8 ms·

I killed my startup

163 points by revorad 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago
>Our website looked good, our app looked stellar thanks to Ryan's design skills, and everyone we talked to said that what we were building is awesome (not "awesome" enough to give us any money though). This reminds me of "The Mom Test" and why even people who are nice and helpful give you completely useless information and advice if you don't know how to parse it. As an aside, "parasitic software" is often how you approach these kinds of things - someone complaining about a process in Salesforce or Outlook that they have to do manually probably won't switch to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it.
- itsmemattchung 4y ago
  > to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it. My parents are non-technical small business owners and agree wholeheartedly with the app/plug-in; getting them to change their processes is always an uphill battle. But seamlessly injecting software into their existing workflow tends to be the way to go.
  - tmp_anon_22 4y ago
    Software engineers (and passionate techies in general) are so so so so bad at understanding the true implementation cost of software solutions. Software engineers often believe their product is just so intuitive that they don't consider QA, training, and support, costs and timelines. Further, people said the app is awesome, people throw positive praise because its cheap and makes everyone in the room feel good. It doesn't mean your app is awesome (what is awesome anyways?). Startups are hard. Selling to small business is hard. Its worth attempting because you learn an incredible amount about one of the backbones of our society (small business) - but its not for the faint of heart.
    - bitL 4y ago
      It's not just about understanding implementation cost, but also an IP minefield when you simply can't change some idiocy in Outlook etc. that would make certain things so much better so you end up with learned hopelessness not just as a user, but also as a developer.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      It's the same problem with the "answer this PhD thesis problem in half an hour" type questions. We really don't register that sitting with an idea as it unfolds month after month/year, slowly evolving means you can't 'see' it the way anybody else will see it: with not only fresh eyes but with motives that largely revolve around getting through your software and out the other side as fast as they can, because while to you it's a full time job, for them it's an impediment to something else they want to get on with. We are collectively That Guy, who keeps telling a story after everyone else has started telegraphing their boredom. It's also why the people who have bagged on Apple for the last 20 years missed out on one of the largest sustained run-ups in stock price so far this century. Nobody cares about your software unless it's pissing them off. If it gets out of their way there's no problem. But you can't 'express yourself' with your software unless you get in the way, at which point people start noticing you and for the wrong reasons. Apple is consistently... less terrible at this than most other companies. "I don't understand. There's nothing special about this software." Yes, that's exactly the point. This is something we missed when we started crowing about 'software eating the world'. We went from people who indulged us 30 years ago to mostly people who don't, because the 'world' we're eating is everybody who thought computers were kinda dumb.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Apple is about removing options and providing a simple way for the less computer savvy computer user. For many removing headphone phone jacks and removing functionality is going backwards for others making a computer simple onboards them into a world they could never grasp. There are a lot of rich people/kids who want simple.. and a lot more who want to be those rich kids.
        4y ago
yingbo 4y ago
- MarcelOlsz 4y ago
  It's one of many threads posted here that you manually decided to open.
  - yingbo 4y ago
    The only reason I open it is to comment "why do I care". I saw ppl downvote the comment, without anyone has a brief: why someone shutdown his/her startup brings many attentions. I don't want to open and read the URL for a reason: why should I read it?
    - MarcelOlsz 4y ago
      Nobody cares about you or if you read it or don't read it.
      - yingbo 4y ago
        True. But why two downvotes? BTW, same logic, nobody cares about yourself or if yourself comment it or don't comment it.
prattcmp 4y ago
This feels very similar to my experience. I built a CultureAmp competitor and ran into the same problems.
sys_64738 4y ago
Startup 101: What problem are you trying to solve? OR Startup 101: What is the problem we can find for our widget? Which makes money in the long run?
- redanddead 4y ago
  I'd say 2nd one
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  I'd say, "What is the biggest marketplace we can find to adapt our widget to" is probably the better way to go. Lots of people have problems. Do they have problems big enough they want to pay $X for? Usually not
thematrixturtle 4y ago
TL;DR: Because it wasn't getting enough paying customers to make it worthwhile.
rchiba 4y ago
> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving. My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem. If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.
- garrickvanburen 4y ago
  To your point on being flexible and checking assumptions, I advocate founders to “fall in love with the problem” and clearly articulate why they want to become become experts on this specific problem.
  - Closi 4y ago
    This is great advice - I'm not a founder but I consult and one of the tricks to keep me motivated for each project is to make myself passionate about each project and what I can do. This might seem like circular logic, but becoming passionate about things is a muscle you can develop and it makes things so much easier!
    - PebblesRox 4y ago
      I'm curious to hear more about what kinds of intentional action you take to develop your passion. What does that look like practically?
