26 ms·

My Startup Failed. Fuck.

287 points by nemrow 14y ago

minimaxir 14y ago
So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated! 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.
- delluminatus 14y ago
  The post was clearly meant to be firmly tongue-in-cheek. That part in particular was simply self-deprecating sarcasm.
  - dopamean 14y ago
    Exactly. Sometimes when you think your idea is good all you need is one or two other people to tell you they think its good and that's it: it's a good idea. How did Instagram come to the conclusion that their idea was a good idea? Or any other startup for that matter. If Zillionears turned out to be a success no one would have thought that having a few people say "good idea" in the beginning was insufficient to get started.
    - nemrow 14y ago
      I totally agree with that! There are tons of companies that "win the lottery", and build a product with no validation and succeed. It is obviously not the "right" way to do it, but sometimes it does work.
    - taude 14y ago
      Yeup. Lots of arm-chair advice these days. It's a business all in itself. It's funny watching people compile lists of "all the mistakes" in hopes that not repeating a single one of them will equal success. Plenty of wildly successful businesses became so without having MVPs or setting up fake landing pages. They spent years building out real product-breakthroughs, maybe with even real technology/science. I'm willing to bet that for every rule that's broken in that StartUpGrave twitter list above (I haven't looked so I don't know what's really there, but I'm going on just the idea of compiling lists of mistakes), there's a company who succeeded while still failing the rule. There's so much retro-active quarterbacking that goes on (especially in the VC-world) that says X company was success because they applied this-thing-I'm-just-now-naming as a rule. Even though, Apple has taught us things like you're users don't always know what they want or need.
  - nemrow 14y ago
    Bingo! :)
- LeeHunter 14y ago
  And then the next sentence: "After that moment we basically stopped talking to artists for a year."
- scmccarthy 14y ago
  It wasn't sufficient data. OP was describing their foolish attitude at the time.
- whyleyc 14y ago
  I think that's his point (illustrated with sarcasm) - with the benefit of hindsight he realises it wasn't.
- austenallred 14y ago
  Getting to the point where an idea is truly validated by unbiased and honest customers is way, way more difficult than we all pretend like it is. I think the idea that you can figure out if your business is viable by talking to a few people can be just as dangerous as it can be helpful.
  - hayksaakian 14y ago
    PPC + Landing page is typically promoted as a valuable tool for validation around here. With launchrock + adwords this has become stupid easy.
    - taude 14y ago
      Maybe this explains so many me-too consumer based websites are de rigueur around here? I'd like to hear more feedback about MVP practices within the enterprise space.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ajross 14y ago
  This seems unkind. What data would you want? It's easy to jeer in hindsight, but frankly if focused and professional market research could reliably determine the existence of new markets there would be no need for a startup to find them. This very web site wouldn't exist. They played a hunch and lost. The linked post details lots of mistakes, but this particular one doesn't seem like one to me.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    I agree that was unkind. But treating a little positive feedback as validation is, as the original author now clearly realizes, a giant mistake. 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.
  - saidajigumi 14y ago
    > What data would you want? 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.
  - mikeg8 14y ago
    A cool idea does not equal a business model. That is why I think soooo many startups fail. They build something awesome, amazing, cool whatever, but they don;t stop to ask people, "Will you pay for this? Is this something you think I could charge for?" That is the data I WANT and need.
    - locacorten 14y ago
      Ahem... Have you heard of Facebook? Or GMail? Or Hotmail? These are money-losing businesses. As we speak. Real life is much more complicated.
cup 14y ago
Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close). 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.
- DanBC 14y ago
  I strongly agree. I'm grateful for people who post articles like this. 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."
  - pg 14y ago
    If this thing = making sure users want what you're making, that particular cargo cult would find to their delight that planes were starting to land.
  - unalone 14y ago
    Yes, well, people are terrible, terrible, at thinking for themselves. And when they do think for themselves, they are even more terrible at acknowledging that their thoughts don't shape reality. 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.
- danenania 14y ago
  I think part of the difficulty of knowing when (or when not) to quit is that opportunity lurks even inside failure. 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.
mindcrime 14y ago
I'm sure it's painful, but thanks for sharing. I agree with cup, that reading about failures can be more valuable than reading about successes. 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-manifesto/ http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifest... [2]: http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/ http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/
