I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in your startup) to only find glory and success down the line.
Either way you failed but you should be commended for it.
My first startup attempt was a coaching marketplace and community for poker players. My co-founder and I were both successful professional poker players and coaches at the time, but we were young (20ish) and all but clueless about technology. I still think the market opportunity was there, but we hired an agency who outsourced everything, made bad tech choices, took forever, and gave us a fraction of what we originally agreed on. I learned to program myself in order to complete a major component of the site (in flash) which they had just completely botched.
What we ended up with wasn't terrible, but it fell way short of the vision we had, and our marketing efforts fell mostly flat as well. We were able to recruit a few smart people to post and discuss hands here and there, and we wrote a few articles ourselves that showcased the flash hand analysis tool I had built (the best functioning aspect of the site), but we weren't getting any other traffic. There were a few bugs and an assortment of minor ux issues which made the site feel a bit clunky, and people's feedback was pretty unenthusiastic, so all in all we weren't feeling very good about the direction of things. It didn't take very long (maybe six weeks or so) before we threw in the towel.
It wasn't a complete failure--after all, I had learned how to program and discovered that I quite liked it (certainly much more than grinding poker online), and both of us had learned a lot of lessons about business and technology. But there was another lesson that we only discovered with time.
Even after we completely abandoned the site and it went dormant, I would still check google analytics from time to time to see if there was any traffic, and an interesting trend started to emerge: a few of the hand posts and articles we had posted were developing really steady search traffic. One article in particular was generating something like 20 uniques per day.
At that point, we were both just done with the whole endeavor and had no motivation to try to pick it up again, but we realized that if we had kept at it and continued to create more and more quality content, that we probably could have had an seo goldmine on our hands, developed reputations as poker strategy bloggers, and leveraged that into the community we had originally envisioned. Who knows if it would have gone that way, but it seems like there was at least a relatively unobstructed path to success available to us if we had been willing to stick it out and let the long tail kick in.
No, it does not. Since, statistically, most startups fail, it's is mathematically sound to assume that mostly failure lurks inside failure.
At some point you have to stop and do something else. Even if you've lost money and time, it's wiser to quit and do other stuff, than continue to losing money and time in the same endless sink.
I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know!
It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as a cautionary tail for people that have a startup itch, but don't necessarily have the necessary skills yet. I mean, this really talked about business and technology problems, but even assume they hit lighting in a bottle with the business model and didn't run into the technical issues, does it sounds like they would have been able to capitalize on it? I got a feeling that it was organized in an ad hoc way, and they weren't set up as an llc/s-corp/etc, had equity agreements, or basic contracts (otherwise, how did the one artist change not know they terms of the business, or opt out so quickly?) I feel like they would have ended up in trouble with the IRS, in a lawsuit with each other, or getting screwed by a less than scrupulous VC.
That said, everyone is better off from sharing, and I thank the author for it.
I mean, it's clear to me that their startup failed. But "nowhere near ready to found a startup"? What does that even mean? Where do I get my secret decoder badge of startup readiness exactly?
Reading through it, I saw and empathized with their mistakes--they decided they'd found validation before they really had. They kept it going too long. They ignored the writing on the wall for too long. But aren't those always the tough questions? When should a founder give up versus persevere? It's not a straightforward answer and as a business owner I find it frustrating when I see people (particularly other business owners) suggest it is.
Bottom line though--everyone needs to decide for themselves if they want to go into business for themselves. But are they "ready"? Who the hell knows? There isn't a list of required skills and credentials for this position.
Based on the blog, I get the sense that the founders are in their early twenties. At that age, no one is "ready" for a startup.
I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, etc. were ready to start their company.
At that age, you just do it, since the risks are low.
Unless your parents are wealthy or you have access to a lot of money, at that age its unlikely that a lot of money is on the line. Sure, they "wasted" time on this startup but this is valuable for the next company they will build.
Also, if there was a lot of money involved (and it wasn't their's) its likely that the business would not have gone as far as stakeholders would have wanted validation.
I do wonder (gently) if there's something like cargo-cult avoidance though? "These people didn't do this thing, and they failed, so we have to do it."
That's glib. There is a very, very difficult balancing act between trusting your innermost convictions and learning to doubt said convictions frequently, as an exercise which reinforces the good bits and dispels the nonsense within them. Failure is the most valuable when you fail at something you personally believe in, because you're forced to confront yourself in the failing. Failure because you followed some BS system for doing or creating a thing without using your own thought processes along the way might teach you to stop being such an idiot, but usually it takes many failures of that sort before the message seeps in.