  - al_borland 4y ago
    I think it would be harder to challenge deep assumptions once you fall in love with a problem. It seems like all of your questions and answers would resolve around the base assumption that the problem exists, rather than questioning what the world might look like if it didn't exist. Instead of adding something to solve the problem in the current world, a small shift could eliminate it completely... and thus make the company obsolete, but the world better. I find the most motivation when I hate the problem and I want to eliminate it from my life. Then it's not, "how can I make this better", it's "how can I eliminate this so I never have to hear about it or think about it again".
pedalpete 4y ago
I'm struck by the terminology "killed my start-up". Should we instead start from the position of our start-ups being dead from the beginning? We can't bring them to life, only our customers can. We can do CPR on the idea. We can try to bring it to life, but our start-ups are default dead until customers bring it to life with revenue. I'll admit, I hadn't thought of this perspective until reading this post, and I've been in the game for too many years. There are challenges when bringing any start-up to life. The first one is potentially competitors. This start-up, Storied, entered a market with competitors that were well backed, had many customers, and are making big names for themselves. Why did Stephen think Storied could compete in this space? Never in the post did I hear why Storied would be able to compete, what was it's point of difference? That's like trying to perform CPR on a body with an elephant sitting on it's chest. Unless you can get some leverage to get the elephant off the patient, you 're not going to be able to make a difference. I may write a blog post examining this thread further if it's of interest to people.
- throwaway889900 4y ago
  Perhaps the phrasing "dissolved my startup company" would be more clear.
- rambambram 4y ago
  More than willing to read more about what you think. Write a blogpost, submit it to HN, and/or email me about where I can read it! But, I also think you said enough with: > Should we instead start from the position of our start-ups being dead from the beginning? We can't bring them to life, only our customers can. We can do CPR on the idea. We can try to bring it to life, but our start-ups are default dead until customers bring it to life with revenue.
- silvertaza 4y ago
  It's the same as Default Dead, see http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html
jph 4y ago
> your sole focus should be on the problem you're solving It turns out it's sometimes better to focus on the market area and its participants' value streams, rather than putting your sole focus on just one problem. Focusing on the market area can enable the startup to discover new problems within the market area, and within the participants' companies. Then the startup can experiment with those problems, and possibly pivot to one of them. Use the idea of three discoveries: market discovery, customer discovery, product discovery. For more about this idea, Steve Blank and others emphasize these three aspects and how startups can benefit by understanding them.
muxneo 4y ago
This is quite interesting. Pivoting ( at the right time )is the single most effective decision in keeping your startup afloat imho. What is difficult is that external stimulus which pushes you to pivot. Whether it is your talk with prospective customers or your mentor telling you point blank or just no traction with users.
CPLX 4y ago
I mean he was doing enterprise software addressing a core entrenched business function without any apparent attempt to build a sales team. It didn’t really matter what they built or how good it was. Unless they had a truly brilliant self-service onboarding freemium type approach they were doomed every day of their existence, they never actually tried at all.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  Occam's razor: The CEO was the sales team (good!) but wasn't able to do early stage enterprise sales It's _very_ easy for a manager at an enterprise to pay $50K+ for some software / consulting project, and often not too hard to go to $200K+ (may take an extra signoff). So not being able to get a paying design partner rings alarm bells about the perceived value and request for fair compensation. Whether that's the product or seller, both are on the CEO before any code needs to get written. Enterprise is 'cushy' enough that it's great for startups, but it takes an enterprise team, enterprise advisors, or an idea+market so amazing that it succeeds without those. My bet in this case is advisors, esp. for CEO, could have helped turn these earnest efforts into at least a company running on enough revenue they could fold on their terms vs no runway. (It took me years to start thinking this way.)
cleandreams 4y ago
I've done my own (failed) startup and was 1st employee at a successful one, among other startup experiences. I agree that this is wrongheaded: > Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving. I believe you pulled the plug a few months early because of this. But your startup was unsuccessful because you ran out of money while toiling in a market niche with well established dominant players and you did not have enough value add. That was where you needed more due diligence. It's simple and very hard. You need to build a product customers want. I agree with you on the unique highs of the start up life. Great, horrible, great, horrible. The successful startup was one of the peak experiences of my life.
indeed30 4y ago
