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As someone creating a similar platform (Kicklet.com), I'm curious. Historically, are failures like this reliable indicators that competitors should reconsider

by yuska 11y ago

As someone creating a similar platform (Kicklet.com), I'm curious. Historically, are failures like this reliable indicators that competitors should reconsider their business as well?

anthony_franco 11y ago
Well, look at the opposite case. If you're in a market where your competitors are IPOing left and right, then most likely you'll be doing pretty good as well.
- yuska 11y ago
  Possibly, but that seems to make the assumption that there's a direct correlation between your competitors' success and your own. I'm not certain that there is one.
  - rockarage 11y ago
    If you believe you can do better consider acquiring Assembly. It is better to start with a community that understands the goals & potential for failure than to start from scratch with a community that does not understand the risk. Moreover, their branding is very good.
    - yuska 11y ago
      Unfortunately we're bootstrapped, so acquiring them doesn't seem feasible right now.
  - anthony_franco 11y ago
    Yes, there's absolutely a correlation with competitors. You're all in the same market after all, pulled by the same market forces. I'm not saying it's a 1:1 correlation, of course. But in a market where your competitors are extremely successful, it proves that it's possible you can be successful as well. That's not always the case in every market since many markets out there just won't be viable for a successful company.
masukomi 11y ago
in this scenario I'd ask wtf they're doing that cost so much that they couldn't sustain it. It seems like a business that could be run with 1 or 2 people, and it seems like they were making enough to support that. Why wasn't that enough?
whistlerbrk 11y ago
I'm not saying you'll fail. Please understand that. That startup playbook that just came out, and countless other sources, anecdotes, etc all say the same thing : work with people you know, that you know well. Friends, former colleagues, etc. It is quite a barrier to meet someone and jump on a project with them as a co-founder. Especially as a side project where the commitment level is low. I think you should think seriously on that.
- yuska 11y ago
  You make a good point, though the ability to work with people you already know seems to at least partially depend on where you live. Having lived in several places, I've always found finding collaborators to be considerably easier on the coast than elsewhere (in the US).
volaski 11y ago
I think the reason why these venture-backed companies are shutting down is because they can't live up to their investor's (as well as their own) expectations, EVEN IF they're doing pretty well. It's kinda crazy thinking about it. Nowadays if you don't get hundreds of millions of users AND if it's not growing exponentially, people call you a loser. Look at companies like Dropbox and Twitter. It's not like they've failed but people compare them with the newest hot startups like Snapchat and Slack and call them "the next Unicorn that will probably die". But I don't think that's true. You should keep working on what you believe in, and whenever you see something like this, congratulate yourself for staying in the game and keep going. You never know what will happen in the future, markets change and things change, and as a result your product can become very attractive to certain groups of people, and when that happens, if you're the only one standing in the arena, you win.
jakejake 11y ago
There is a history of these types of crowd-sourced-product-creation companies going under. I personally think the reason is because it is relatively easy to build a product. But it is incredibly difficult to build a business around a product. It is very difficult to get traction and you have to really focus on and refine your product. So you have a startup who's concept is to crank out product after product, and then just throw them into the wind, hoping something will take off. Even businesses with one amazing product don't take off that way. A huge corporation can afford an R&D lab where 1 out of 1000 products might take off. (You might even say ycombinator is such a concept) A startup with a little bit of funding cannot afford to crank out dud after dud. They're betting that they will hit the jackpot after, say, 5 or 10 products, depending on the amount of runway they have. Then again, there's a lot of businesses that were successful because they found the magic sauce that all of their predecessors were unable to find. If you think you've found it, then definitely go for it! If you think your concept is pretty much a rehash of Assembly, then I would probably start thinking seriously about how you are going to succeed where they failed.
pedalpete 11y ago
I wasn't aware of assembly, and just checked out your site. As a developer, I'm wondering, what would drive me to use your site. Am I looking for a project to collaborate on? If I want to offer a bit of my time, I go to SO and answer some questions, or write a blog post, etc. etc. On the other side, I'm about to release an open-source project. Obviously, I hope to get people really excited about it. I want people to contribute and I want to spread the word about my project. I guess I WANT something like Kicklet to work, but what I'm missing is you showing me that it does. Dare I say, I think the login wall is a barrier. I can't see what other projects are on Kicklet so I have no idea how active your community is. What if, rather than having to sign-in, you listed a bunch of projects. Let me know about them, help me get interested in them. Then, maybe for commits that I make for projects, the project owner gives me a rating. I earn points. As I gain points, it is a signal to the community of the value and quality of my work. Maybe some people want to do code-reviews, let them get points. Lets help us all become better developers. Maybe this is what happens now, but I have no idea because I can't see it. I have no idea what the business model would be. But at the current state, I can't see that you're adding a large enough value, and I think that is the statement that comes out of Assembly. They didn't quite nail the product/business model equation. Failure CAN be reliable indicators of a bad market, but that doesn't mean successful companies can't exist in that market. I'm thinking about not that long ago when everybody and their dog were creating playlist sharing sites. I worked in the music industry and that time, and saw copy-cat after copy-cat with minor tweaks and you knew they were all going to fail. Even when Spotify came out, it was kinda like, are these guys really thinking they can sort out this whole music industry mess. But, they did. So, I think failure in a market can be a sign that someday, somebody will figure this out. Maybe we'll be saying that about Kicklet, but you've got some work to do. It may not sould like it, I'm cheering for you.

