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Exit Interview: The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain
- casca 15y agoThis is a good read, particularly for HN. As naturally optimistic people, we all believe that the "9 out of 10 startups fail" statistics apply to everyone else. This is a good read as perhaps it reminds us that 9 out of 10 means us, not just those other silly people with their terrible ideas and poor commercialization strategies. These companies all had super-smart people, worked really hard, were funded and had as much chance of succeeding as the rest of us plugging away.
- martincmartin 15y agoI wonder whether it's really 9 out of 10, or higher, or lower. I suppose it depends how you define "fail," maybe something like "made less money for the liquidity event than I would have working for an established firm all those years." So the answer could be very different for founders than for employee 1 or employee 25.
- nfm 15y ago1. Didn't build something people would pay for 2. Beaten by the competition 3. Didn't build something people would pay for 4. Didn't build something people would pay for 5. ? 6. Didn't know their users and build the product with them in mind 7. Didn't build something people would pay for Notice a pattern?
- aaronharnly 15y agoYes: it's harder than people think to divine what people will pay for and what they won't. As a consumer, I pay for plenty of things I wouldn't necessarily have predicted I would; conversely, I use some "successful" services that I'll never pay a dime for.
- robryan 15y agoYeah it is hard for the founders to know what people will pay for ahead of time. In a few cases there they had free competition, although that may have sprung up after they started. If you have free competition and are looking for direct payments from users as a model you have to think you can build a much better product than the free alternative. Something like Twitter I think is a great example of people probably not knowing they wanted it until they used it and it built up a bit. Sure they are ad supported, but Twitter could have very easily fit into the type of stories in this post had things went a little differently.
- vastly 15y agoThough it's interesting if you're planning to create a paid for product, the vast majority of the internet operates on a free / ad supported model, which works fantastically well. If we only had "websites people are willing to pay for directly", it'd be a terrible internet...
- duskwuff 15y ago5. Beaten by their own other product ... I guess.
- bcks 15y agoTumblr seems much like what VOX was aiming for: easy, free, theme-able social blogging. And it looks like Tumblr has trounced TypePad.
- duskwuff 15y agoTumblr's also got a lot of additional "social" features (e.g, reblogging content and tracking it across blogs) which I don't think Vox had, though. I'm not sure how instrumental those features have been in Tumblr's success, but I'm sure they haven't hurt.
- dmragone 15y agoOne might think asking people what value they would get would be a good idea - making sure there is in fact some audience that would pay. There are a lot of really cool things I'd like to have, but that doesn't mean I'd pay for all of them. I wonder to what degree a service like KickStarter can be used to determine if people will in fact pay for a product like one of these?
- lusr 15y agoI think people are pretty bad at predicting value in advance. I suspect you'd get plenty of bad data. If you don't understand the market you're building your solution for, in any case, I think you have a bigger problem. I'd also feel uncomfortable publishing my idea before building it because of competition. This is why I'd rather go something like the MVP route and only then solicit feedback. But then most of my ideas involve building a community, where first mover advantages can be very important.
- joshfraser 15y agoI'm one of the founders from #7 (EventVue) and we had paying customers from the beginning. We had people who would pay, just not enough money and not frequently enough.
- ig1 15y agoWhy didn't you make the product free for event organizers and generate revenue from the lead gen of hotel rooms and flights that accompany events ?
- joshfraser 15y agoWe probably would have tried that if money was the only objection for event organizers. They had enough other concerns (like giving up access to their attendee list) that made customer adoption of our product tough.
- ig1 15y agoHave you seen what Lanyrd have done in this space ?
- keeptrying 15y agoLanyrd released in 2 weeks with 1 feature - aggregate the vevents from the people you follow on twitter.
- joshfraser 15y agoTheir challenge is w/o the attendee list from the event organizer, it's tough to get a meaningful % to participate.
- keeptrying 15y agoI love how they emphasize that doing a feature well takes a long time. I think this is somrething you can only understand by starting a company. It's really hard to do a feature such that it will workin all the cases in the real world.
- Drbble 15y agoEveryone who has ever built anything knows this about features. You don’t need to start a company to learn it.
- keeptrying 15y agoThats not really true. When your working as part of another company there are abstractions around you created by others that protect you. You dont have to deal with a lot of stuff because a lot has been abstracted away. In the startup world, either you pay for the abstraction or you deal with the real word. Lots of people say things like "I could code that in a day" but when its for a startup, that one thing could take a month to do right. Its completely different when its your own startup. Completely.