The early generation of SaaS employee engagement platforms (Glint, CA, Peakon) found their success in replacing legacy consulting providers (who had fantastic services but terrible tech) with faster, better integrated, better designed and more automated solutions. That market was huge and everyone did very well out of it. Today it is a much more mature market, and as rightly pointed out, a survey platform is no longer enough. But there is still so much room for innovation. Actually improving employee engagement is far from solved or commoditised, and I believe that anyone that can bring an original idea that can be proven to lead to real-world change can still find a place in this industry. Personally I believe that any future success stories are likely to be focused less on customisation and configurability, and more on opinionated takes that suggest better ways to manage and measure employee engagement. The idea of linking HR initiatives to measurable change is a good one! But it's fairly easy to see that you can extend it to 'events' more widely. Customers don't just care about what HR has been doing; they want to know what impact virtually any event has had on their employees, whether internal, external, global or local. You may have noticed that over the last few years the buzzword 'moments that matter' has become pervasive in our industry, and you can see the majority of providers have delivered some kind of feature to capitalise on this. One final point is that I would say that the idea that HR is responsible for improving employee engagement is a little dated. I think it is uncontroversial to say that HR does not have the time or resources to actually do anything about employee engagement themselves. The modern role of HR is as enablers, measurers and instigators - undoubtedly a key stakeholder - but ultimately if you actually want to change something then the responsibility has to be more widely distributed. Disclosure: I was an early hire at Peakon, an employee engagement company, and I ran the ML and DS functions for four years until our acquisition by Workday, where I still work on Peakon today.
- joneil 4y ago
  As an engineer at Culture Amp, I strongly agree with all of this, especially: > Actually improving employee engagement is far from solved or commoditised, and I believe that anyone that can bring an original idea that can be proven to lead to real-world change can still find a place in this industry. OP it sounds like you and your co-founder had good intuition and insights into what the industry needs. But as indeed30 mentions the market is mature, the competition is strong, the expectations of quality and a certain feature breadth are high, and you'd probably need some decent sales skills to get a look in. Well done on picking a good problem and giving it a shot. As someone who failed a startup at a similar stage, it sounds like you've walked away at a good time, learned good lessons, and hopefully you've got good opportunities ahead.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
ipaddr 4y ago
Biggest mistakes were not having someone who could sell the product. Sounds like design was covered and development to some degree. I wonder if development could have been easier if leveling up was not a part of it. It sounds like the CTO was more qualified to be the CEO than the CEO but was missing some key CEO skills.
- ido 4y ago
  i would argue OP was right in his estimate that it was just not a good market gap for them to fill, i.e. the problem was the product they chose to build not that they didn't market/sell it well enough. It's much better to figure out a product people would actually really want to buy that have the uphill battle of trying to sell something people ultimately aren't that itching to buy.
journey_16162 4y ago
My situation is a little different but somewhat related. I'm working on a smaller product and I realized just how much time the whole thing may take (maybe 10 years from concept to acquisition). I spent 2 years so far, didn't launch it yet. I'm actually considering scratching what I'm doing now and starting a new, more ambitious product - something that would be more worthy of the sacrifice, life is short after all, why wait. I do like working on what I'm working though and at best, maybe I could be done with it in 7 years from now - with a small acquisition that could make it easier to build the next product (or wrap it up as a failure in 4 years and still get tons of experience from that). In contrast, the more ambitious product would take 7 years just to launch it, however it's not that much of a difference on a bigger scale. In the end, I think I'm sticking with the current product, for better or for worse. I already spent a lot of time on it, I have very limited resources and it's faster to ship, to get some success or fail earlier and use the experience (+ resources if any) to start working on a new product in 4 - 8 years, whatever it could be. But it does get me, that things take time either way, things are hard either way, so maybe it's better to work on something with bigger potential. I have some more thinking to do.
- mkmk3 4y ago
  I'm a little clueless, in what environment is this sort of time frame reasonable? I'm guessing this is not a software project, or exists in a slow moving niche?
  - journey_16162 4y ago
    Yeah, it's not reasonable at all and it's a software project, niche is kinda slow moving, yes - but I do worry about possibly launching too late. I'm almost certain that if I launched it in 2019, it would be a success, but launching it in 2025 - 2026 may be a much different landscape. Currently I'm estimating the effort to be 5,500h. I really started in 2021 and will probably launch somewhere in 2026. So it is 5 years hustle to put almost 3 years of full time work while also making a living working for other people. My self funding strategy was small time freelancing, which was ok for a short time, but when I found out it's going to take more time I'm spending now a lot of time to prepare to get a full time job instead and lower the personal life sacrifice. I guess if I had a well-paid job from the start and I was willing to sacrifice more personal life, I would get there faster - but either way it would take some time.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Was there even a startup to begin with? 2 people working on something that they give for free to their only user isn't a startup.
yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
> I was a first time CTO without a lot of expertise. I had only one job out of college, which was working on Saito. Of course it's just a title, and titles are often mostly meaningless, but it strikes me as odd to label oneself a CTO without much professional programming experience to speak of.