Remember the famous maxim: "I failed a thousand times but each one brought me a step closer to stealing what I needed from Tesla"
Why was that sufficient data to justify spending months and months of your life bringing this startup to fruition?
EDIT: I did not intend to make a sly insult toward the author. I've seen people do startups with similar justifications and I am confused.
They played a hunch and lost. The linked post details lots of mistakes, but this particular one doesn't seem like one to me.
You've got a business when people repeatedly exchange value with you. Kind words are validation of a sort, but the weakest kind. To go from there to spending a year building a platform is basically hearing what you want to hear. Better not to ask than to believe what you hear uncritically; if you don't ask, at least you know you don't know.
The data that was lost right here: "After that moment we basically stopped talking to artists for a year [...]"
Find customers as early as possible, engage with them as often as possible, and really really listen to what's being said. This is a huge benefit of bootstrapping. Customer engagement from the earliest possible time is vital to the process of transforming an idea into a product.
With launchrock + adwords this has become stupid easy.
We're not failing, but even from a (modestly) successful startup perspective, the vast gulf between "people who like to talk to you as if they will spend real money" and "people who will actually spend money" is painfully apparent.
You never know if someone is willing to pay until you ask them to open their checkbook.
The same theory can be applied to most investors. (pre-handshake protocol at least)
You throw up a cool pitch with some videos and vague promises, and watch the cash roll in. If the cash does indeed roll in, then it's a good idea!
Then you get to work, and hope no one remembers in 6 months that you promised to deliver them some amazing gifts. :-)
What you should be trying to find out is:
1. if they currently spend their money somewhere else to solve their problem
2. if your product is so much better at solving the problem, that they will want to switch.One click, a single click will not destroy you brand. And OP would've realized that no matter even with their best shot they couldn't get 10 clicks.
10 disappointed non-customers won't destroy your brand.
stop worrying about what might happen, and do experiments to see what does happen.
ask people to buy and collect money. if they do, tell them it's not ready yet, do they want to wait, or do they want a refund?
S I M P L E S !
@startupjerkfest
I'm just interested in how people pick the ideas they pursue.
The notion was that both VCs and founders should look at broad markets and dig in to find opportunities. As Bezos did back in the day with books. Less fun initially, sure, but taking one's company behind the barn is definitely not fun.
Who is this Dalton Caldwell, and why is he relevant?
Landing on that site and seeing the big 'Create Sale' button is pretty confusing. I don't think 'oh this is a site for musicians to sell their music directly to fans'. It also claims I can use 'social sales' but is that a meaningful term? I've never heard it before and it sounds pretty buzzwordy.
edit: Just watched the video on the front page and I can easily believe that only 1 out of 1700 people thought it was worth bothering with.
The execution just seems awful.
EDIT to add: Some people might bring up airline tickets or hotel rooms. Limited analog inventory, not infinite digital inventory.
Amazon and Travelocity rightfully caught a lot of flack when they were caught trying this (perhaps pricing A/B test?) years ago.
Sorry, had to say that :) It's fun for me how analog/digital have become synonyms for material/virtual.
Companies like this make it very hard to explain what we do which is use machine learning to maximize profits.
Lawyers are not just there to object to things and make life difficult for dreamers, they're there to spot major potential pitfalls like this and steer around them. Far too many entrepreneurially-minded people see contractual and statutory constraints as some sort of obstacle course designed solely to prevent competition or enterprise, and react to said constraints by simply wishing them away. I was impressed that your reaction to this problem was to pay everyone as promised and retool your application to be compliant with Amazon's requirements, rather than simply blaming them for your problems. A hard lesson to learn, but one which will put you ahead of the pack in future.
If anything, your story adds more fuel to the fire for the approach that @sgblank advocates[1][2]. Get out of the building, talk to customers, validate customer needs, etc. We've been doing this, but - to be honest - we haven't done as good a job as we could. Hopefully we will soon start another big round of Customer Development interviews, much more targeted this time, building on the feedback we got the first go-round, and moving more into what Steve calls the "Problem Presentation" phase.
It's a tough slog, but I continue to remain convinced of just how important it is.
[1]: http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifest...
One of the most helpful guides is to try to make a mistake in the other direction. Try to talk to your customers too much. No early stage startup ever died from talking to their customers too much.
I have seen so many people start their own company after breaking off from some existing company and "doing it better" or realizing some previously un-claimed niche specifically because they had the industry knowledge.
We decided to ask ourselves one question: How to we validate an idea before wasting months on an idea that only we seem to think is cool?
So we are creating WillThisFly? to ask that very question... it's a site that allows you to try out your ideas and projects, get feedback and refine them before committing resources to it.
