just wanted to raise happy, emotionally healthy dogs but didn’t know where to start, or what to trust.
That night, Luna didn’t do anything extraordinary. She just laid her head on my lap and sighed. But in that moment, I knew.
I had found my new direction.
And this time, I wasn’t just building a startup.
I was building Snout—for her, for me, and for every dog parent who's ever felt lost and just needed a little guidance.
We will post once a month about the state of our start-up and how it grows.
You can check our previous blog about who inspired me to create our PetTech start-up, Snout.
Let me know if you want to know more about any story!
Perk up your ears for our next blogs:
July 28th - When I decided to join a pre-seed accelerator program, and the whirlwind I was in for.
August - When we were Sniffing Out the Problem” - Our research, insights, and ICP Interviews
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