163 points by revorad 4y ago

>Our website looked good, our app looked stellar thanks to Ryan's design skills, and everyone we talked to said that what we were building is awesome (not "awesome" enough to give us any money though). This reminds me of "The Mom Test" and why even people who are nice and helpful give you completely useless information and advice if you don't know how to parse it. As an aside, "parasitic software" is often how you approach these kinds of things - someone complaining about a process in Salesforce or Outlook that they have to do manually probably won't switch to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it.

itsmemattchung 4y ago
> to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it. My parents are non-technical small business owners and agree wholeheartedly with the app/plug-in; getting them to change their processes is always an uphill battle. But seamlessly injecting software into their existing workflow tends to be the way to go.
- tmp_anon_22 4y ago
  Software engineers (and passionate techies in general) are so so so so bad at understanding the true implementation cost of software solutions. Software engineers often believe their product is just so intuitive that they don't consider QA, training, and support, costs and timelines. Further, people said the app is awesome, people throw positive praise because its cheap and makes everyone in the room feel good. It doesn't mean your app is awesome (what is awesome anyways?). Startups are hard. Selling to small business is hard. Its worth attempting because you learn an incredible amount about one of the backbones of our society (small business) - but its not for the faint of heart.
  - bitL 4y ago
    It's not just about understanding implementation cost, but also an IP minefield when you simply can't change some idiocy in Outlook etc. that would make certain things so much better so you end up with learned hopelessness not just as a user, but also as a developer.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    It's the same problem with the "answer this PhD thesis problem in half an hour" type questions. We really don't register that sitting with an idea as it unfolds month after month/year, slowly evolving means you can't 'see' it the way anybody else will see it: with not only fresh eyes but with motives that largely revolve around getting through your software and out the other side as fast as they can, because while to you it's a full time job, for them it's an impediment to something else they want to get on with. We are collectively That Guy, who keeps telling a story after everyone else has started telegraphing their boredom. It's also why the people who have bagged on Apple for the last 20 years missed out on one of the largest sustained run-ups in stock price so far this century. Nobody cares about your software unless it's pissing them off. If it gets out of their way there's no problem. But you can't 'express yourself' with your software unless you get in the way, at which point people start noticing you and for the wrong reasons. Apple is consistently... less terrible at this than most other companies. "I don't understand. There's nothing special about this software." Yes, that's exactly the point. This is something we missed when we started crowing about 'software eating the world'. We went from people who indulged us 30 years ago to mostly people who don't, because the 'world' we're eating is everybody who thought computers were kinda dumb.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Apple is about removing options and providing a simple way for the less computer savvy computer user. For many removing headphone phone jacks and removing functionality is going backwards for others making a computer simple onboards them into a world they could never grasp. There are a lot of rich people/kids who want simple.. and a lot more who want to be those rich kids.
      - 4y ago