Shameless plug: http://willthisfly.net (Just launched last night)
Only thing on there at the moment is WTF? itself.
All I can say is, it has happened to probably everyone at one stage in their startup career... don't give up, refine your ideas, create MVP's and keep trying...
Sometime it just need a few more optimization iterations. Considering the Facebook example and prior art, this must be really frustrating for those who missed the gold pot.
If we had something like this when we first started out it would have made life so much easier and we wouldn’t have wasted months on projects that weren’t going anywhere but may still have been salvageable with the right feedback.
The iterations and feedback are key: This involves a simple, instant method (voting) and the more involved approach (comments). With both of these, a project owner will be able to find out if his project is worth pursuing and if it is, be able to iterate, change or pivot accordingly until he is happy he has a product that will work.
We will be adding a blog shortly that will outline strategies and features and more information about WTF?
At the moment we are using WillThisFly? to develop WillThisFly? and it's early days but it's coming along nicely and we are always open to suggestions :)
Once he found out about the dynamic pricing he tells us “I think I am just going to release with another platform.” FUCK! Are you serious????
What other platform(s)? What were differentiating factors between those, and your service? Do artists suffer any particular trending pain-points in alternate services?
1,700 or so artists could probably provide great feedback into what they actually want in a platform, vs building it in a vacuum.
Thank you for sharing!
Your problem wasn't amazon payments, or flakey artists jumping ship. It was that your audience wasn't even on your radar.
also it was hard to understand what the site does, there is something like a price slider on the demo page but does not slide. what the hell is going on? better read some explanation...
the founder probably did many mistakes, good luck next time.
If you have no product and are not asking for a sale, saying 'yes' has not cost to the person. Saying 'no' makes them a grouch, and they would have to justify why they said no. So lots of people say 'yes' even though they don't really mean it.
That's why the only data worth talking about is sales and adoption, and why minimum viable product is the way to go.
i am one of those people. why do so many bands have such a minimal online presence that i cannot even buy a t-shirt? surely these days it should be trivial for any band to create a store with some basic items generated from a few uploaded images. there are people out here looking for something cool to buy to give back money for what we just heard... even stickers are nice.
My feeling is that you conceived the startup guided mainly by your desires than the one of the artists, visitors and clients. Unfortunately your desires where not attractive for them.
Mistake n° 1 is the domain name which is the first message you give about your business and service.
Also, there is a notion amongst us entrepreneurs to persevere amongst all odds. This might be dangerous at times. There might be a massive market for your product yet you have approached it in the wrong way. The thing is, if you have no data, it is very difficult to know what REALLY went wrong. For example: Drew Houston from Dropbox early on stated that selling Dropbox through adwords was costing them something like 300 dollars per acquisition, once they introduced their double-sided referral scheme Dropbox started selling like mad. It was what Eric Ries calls a Pivot.
When it comes to commerce, I'm liking the model of first building an audience and then adding commerce.
1. The site's tagline is "Sell your $h!t with Social Sales!" which I would think is kind of off-putting in the context of a vendor relationship
2. Your sales model appears to be in contrast to how supply and demand work. Your model is that as more buyers sign up, the per-unit price goes down. I understand your theory is this causes people to share it with their friends. But, people who are buying indie music not only don't want to screw the artist -- they're also not going to bother talking their friends into something just to save a nickel.
3. I think this would have made more sense for the artist if the price went up (slightly, like from $4 to $5) as sales went up, with the early people locking in their price.
One of the most useful things I do to validate an idea is to actually use YC's application- if you can't answer all the questions about your idea without any doubts, you're don't have a solid idea yet. And validating your idea means to follow up at the very least with the people that said it was "cool". Forget the stealth startups, be completely transparent in what you're building and have beta users follow you from day 1.
Good luck with your next thing!
For a site that resonates with artists, check out Reverb Nation:
A sample artist page here:
http://www.reverbnation.com/evangibb
Instead of buying their music, the site is focused on you listening to it via the embedded player and then going to see them live. You can even buy them a gift card so that they can buy advertising. They're growing like crazy with a marketing budget close to zero.
Thanks for sharing your hard learned lesson. It reminds us all to get out of the building and talk to users.
Also, happy to hear you didn't mortgage your life savings and burn out in grand fashion. You're wise beyond your years.
Your startup failure was good. It hit quick. You learned. You moved on.
If I had more time I'd tell you about all those failed startups that suffer a really slow death. Like the YC startups. Pretty much all of them are failed. They haven't seen the light yet. You have. Be grateful.
Do take a break. A year sounds about right.
This is not something I would be telling tech-savvy people.