- sskates 14y ago
  Startups repeatedly make the same mistake of not talking to customers enough and dying as a result. 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.
  - hobs 14y ago
    I mostly see it as a matter of empathy with existing people, or exposure to existing problems. I would say one of the best ways to come up with an idea for a startup is to be working for your potential customer. 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.
iamjonlee 14y ago
I've been there done that, so I get the frustration you went through. Lesson # 1 What people say is cool doesn't mean that it's something that they'd use. Just because you say you're building the next Facebook will get you some "that's cool" responses but doesn't mean they'd actually use it. 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!
salemh 14y ago
I would be interested in: 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!
- popopje 14y ago
  i realise you want the actual answer here, but if i was going to sell my own stuff, i would be using bandcamp http://bandcamp.com/ http://bandcamp.com/ and have as a buyer many times. it's simple to set up and purchase from, is the main selling point.
- nemrow 14y ago
  Yes, Bandcamp was for sure our competitor. Simple to use, and well known. Our added value was the dynamic pricing (which we found out was not a value at all). There are many pain points for artists. The main one is "no one is buying my music". That pain point hasn't yet been solved in an easy way, and as time goes on, it seems its getting harder and harder.
mikecane 14y ago
"Dynamic pricing" -- does anyone really like that? I've seen reports of online booksellers (no, not Amazon) giving people different prices based on the account they use. No one really likes to feel like a sucker. EDIT to add: Some people might bring up airline tickets or hotel rooms. Limited analog inventory, not infinite digital inventory.
- kaoD 14y ago
  Analog? You mean planes and hotel rooms are non-quantized? Sorry, had to say that :) It's fun for me how analog/digital have become synonyms for material/virtual.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Even more fun because the material world seems to operate in mostly quantized steps at its most fundamental level.
- r00fus 14y ago
  It's also called value-based pricing [1]. You're correct in your edit, hotels/airline tickets where you're auctioning off a limited value is one thing, selling a inexhaustible commodity at different rates without any reasonable factor like location (water in a desert = more valuable) just feels dishonest. Amazon and Travelocity rightfully caught a lot of flack when they were caught trying this (perhaps pricing A/B test?) years ago. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing
  - nobodysfool 14y ago
    Yes, perhaps it would feel dishonest, but think about it for a bit, you are a musician, and you want your music heard. So you give out your music for free. Later, people want to support you, so you start selling at $1. Now you are getting play on the radio, whatever - you are hot now. Bump that price up automatically to $5 or whatever and get paid because your value increases.
- ljd 14y ago
dakrisht 14y ago
Keep Moving Forward. Pick up the pieces, mend the broken bones, take a vacation, regroup, do something else that you love and are passionate about. Failure is part of life. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right? Just keep at it.
joeblau 14y ago
Welcome... do it again.
tptacek 14y ago
Even the people at the very top of the value chain in the music industry --- the vanishingly small set of people who produce commercially viable music --- can't make the business work. So I'm curious as to why you'd have tried to start a company in music. Did you start before Dalton Caldwell's talk? I'm just interested in how people pick the ideas they pursue.
- dasil003 14y ago
  I got the feeling there were in college or fresh out of college when they started this. Probably they were just doing what they had an interest in and thought they knew something about.
  - dpolaske 14y ago
    Exactly the situation.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- markdown 14y ago
  > Did you start before Dalton Caldwell's talk? Who is this Dalton Caldwell, and why is he relevant?
  - pg 14y ago
    http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwells-must-see-talk-on-the-challenges-facing-music-startups/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwe...
    - dpolaske 14y ago
      Would have been a valuable talk to watch, before we got started.
    - 14y ago
xoail 14y ago
I see this happen more and more that we talk to our potential customers about the idea we've been brewing and they say 'heck yeah I would totally use it', later only to find no interest in it. One thing I learned is, most of our ideas are pretty cool and most likely all the potential customers would agree when you try to validate but very few would actually hop on to try it. May be the implementation wasn't right, or may be its too hard to change the customer behavior to switch. Sometimes the customer was not serious enough when you pitched.
- brc 14y ago
  The correct answer is that people don't like being rude and saying no, particularly when its' easy for them to agree. 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.
skeoh 14y ago
You have a tangible yet unmarketable product. Rather than abandon it completely, would you consider open-sourcing it? Any contribution to the open source community is a positive use of time (in my opinion).
