When the Rain Doesn’t Come: Staying Resilient in Tough Times

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve stared at a blank sales pipeline or a bank balance that made me wonder how we’d keep going.

If you’re building something from scratch, you will face seasons when the “rain” you were counting on — the signed client, the investor payment, the big product launch — just… doesn’t happen.

At Let’sCreate, we’ve had seasons where our work was in demand and seasons where it felt like no one was buying. And I can tell you this — the easy seasons don’t define you. The droughts do. That’s when you discover if you’re a builder… or just someone who likes building when it’s easy.

1. Droughts Aren’t Punishment — They’re Preparation

When we launched Let’sCreate, we imagined a steady flow of clients who’d stick with us for years. Some did. But others — through no fault of ours — ran out of funds midstream. Projects were put on hold, invoices went unpaid, and we had to decide quickly: shrink or adapt.

And then there was Sherlock — the product we poured months into. It was beautiful. It won two awards. It was everything we thought the market wanted.

Sherlock was going to revolutionise the construction industry. It was built to bring much-needed transparency to the payment chain between main contractors and subcontractors. We thought: Finally — a solution that will fix one of the biggest problems in the sector.

Only… the market didn’t want it. Not enough to pay for it, anyway. Why? Because there was too much money in the mess. The very lack of transparency we were trying to solve was what kept certain players comfortable.

The drought we faced wasn’t because Sherlock didn’t work — it was because the system didn’t want it to.

At the time, it felt like a gut punch. But I’ve learned that droughts aren’t punishment — they’re preparation. They strip away illusions and force you to see the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.

For us, it meant letting go of something we believed in deeply and pivoting toward opportunities where the market was actually ready for change.

2. Stop Waiting for the Rain Dance to Work

In tough times, you can’t just wait for “the right client” to find you or for the market to magically improve.

After Sherlock, we could have spent months trying to force adoption. But the truth was clear: the market wasn’t ready. So, we pivoted — and pivoted again.

We repurposed parts of the product into something sellable. We doubled down on clients who still had budgets and urgent needs. We focused on delivering smaller wins fast, instead of waiting for one massive breakthrough.

3. Protect Your Seed

When money is tight, panic can make you say “yes” to everything. But in a drought, your real job is to protect your seed — the core things that will matter most when the rain comes back.

For Let’sCreate, that meant:

• Keeping the right people, even if it meant my own pay took the hit

• Saying “no” to projects that would drain us without moving us forward

• Preserving our strongest client relationships and tech assets so we could reuse them

Sometimes protecting your seed means walking away from good to save what’s great.

4. Build Wells, Not Just Pray for Clouds

Rain is unpredictable. Wells are built.

Our “wells” at Let’sCreate were:

• A modular tech architecture that let us adapt and reuse what we’d built

• Relationships with decision-makers who’d call us even when they weren’t ready to buy yet

• A focus on sectors where we could deliver measurable ROI quickly, making us hard to cut from a budget

Because when the rain doesn’t come, you can’t start digging from scratch.

5. Keep Your Faith When the Sky is Clear Blue

There were months when I told God, I’m doing all I can — but it’s not enough.

And somehow, every time, something came through. Not always in a big way — sometimes it was a small client signing at the right moment, sometimes a late payment arriving just before payroll.

Faith in the drought is different. It’s not hoping for what you can already see; it’s trusting the work you’re doing has a purpose beyond this season.

6. Droughts End — And That’s Your Advantage

When the rain finally comes, the ones who survive the drought are the ones who can scale fast.

The reason we can move quickly on Let’sTrade’s new features and launches today is because we learned to build lean, precise, and resilient when we didn’t have spare resources.

Every pivot, every “no,” every sleepless night has made us builders who can thrive in any season — not just the good ones.

Final Word

If you’re in your drought right now, hear me:

This is not the end.

This season is shaping you in ways you’ll only appreciate later.

The rain will come — and when it does, you’ll be ready in ways you never were before.

Until then: protect your seed. Dig your wells. Keep building.

Because the entrepreneurs who survive the drought don’t just make it through…

They lead the next season.

Be Bold, Have Courage, Let’sCreate