yingbo 4y ago

MarcelOlsz 4y ago
It's one of many threads posted here that you manually decided to open.
- yingbo 4y ago
  The only reason I open it is to comment "why do I care". I saw ppl downvote the comment, without anyone has a brief: why someone shutdown his/her startup brings many attentions. I don't want to open and read the URL for a reason: why should I read it?
  - MarcelOlsz 4y ago
    Nobody cares about you or if you read it or don't read it.
    - yingbo 4y ago
      True. But why two downvotes? BTW, same logic, nobody cares about yourself or if yourself comment it or don't comment it.

prattcmp 4y ago

This feels very similar to my experience. I built a CultureAmp competitor and ran into the same problems.

sys_64738 4y ago

Startup 101: What problem are you trying to solve? OR Startup 101: What is the problem we can find for our widget? Which makes money in the long run?

redanddead 4y ago
I'd say 2nd one
yawnxyz 4y ago
I'd say, "What is the biggest marketplace we can find to adapt our widget to" is probably the better way to go. Lots of people have problems. Do they have problems big enough they want to pay $X for? Usually not

thematrixturtle 4y ago

TL;DR: Because it wasn't getting enough paying customers to make it worthwhile.

rchiba 4y ago

> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving. My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem. If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.

garrickvanburen 4y ago
To your point on being flexible and checking assumptions, I advocate founders to “fall in love with the problem” and clearly articulate why they want to become become experts on this specific problem.
- Closi 4y ago
  This is great advice - I'm not a founder but I consult and one of the tricks to keep me motivated for each project is to make myself passionate about each project and what I can do. This might seem like circular logic, but becoming passionate about things is a muscle you can develop and it makes things so much easier!
  - PebblesRox 4y ago
    I'm curious to hear more about what kinds of intentional action you take to develop your passion. What does that look like practically?
- al_borland 4y ago
  I think it would be harder to challenge deep assumptions once you fall in love with a problem. It seems like all of your questions and answers would resolve around the base assumption that the problem exists, rather than questioning what the world might look like if it didn't exist. Instead of adding something to solve the problem in the current world, a small shift could eliminate it completely... and thus make the company obsolete, but the world better. I find the most motivation when I hate the problem and I want to eliminate it from my life. Then it's not, "how can I make this better", it's "how can I eliminate this so I never have to hear about it or think about it again".

pedalpete 4y ago

I'm struck by the terminology "killed my start-up". Should we instead start from the position of our start-ups being dead from the beginning? We can't bring them to life, only our customers can. We can do CPR on the idea. We can try to bring it to life, but our start-ups are default dead until customers bring it to life with revenue. I'll admit, I hadn't thought of this perspective until reading this post, and I've been in the game for too many years. There are challenges when bringing any start-up to life. The first one is potentially competitors. This start-up, Storied, entered a market with competitors that were well backed, had many customers, and are making big names for themselves. Why did Stephen think Storied could compete in this space? Never in the post did I hear why Storied would be able to compete, what was it's point of difference? That's like trying to perform CPR on a body with an elephant sitting on it's chest. Unless you can get some leverage to get the elephant off the patient, you 're not going to be able to make a difference. I may write a blog post examining this thread further if it's of interest to people.