- nemrow 14y ago
  I did want to open source it, but the problem is all of our passwords and keys for amazon and everything are in the code. Is there a way to get around that?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - skeoh 13y ago
    There was a discussion on storing passwords in source control here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178914, Although if you plan to discontinue development entirely you could just substitute keys with placeholders (YOUR_KEY_HERE) and make a note of it in your README.
adamnemecek 14y ago
Out of curiosity, what did you do wrong originally that was against Amazon's terms?
- nemrow 14y ago
  We were a middle-man to the artists. We had it setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This way the money goes directly to the artist and we get sent a cut directly from amazon.
  - adamnemecek 14y ago
    Ah, thanks for the response.
donnfelker 14y ago
Best advise I can give here is to do what Steve Blank, Martel, and many other advisers/founders/etc say - If you can get a check for the product. Then you've sold it. Then there is demand. Until that money is in your hand, you just have an idea.
- donnfelker 14y ago
  NOTE: This doesn't mean you'll be a success. You may have found a market, but you need to do more customer development in order to really figure out if the market is large enough to sustain.
greyfox 14y ago
seems like it shoulda really taken off for independent artists.
- therobotking 14y ago
  Mmm, if you look at the site it's really not that surprising it didn't take off. http://zillionears.com/ http://zillionears.com/ 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.
  - iagomr 14y ago
    Completely agree. This doesn't show much knowledge for the music industry. The huge call to action button and the blond girl are just a bit demeaning for someone who is trying to establish their name to their fans
  - nemrow 14y ago
    Hahaha, i'll take the honesty!
  - notimetorelax 14y ago
    Maybe I didn't have my morning coffee yet, but the video seemed to be too disrespectful of musicians.
    - human_error 14y ago
      That was my interpretation as well and I didn't like "sell your sh!t" thing. I don't think a musician would like his art to be called shit.
      - stereosky 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 14y ago
Ouch. One thing that leaped out at me was your mention that the first beta was a disaster because it didn't comply with Amazon's payment-processor requirements, so you burned a lot of capital making good on your promises. This sort of thing is why I keep saying more startups need a legal person on board early on - and with a surplus of underemployed JDs around, now is a great time to work that into your team plan. 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.
- seivan 14y ago
  Would they work for equity? Sorry I couldn't help myself :) /developer.
  - jfarmer 14y ago
    Often, yes, if you have a good relationship with a well-established firm or have someone who does vouch for you. Most top tech law firms (WSGR, Orrick, Fenwick & West, Gunderson Dettmer, etc.) will defer payment or even waive certain fees for early-stage startups in exchange for a small amount of equity.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Some would. I know quite a few lawyers in startups. That's why I mentioned 'underemployed JDs' who have an incentive to explore other avenues if they can't get a job at an established law firm or public body. You might not be aware that there's a major supply-demand imbalance in the legal field right now.
andrewcooke 14y ago
More importantly though, people really didn’t really LIKE anything about our product. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. In fact, some people that participated in the sale didn’t even like our “dynamic pricing” system. They were trying to support the artist, so saving a few dollars didn’t excite them. They could easily have just gotten his music for free elsewhere. 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.
fuddle 14y ago
"Zillionears | Sell your $h!t with Social Sales!" - Sorry but as soon as I seen your landing page title, I was put off.
- dpolaske 14y ago
  Understandable, most Christian musicians where not excited about our slogan.
  - tiredofcareer 14y ago
    Well, that's a comment that betrays a lot about you and, potentially, why your startup failed.
    - ivix 14y ago
      Likely they are extremely young and can't conceive of why that is a terrible thing to put on a serious commercial site.
    - lancer383 14y ago
      That and the landing page video — it was both cheesy, and patronizing to both musicians and their fans. And after watching it I still don't understand the "decrease price by a dollar" pricing scheme.
      - nemrow 14y ago
        All of these things I DO agree with. And yes, we are young. We might not use the word "shit" on our homepage next time. But Hell, I used the word "fuck" on the title of this article, and it sure turned alot of heads.
        tiredofcareer 14y ago
        I was referring to the dig at Christians. Not the vulgarity.
eah13 14y ago
I love the honesty and the spot on diagnosis. For a site that resonates with artists, check out Reverb Nation: http://www.reverbnation.com/ http://www.reverbnation.com/ A sample artist page here: http://www.reverbnation.com/evangibb 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.
flaktrak 14y ago