by yuska 11y ago

As someone creating a similar platform (Kicklet.com), I'm curious. Historically, are failures like this reliable indicators that competitors should reconsider their business as well?

anthony_franco 11y ago

Well, look at the opposite case. If you're in a market where your competitors are IPOing left and right, then most likely you'll be doing pretty good as well.

yuska 11y ago
Possibly, but that seems to make the assumption that there's a direct correlation between your competitors' success and your own. I'm not certain that there is one.
- rockarage 11y ago
  If you believe you can do better consider acquiring Assembly. It is better to start with a community that understands the goals & potential for failure than to start from scratch with a community that does not understand the risk. Moreover, their branding is very good.
  - yuska 11y ago
    Unfortunately we're bootstrapped, so acquiring them doesn't seem feasible right now.
- anthony_franco 11y ago
  Yes, there's absolutely a correlation with competitors. You're all in the same market after all, pulled by the same market forces. I'm not saying it's a 1:1 correlation, of course. But in a market where your competitors are extremely successful, it proves that it's possible you can be successful as well. That's not always the case in every market since many markets out there just won't be viable for a successful company.

masukomi 11y ago

in this scenario I'd ask wtf they're doing that cost so much that they couldn't sustain it. It seems like a business that could be run with 1 or 2 people, and it seems like they were making enough to support that. Why wasn't that enough?

whistlerbrk 11y ago

I'm not saying you'll fail. Please understand that. That startup playbook that just came out, and countless other sources, anecdotes, etc all say the same thing : work with people you know, that you know well. Friends, former colleagues, etc. It is quite a barrier to meet someone and jump on a project with them as a co-founder. Especially as a side project where the commitment level is low. I think you should think seriously on that.

yuska 11y ago
You make a good point, though the ability to work with people you already know seems to at least partially depend on where you live. Having lived in several places, I've always found finding collaborators to be considerably easier on the coast than elsewhere (in the US).

volaski 11y ago

I think the reason why these venture-backed companies are shutting down is because they can't live up to their investor's (as well as their own) expectations, EVEN IF they're doing pretty well. It's kinda crazy thinking about it. Nowadays if you don't get hundreds of millions of users AND if it's not growing exponentially, people call you a loser. Look at companies like Dropbox and Twitter. It's not like they've failed but people compare them with the newest hot startups like Snapchat and Slack and call them "the next Unicorn that will probably die". But I don't think that's true. You should keep working on what you believe in, and whenever you see something like this, congratulate yourself for staying in the game and keep going. You never know what will happen in the future, markets change and things change, and as a result your product can become very attractive to certain groups of people, and when that happens, if you're the only one standing in the arena, you win.

jakejake 11y ago

There is a history of these types of crowd-sourced-product-creation companies going under. I personally think the reason is because it is relatively easy to build a product. But it is incredibly difficult to build a business around a product. It is very difficult to get traction and you have to really focus on and refine your product. So you have a startup who's concept is to crank out product after product, and then just throw them into the wind, hoping something will take off. Even businesses with one amazing product don't take off that way. A huge corporation can afford an R&D lab where 1 out of 1000 products might take off. (You might even say ycombinator is such a concept) A startup with a little bit of funding cannot afford to crank out dud after dud. They're betting that they will hit the jackpot after, say, 5 or 10 products, depending on the amount of runway they have. Then again, there's a lot of businesses that were successful because they found the magic sauce that all of their predecessors were unable to find. If you think you've found it, then definitely go for it! If you think your concept is pretty much a rehash of Assembly, then I would probably start thinking seriously about how you are going to succeed where they failed.

pedalpete 11y ago

I wasn't aware of assembly, and just checked out your site. As a developer, I'm wondering, what would drive me to use your site. Am I looking for a project to collaborate on? If I want to offer a bit of my time, I go to SO and answer some questions, or write a blog post, etc. etc. On the other side, I'm about to release an open-source project. Obviously, I hope to get people really excited about it. I want people to contribute and I want to spread the word about my project. I guess I WANT something like Kicklet to work, but what I'm missing is you showing me that it does. Dare I say, I think the login wall is a barrier. I can't see what other projects are on Kicklet so I have no idea how active your community is. What if, rather than having to sign-in, you listed a bunch of projects. Let me know about them, help me get interested in them. Then, maybe for commits that I make for projects, the project owner gives me a rating. I earn points. As I gain points, it is a signal to the community of the value and quality of my work. Maybe some people want to do code-reviews, let them get points. Lets help us all become better developers. Maybe this is what happens now, but I have no idea because I can't see it. I have no idea what the business model would be. But at the current state, I can't see that you're adding a large enough value, and I think that is the statement that comes out of Assembly. They didn't quite nail the product/business model equation. Failure CAN be reliable indicators of a bad market, but that doesn't mean successful companies can't exist in that market. I'm thinking about not that long ago when everybody and their dog were creating playlist sharing sites. I worked in the music industry and that time, and saw copy-cat after copy-cat with minor tweaks and you knew they were all going to fail. Even when Spotify came out, it was kinda like, are these guys really thinking they can sort out this whole music industry mess. But, they did. So, I think failure in a market can be a sign that someday, somebody will figure this out. Maybe we'll be saying that about Kicklet, but you've got some work to do. It may not sould like it, I'm cheering for you.