throwaway889900 4y ago
Perhaps the phrasing "dissolved my startup company" would be more clear.
rambambram 4y ago
More than willing to read more about what you think. Write a blogpost, submit it to HN, and/or email me about where I can read it! But, I also think you said enough with: > Should we instead start from the position of our start-ups being dead from the beginning? We can't bring them to life, only our customers can. We can do CPR on the idea. We can try to bring it to life, but our start-ups are default dead until customers bring it to life with revenue.
silvertaza 4y ago
It's the same as Default Dead, see http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html

jph 4y ago

> your sole focus should be on the problem you're solving It turns out it's sometimes better to focus on the market area and its participants' value streams, rather than putting your sole focus on just one problem. Focusing on the market area can enable the startup to discover new problems within the market area, and within the participants' companies. Then the startup can experiment with those problems, and possibly pivot to one of them. Use the idea of three discoveries: market discovery, customer discovery, product discovery. For more about this idea, Steve Blank and others emphasize these three aspects and how startups can benefit by understanding them.

muxneo 4y ago

This is quite interesting. Pivoting ( at the right time )is the single most effective decision in keeping your startup afloat imho. What is difficult is that external stimulus which pushes you to pivot. Whether it is your talk with prospective customers or your mentor telling you point blank or just no traction with users.

CPLX 4y ago

I mean he was doing enterprise software addressing a core entrenched business function without any apparent attempt to build a sales team. It didn’t really matter what they built or how good it was. Unless they had a truly brilliant self-service onboarding freemium type approach they were doomed every day of their existence, they never actually tried at all.

lmeyerov 4y ago
Occam's razor: The CEO was the sales team (good!) but wasn't able to do early stage enterprise sales It's _very_ easy for a manager at an enterprise to pay $50K+ for some software / consulting project, and often not too hard to go to $200K+ (may take an extra signoff). So not being able to get a paying design partner rings alarm bells about the perceived value and request for fair compensation. Whether that's the product or seller, both are on the CEO before any code needs to get written. Enterprise is 'cushy' enough that it's great for startups, but it takes an enterprise team, enterprise advisors, or an idea+market so amazing that it succeeds without those. My bet in this case is advisors, esp. for CEO, could have helped turn these earnest efforts into at least a company running on enough revenue they could fold on their terms vs no runway. (It took me years to start thinking this way.)

cleandreams 4y ago

I've done my own (failed) startup and was 1st employee at a successful one, among other startup experiences. I agree that this is wrongheaded: > Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving. I believe you pulled the plug a few months early because of this. But your startup was unsuccessful because you ran out of money while toiling in a market niche with well established dominant players and you did not have enough value add. That was where you needed more due diligence. It's simple and very hard. You need to build a product customers want. I agree with you on the unique highs of the start up life. Great, horrible, great, horrible. The successful startup was one of the peak experiences of my life.

indeed30 4y ago

The early generation of SaaS employee engagement platforms (Glint, CA, Peakon) found their success in replacing legacy consulting providers (who had fantastic services but terrible tech) with faster, better integrated, better designed and more automated solutions. That market was huge and everyone did very well out of it. Today it is a much more mature market, and as rightly pointed out, a survey platform is no longer enough. But there is still so much room for innovation. Actually improving employee engagement is far from solved or commoditised, and I believe that anyone that can bring an original idea that can be proven to lead to real-world change can still find a place in this industry. Personally I believe that any future success stories are likely to be focused less on customisation and configurability, and more on opinionated takes that suggest better ways to manage and measure employee engagement. The idea of linking HR initiatives to measurable change is a good one! But it's fairly easy to see that you can extend it to 'events' more widely. Customers don't just care about what HR has been doing; they want to know what impact virtually any event has had on their employees, whether internal, external, global or local. You may have noticed that over the last few years the buzzword 'moments that matter' has become pervasive in our industry, and you can see the majority of providers have delivered some kind of feature to capitalise on this. One final point is that I would say that the idea that HR is responsible for improving employee engagement is a little dated. I think it is uncontroversial to say that HR does not have the time or resources to actually do anything about employee engagement themselves. The modern role of HR is as enablers, measurers and instigators - undoubtedly a key stakeholder - but ultimately if you actually want to change something then the responsibility has to be more widely distributed. Disclosure: I was an early hire at Peakon, an employee engagement company, and I ran the ML and DS functions for four years until our acquisition by Workday, where I still work on Peakon today.