Good post and you had me all the way up until you said "journey". I hate that word. Pre-internet Journey meant something now every man and his cat uses it to talk about the incites they had while doing something, it has lost its impact. However like I said I enjoyed the post until then.
rstevenson542 14y ago
Talked to 1,700 potential users and you still couldn't figure out that you were building a shit product. YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR.
arbuge 14y ago
Great story & thanks for sharing this. I was curious about why you chose to go with Amazon Payments... why not PayPal, or your own merchant account?
- dpolaske 14y ago
  Billing info was authorized, but not captured until the end of the sale period. Similar to what Kickstarter does. Amazon is really the only option (that we could find) that would allow that type of flow.
- nemrow 14y ago
  Dans right (he's my co-founder). Amazon allowed for a much larger period of time between authorization and capturing. They are the only processor that had the technology on hand for us.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
Music is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest industries to be successful in. Props to them for continuing to press on, hoping for a break and smart enough to throw in the towel and move on. Also, happy to hear you didn't mortgage your life savings and burn out in grand fashion. You're wise beyond your years.
jfb 14y ago
So did mine, largely because I was not able to commit to it for a variety of reasons that wouldn't be unfamiliar. I like reading the success stories, but I get pretty down thinking about my experience -- not the doing, but the way it ended up going down.
wellboy 14y ago
Knowing when to quit is like trading with bitcoins, you never know when to sell.
escaped_hn 14y ago
Can you go indept about what you did wrong that allowed payment processors to freeze your accounts? What about your software didn't comply with their terms that it had to be rewritten?
- nemrow 14y ago
  We were a middle-man to the artists. We had to setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This was the money goes directly to the artist and we get send a cut directly from amazon
astrojams 14y ago
It was a very successful failure. You are much more likely to succeed given what you learned from it. I'd say that it is a blessing in disguise and very much appreciate that you shared the experience with us.
mikeg8 14y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience but to me, the whole post is about how you didn't really listen at all and built something that people didn't want, which ended up failing, yet you still learned a ton. I bet you learned something but did this experience really teach you a LOT? You don't mention any other learning experience in this post (you say you'll write more later) but somehow in the end, this failure was super insightful. I just don't see how... Sorry if that sounds negative. I wish all entrepreneurs success but the end of this article just fell flat for me.
- nemrow 14y ago
  I hear what you are saying. I have tons of pages of lessons I learned that I will touch on in later posts. I tried to summarize the whole experience in to one page. My experiences took me to business meeting after business meeting, and opened my eyes to the entire tech / music startup scene. The main lesson I learned was not listening to feedback early on, but I also have insight on co-founder issues, legal issues, budgeting issues, personal/work dilemmas, etc.
  - learningram 14y ago
    Can I ask how much money this whole thing cost ? Or is that rude ?
espadagroup 14y ago
Someone should make a new Amiestreet. The business model worked (dynamic pricing) and the company was acquired, then it went away...
cmos 14y ago
You done good. It's not supposed to be easy. You get an A for effort, and next time when you place your 120% into something you'll thank your younger self for getting the early learning phase out of the way when you were young and had unlimited energy. Do take a break. A year sounds about right.
pbreit 14y ago
Reminds me of Pud's Fandalism which he created pretty quickly and ramped up traffic also quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081 When it comes to commerce, I'm liking the model of first building an audience and then adding commerce.
locacorten 14y ago
I'm sorry but let me offer a different perspective. 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.
orangethirty 14y ago
Now that you have learned how not to build product, I suggest you take a one month break, and go build something else.Don't build the product without knowing what the market wants. In your case, people wanted an easy way to support their artists.Don't market a product in such way. In your case, learn the basics of online marketing, and pay someone to build a good landing page for the product.Don't take it so personally. Shit happens. It failed. Who cares? The more value you put on failure, the less value you put on iterating. That's where success comes from.I do have to say that your landing page is pretty crummy. That contributed in a huge way towards the failure.
rtexal 14y ago
Your startup may have failed for other reasons. Just saw the promo video on your website, am not impressed. It actually looked like a parody video. And the reference to drugs (are you saying that all musicians take drugs?). NOT impressed. Product with maybe a good idea but seriously poor execution/marketing. Be more serious when doing a startup (unless your intention is to be less serious, ala 9gag) or risk being a terrible parody joke.
onan_barbarian 14y ago
