Six Lessons Learned From Launching A Space Company From A Laundry Room

Forbes

3 hours ago

Ashi Dissanayake is CEO and Co-Founder of Spaceium.
Most people assume launching a space company requires hundreds of millions in funding, massive infrastructure and a team of aerospace veterans. We started ours with an idea and a washer-dryer combo. That is not a metaphor. In the earliest days of Spaceium, we were living in a small apartment to save money. I worked from the floor with my dog's bed as a table and my cofounder Reza took calls from the laundry room, with his legs tucked into the dryer to dampen the echo.
Neither of us came from business backgrounds. We were engineers. All we knew was how to build things. Even basic startup terms, such as SAFE (simple agreement for future equity), were new to us. So when we decided to create a company, we had to learn everything from scratch.
We had to figure out how to raise money, how to talk to investors and how to build something the market actually wanted.
But we knew there was a real problem to solve. We had experienced it firsthand.
The Problem No One Was Solving
Before launching our startup, we worked on rockets and propulsion systems. One of the persistent challenges we ran into was getting enough power and efficiency from propulsion systems to carry meaningful payloads. We quickly realized that propulsion was a technical bottleneck and an industry-wide constraint.
We started talking to other space companies and asking questions. The more we listened, the more it became clear. Space missions were limited by fuel. Refueling infrastructure in orbit simply did not exist. It was, quite literally, a universal problem. So we began building for that need.
At the time, refueling was not a priority in the industry. We had to explain what it was and why it mattered. Now, a few years later, customers come to us asking for fuel. That is how fast the industry has evolved and how urgent the problem has become.
Lesson One: Move Fast And Fail Faster
If you are building something in a completely new frontier, such as in-space refueling, there is no roadmap. You have to build the plane as you fly it. For us, that meant moving quickly and being willing to get things wrong.
The best way we have found to accelerate learning is by failing more frequently—not recklessly but intentionally. If we can fail 10 times in a month, we gain 10 opportunities to learn. That's 10 cycles of iteration. A team that fails once a month learns far less. Especially in a sector like ours, where much of what we are doing has not been done before, the speed of learning is everything.
Lesson Two: Scrappiness Beats Scale
Thanks to advances in off-the-shelf components, shorter-duration mission architectures and affordable testing capabilities, you can get pretty far on a lean budget if you are scrappy.
In the past, satellites had to last 15 years. Now, some are designed to last a few months, which brings down capital intensity dramatically. That changes who can play in the space economy. It is not crazy anymore to imagine someone launching a space startup from their garage. It is actually happening.
Lesson Three: Listen to Customers (Even When Investors Aren't)
When we first tried to raise funding, we were told repeatedly that we would fail. Investors said no one would buy fuel in space. But after every no, we would hop on a call with a potential customer and hear the opposite. One potential customer even asked us for 10 metric tons.
The contrast was jarring. However, it taught us a crucial lesson. You need to trust the market, not just the money. Investors come around when customers are already in line. And that is exactly what happened to us. After many rejections, we ultimately closed an oversubscribed seed round with some of the best investors in Silicon Valley. By that time, we had customers lined up for future missions.
We built our entire infrastructure based on real conversations with customers. And those conversations did not stop after the first discovery call. We spent hours with them getting beneath the surface, understanding what would make them buy, what their pain points were and what criteria mattered most. Sometimes they didn't even know what they needed until we asked the right questions.
Lesson Four: Push Through the Doubt
Of course, there were moments of doubt. When you send 100 emails and no one replies, it's hard not to wonder if you are wasting your time. But even the smallest glimmer of interest kept us going.
One customer saying 'maybe' was enough. We told ourselves that if there is even one person who needs this, we're going to build it. That became our North Star. We weren't trying to prove ourselves to investors or compete on hype. We just wanted to solve a real problem for real customers.
And when you orient around customer need, everything gets simpler. Not easier but simpler. You stop chasing the spotlight and start building what people want to buy.
Lesson Five: Be Part Of Positive Change
Space is no longer just about moonshots and Mars dreams. There is a thriving ecosystem of startups tackling real-world challenges closer to Earth. From space-based manufacturing to in-orbit servicing and satellite refueling, the infrastructure is starting to catch up to the ambitions.
The number of satellites being launched is growing rapidly. Most of those satellites exist to serve Earth-based values such as climate data, wildfire detection and connectivity. That is creating an entire downstream chain of launches, servicing, repositioning and refueling. We are part of the ecosystem to support that chain.
One of the things I love about this industry is the spirit of collaboration. Most companies in the space sector are trying to help each other. That is the only way the ecosystem grows.
Lesson Six: Keep Going
If there is one message I'd like to share with other early-stage founders, especially those building in hard tech, it is this: Talk to your customers more than you think you should.
There is no magic answer to fundraising, product-market fit or momentum. Everything starts with deeply understanding the problem you're solving and who you are solving it for. If you do that, the rest (funding, hiring and scaling) gets easier.
Also, do not underestimate what you can build with limited resources. Stay scrappy. Stay curious. Move fast. Get it wrong. Get it right. Repeat.
I'm not saying you should work out of a laundry room. But that did work for us.
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