joneil 4y ago
As an engineer at Culture Amp, I strongly agree with all of this, especially: > Actually improving employee engagement is far from solved or commoditised, and I believe that anyone that can bring an original idea that can be proven to lead to real-world change can still find a place in this industry. OP it sounds like you and your co-founder had good intuition and insights into what the industry needs. But as indeed30 mentions the market is mature, the competition is strong, the expectations of quality and a certain feature breadth are high, and you'd probably need some decent sales skills to get a look in. Well done on picking a good problem and giving it a shot. As someone who failed a startup at a similar stage, it sounds like you've walked away at a good time, learned good lessons, and hopefully you've got good opportunities ahead.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

ipaddr 4y ago

Biggest mistakes were not having someone who could sell the product. Sounds like design was covered and development to some degree. I wonder if development could have been easier if leveling up was not a part of it. It sounds like the CTO was more qualified to be the CEO than the CEO but was missing some key CEO skills.

ido 4y ago
i would argue OP was right in his estimate that it was just not a good market gap for them to fill, i.e. the problem was the product they chose to build not that they didn't market/sell it well enough. It's much better to figure out a product people would actually really want to buy that have the uphill battle of trying to sell something people ultimately aren't that itching to buy.

journey_16162 4y ago

My situation is a little different but somewhat related. I'm working on a smaller product and I realized just how much time the whole thing may take (maybe 10 years from concept to acquisition). I spent 2 years so far, didn't launch it yet. I'm actually considering scratching what I'm doing now and starting a new, more ambitious product - something that would be more worthy of the sacrifice, life is short after all, why wait. I do like working on what I'm working though and at best, maybe I could be done with it in 7 years from now - with a small acquisition that could make it easier to build the next product (or wrap it up as a failure in 4 years and still get tons of experience from that). In contrast, the more ambitious product would take 7 years just to launch it, however it's not that much of a difference on a bigger scale. In the end, I think I'm sticking with the current product, for better or for worse. I already spent a lot of time on it, I have very limited resources and it's faster to ship, to get some success or fail earlier and use the experience (+ resources if any) to start working on a new product in 4 - 8 years, whatever it could be. But it does get me, that things take time either way, things are hard either way, so maybe it's better to work on something with bigger potential. I have some more thinking to do.

mkmk3 4y ago
I'm a little clueless, in what environment is this sort of time frame reasonable? I'm guessing this is not a software project, or exists in a slow moving niche?
- journey_16162 4y ago
  Yeah, it's not reasonable at all and it's a software project, niche is kinda slow moving, yes - but I do worry about possibly launching too late. I'm almost certain that if I launched it in 2019, it would be a success, but launching it in 2025 - 2026 may be a much different landscape. Currently I'm estimating the effort to be 5,500h. I really started in 2021 and will probably launch somewhere in 2026. So it is 5 years hustle to put almost 3 years of full time work while also making a living working for other people. My self funding strategy was small time freelancing, which was ok for a short time, but when I found out it's going to take more time I'm spending now a lot of time to prepare to get a full time job instead and lower the personal life sacrifice. I guess if I had a well-paid job from the start and I was willing to sacrifice more personal life, I would get there faster - but either way it would take some time.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Was there even a startup to begin with? 2 people working on something that they give for free to their only user isn't a startup.

yakshaving_jgt 4y ago

> I was a first time CTO without a lot of expertise. I had only one job out of college, which was working on Saito. Of course it's just a title, and titles are often mostly meaningless, but it strikes me as odd to label oneself a CTO without much professional programming experience to speak of.