If there's a common thread between endless startup failure stories, then it is "we talked to a bunch of people who said they'd spend money on this" and when push came to shove said people didn't actually spend money. 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.
- SurfScore 14y ago
  I like to live by the motto: 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)
  - ronyeh 14y ago
    So then... is Kickstarter the only true way to validate a startup idea? 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. :-)
    - hayksaakian 14y ago
      PPC + Landing page works wonders. Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea. Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale. (You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)
      - d4nt 14y ago
        I'm sure this works for things which you might buy having only see the website (and maybe a few screenshots) but beyond a certain level of cost/complexity you actually need to have some real software for them to try before they'll pay.
kingkawn 14y ago
A lot of comments have thrown flak, justifiably, at your landing page video; it is terrible. But the reason is not simply aesthetic, it's because you chose to present an image of musicians that relies on tropes which could only possibly be relevant to non-musicians, and even they would probably think it was not funny. Nobody who is seriously pursuing art thinks of themselves or their work in the way you portrayed them. Your problem wasn't amazon payments, or flakey artists jumping ship. It was that your audience wasn't even on your radar.
- mrtksn 14y ago
  I had a similar impression. the video looks like the founders really don't know anything about the business they are getting into. The video looks cheesy, like a corporation trying to speak teen's language to sell them ice cream, not like somebody who understands artists. 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.
jchulani 14y ago
Fast iteration is cool assuming you have customer validation plans. In this case, it didn't sound like one existed.
chmike 14y ago
Maybe it is a marketing problem. The domain name is nice, but what does it tell about you, about your product, about people sharing the url ? For you it was probably a matter of being zillionears but for music lovers ? The dynamic pricing thing looks also fishy in the sense that no one except you are in control of pricing, or its algorithm. This gives the feeling to be exposed to be screwed, the artists and the potential buyers. 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.
yoster 14y ago
Definitely a great learning experience. I myself had my own business. Made enough to live comfortably, but in the end, the IRS made me pay back every red cent in back taxes, and then some when it came to a screeching halt.
WillThisFly 14y ago
Man, I feel your pain. I have developed the most awesome products the world has never seen 4 times now. We had a "build it and they will come" attitude too :( 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 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...
- chmike 14y ago
  Excellent initiative. I'll check it. I hope you will also provide some general talks on strategies we could use to test this as early as possible. 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.
  - WillThisFly 14y ago
    The main point of WillThisFly? is to test out an idea or project at any stage of its development before committing too many resources and finding that your awesome idea isn't so awesome after all. 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 :)
brendanborginc 14y ago
I wish you had read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It stresses the fact of build a Mean Viable Product very early on and testing hypothesis like "will artists pay for this service" in a real life scenario with an ok product. Aardvark did this in a really cool way (check Aardvark out). 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.
D9u 14y ago
"Fall down seven times, get up eight times..."
ausjke 14y ago
Hate the F word in the title, that word is for your mouth, not for writing on the public network so all can see(including my kids), unless, you have a 18-year-old warning on your homepage.
smackfu 14y ago
>Hit me up on twitter! I just got on there. This is not something I would be telling tech-savvy people.
workbench 14y ago
Read the whole thing… still no idea what "dynamic pricing" is.
rexreed 14y ago
"we felt like we had already gone too far to quit" -- the bane of many a startup that should just pack it up / pivot / rethink things the moment this thought crosses their minds. If you're already thinking you've gone too far, you've gone too far.
- matehat 14y ago
  I think part of the problem is that there is so many credible sources to draw from when faced with this sort of thoughts. The Lean crowd will tell you to pivot, but others will tell you to never give up, that big ideas are often brought to life by stubborn entrepreneurs. Many early entrepreneurs are often inspired by such stories and so that's probably quite natural for them to react that way.
ssw1n 14y ago
gg go next
tedchs 14y ago
Sorry to hear it didn't work out. I might just share two thoughts that occurred to me: 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.
jimmaswell 14y ago
Really seems like this was a great idea but somewhat poorly executed with the presentation on the site.
cybernomad99 13y ago
You actually have spoken to 1700+ artists? See if you could learn a few things about the market, and do a "pivot" as so many start ups have done. AirBNB started out selling air mattress...

287 points by nemrow 14y ago

So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated! 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.

delluminatus 14y ago
The post was clearly meant to be firmly tongue-in-cheek. That part in particular was simply self-deprecating sarcasm.
- dopamean 14y ago
  Exactly. Sometimes when you think your idea is good all you need is one or two other people to tell you they think its good and that's it: it's a good idea. How did Instagram come to the conclusion that their idea was a good idea? Or any other startup for that matter. If Zillionears turned out to be a success no one would have thought that having a few people say "good idea" in the beginning was insufficient to get started.
  - nemrow 14y ago
    I totally agree with that! There are tons of companies that "win the lottery", and build a product with no validation and succeed. It is obviously not the "right" way to do it, but sometimes it does work.
  - taude 14y ago
    Yeup. Lots of arm-chair advice these days. It's a business all in itself. It's funny watching people compile lists of "all the mistakes" in hopes that not repeating a single one of them will equal success. Plenty of wildly successful businesses became so without having MVPs or setting up fake landing pages. They spent years building out real product-breakthroughs, maybe with even real technology/science. I'm willing to bet that for every rule that's broken in that StartUpGrave twitter list above (I haven't looked so I don't know what's really there, but I'm going on just the idea of compiling lists of mistakes), there's a company who succeeded while still failing the rule. There's so much retro-active quarterbacking that goes on (especially in the VC-world) that says X company was success because they applied this-thing-I'm-just-now-naming as a rule. Even though, Apple has taught us things like you're users don't always know what they want or need.
- nemrow 14y ago
  Bingo! :)
LeeHunter 14y ago
And then the next sentence: "After that moment we basically stopped talking to artists for a year."
scmccarthy 14y ago
It wasn't sufficient data. OP was describing their foolish attitude at the time.
whyleyc 14y ago
I think that's his point (illustrated with sarcasm) - with the benefit of hindsight he realises it wasn't.
austenallred 14y ago
Getting to the point where an idea is truly validated by unbiased and honest customers is way, way more difficult than we all pretend like it is. I think the idea that you can figure out if your business is viable by talking to a few people can be just as dangerous as it can be helpful.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
  PPC + Landing page is typically promoted as a valuable tool for validation around here. With launchrock + adwords this has become stupid easy.
  - taude 14y ago
    Maybe this explains so many me-too consumer based websites are de rigueur around here? I'd like to hear more feedback about MVP practices within the enterprise space.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ajross 14y ago
This seems unkind. What data would you want? It's easy to jeer in hindsight, but frankly if focused and professional market research could reliably determine the existence of new markets there would be no need for a startup to find them. This very web site wouldn't exist. They played a hunch and lost. The linked post details lots of mistakes, but this particular one doesn't seem like one to me.
- wpietri 14y ago
  I agree that was unkind. But treating a little positive feedback as validation is, as the original author now clearly realizes, a giant mistake. 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.
- saidajigumi 14y ago
  > What data would you want? 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.
- mikeg8 14y ago
  A cool idea does not equal a business model. That is why I think soooo many startups fail. They build something awesome, amazing, cool whatever, but they don;t stop to ask people, "Will you pay for this? Is this something you think I could charge for?" That is the data I WANT and need.
  - locacorten 14y ago
    Ahem... Have you heard of Facebook? Or GMail? Or Hotmail? These are money-losing businesses. As we speak. Real life is much more complicated.

cup 14y ago

Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close). 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.

DanBC 14y ago
I strongly agree. I'm grateful for people who post articles like this. 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."
- pg 14y ago
  If this thing = making sure users want what you're making, that particular cargo cult would find to their delight that planes were starting to land.
- unalone 14y ago
  Yes, well, people are terrible, terrible, at thinking for themselves. And when they do think for themselves, they are even more terrible at acknowledging that their thoughts don't shape reality. 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.
danenania 14y ago
I think part of the difficulty of knowing when (or when not) to quit is that opportunity lurks even inside failure. 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.

mindcrime 14y ago

I'm sure it's painful, but thanks for sharing. I agree with cup, that reading about failures can be more valuable than reading about successes. 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-manifesto/ http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifest... [2]: http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/ http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/

sskates 14y ago
Startups repeatedly make the same mistake of not talking to customers enough and dying as a result. 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.
- hobs 14y ago
  I mostly see it as a matter of empathy with existing people, or exposure to existing problems. I would say one of the best ways to come up with an idea for a startup is to be working for your potential customer. 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.

iamjonlee 14y ago

I've been there done that, so I get the frustration you went through. Lesson # 1 What people say is cool doesn't mean that it's something that they'd use. Just because you say you're building the next Facebook will get you some "that's cool" responses but doesn't mean they'd actually use it. 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!

salemh 14y ago

I would be interested in: 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!

popopje 14y ago
i realise you want the actual answer here, but if i was going to sell my own stuff, i would be using bandcamp http://bandcamp.com/ http://bandcamp.com/ and have as a buyer many times. it's simple to set up and purchase from, is the main selling point.
nemrow 14y ago
Yes, Bandcamp was for sure our competitor. Simple to use, and well known. Our added value was the dynamic pricing (which we found out was not a value at all). There are many pain points for artists. The main one is "no one is buying my music". That pain point hasn't yet been solved in an easy way, and as time goes on, it seems its getting harder and harder.

mikecane 14y ago

"Dynamic pricing" -- does anyone really like that? I've seen reports of online booksellers (no, not Amazon) giving people different prices based on the account they use. No one really likes to feel like a sucker. EDIT to add: Some people might bring up airline tickets or hotel rooms. Limited analog inventory, not infinite digital inventory.

kaoD 14y ago
Analog? You mean planes and hotel rooms are non-quantized? Sorry, had to say that :) It's fun for me how analog/digital have become synonyms for material/virtual.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Even more fun because the material world seems to operate in mostly quantized steps at its most fundamental level.
r00fus 14y ago
It's also called value-based pricing [1]. You're correct in your edit, hotels/airline tickets where you're auctioning off a limited value is one thing, selling a inexhaustible commodity at different rates without any reasonable factor like location (water in a desert = more valuable) just feels dishonest. Amazon and Travelocity rightfully caught a lot of flack when they were caught trying this (perhaps pricing A/B test?) years ago. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing
- nobodysfool 14y ago
  Yes, perhaps it would feel dishonest, but think about it for a bit, you are a musician, and you want your music heard. So you give out your music for free. Later, people want to support you, so you start selling at $1. Now you are getting play on the radio, whatever - you are hot now. Bump that price up automatically to $5 or whatever and get paid because your value increases.
ljd 14y ago

dakrisht 14y ago

Keep Moving Forward. Pick up the pieces, mend the broken bones, take a vacation, regroup, do something else that you love and are passionate about. Failure is part of life. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right? Just keep at it.

joeblau 14y ago

Welcome... do it again.

tptacek 14y ago

Even the people at the very top of the value chain in the music industry --- the vanishingly small set of people who produce commercially viable music --- can't make the business work. So I'm curious as to why you'd have tried to start a company in music. Did you start before Dalton Caldwell's talk? I'm just interested in how people pick the ideas they pursue.

dasil003 14y ago
I got the feeling there were in college or fresh out of college when they started this. Probably they were just doing what they had an interest in and thought they knew something about.
- dpolaske 14y ago
  Exactly the situation.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
markdown 14y ago
> Did you start before Dalton Caldwell's talk? Who is this Dalton Caldwell, and why is he relevant?
- pg 14y ago
  http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwells-must-see-talk-on-the-challenges-facing-music-startups/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwe...
  - dpolaske 14y ago
    Would have been a valuable talk to watch, before we got started.
  - 14y ago

xoail 14y ago

I see this happen more and more that we talk to our potential customers about the idea we've been brewing and they say 'heck yeah I would totally use it', later only to find no interest in it. One thing I learned is, most of our ideas are pretty cool and most likely all the potential customers would agree when you try to validate but very few would actually hop on to try it. May be the implementation wasn't right, or may be its too hard to change the customer behavior to switch. Sometimes the customer was not serious enough when you pitched.

brc 14y ago
The correct answer is that people don't like being rude and saying no, particularly when its' easy for them to agree. 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.

skeoh 14y ago

You have a tangible yet unmarketable product. Rather than abandon it completely, would you consider open-sourcing it? Any contribution to the open source community is a positive use of time (in my opinion).

nemrow 14y ago
I did want to open source it, but the problem is all of our passwords and keys for amazon and everything are in the code. Is there a way to get around that?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- skeoh 13y ago
  There was a discussion on storing passwords in source control here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178914, Although if you plan to discontinue development entirely you could just substitute keys with placeholders (YOUR_KEY_HERE) and make a note of it in your README.

adamnemecek 14y ago

Out of curiosity, what did you do wrong originally that was against Amazon's terms?

nemrow 14y ago
We were a middle-man to the artists. We had it setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This way the money goes directly to the artist and we get sent a cut directly from amazon.
- adamnemecek 14y ago
  Ah, thanks for the response.

donnfelker 14y ago

Best advise I can give here is to do what Steve Blank, Martel, and many other advisers/founders/etc say - If you can get a check for the product. Then you've sold it. Then there is demand. Until that money is in your hand, you just have an idea.

donnfelker 14y ago
NOTE: This doesn't mean you'll be a success. You may have found a market, but you need to do more customer development in order to really figure out if the market is large enough to sustain.

greyfox 14y ago

seems like it shoulda really taken off for independent artists.

therobotking 14y ago
Mmm, if you look at the site it's really not that surprising it didn't take off. http://zillionears.com/ http://zillionears.com/ 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.
- iagomr 14y ago
  Completely agree. This doesn't show much knowledge for the music industry. The huge call to action button and the blond girl are just a bit demeaning for someone who is trying to establish their name to their fans
- nemrow 14y ago
  Hahaha, i'll take the honesty!
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  Maybe I didn't have my morning coffee yet, but the video seemed to be too disrespectful of musicians.
  - human_error 14y ago
    That was my interpretation as well and I didn't like "sell your sh!t" thing. I don't think a musician would like his art to be called shit.
    - stereosky 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 14y ago

Ouch. One thing that leaped out at me was your mention that the first beta was a disaster because it didn't comply with Amazon's payment-processor requirements, so you burned a lot of capital making good on your promises. This sort of thing is why I keep saying more startups need a legal person on board early on - and with a surplus of underemployed JDs around, now is a great time to work that into your team plan. 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.

seivan 14y ago
Would they work for equity? Sorry I couldn't help myself :) /developer.
- jfarmer 14y ago
  Often, yes, if you have a good relationship with a well-established firm or have someone who does vouch for you. Most top tech law firms (WSGR, Orrick, Fenwick & West, Gunderson Dettmer, etc.) will defer payment or even waive certain fees for early-stage startups in exchange for a small amount of equity.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Some would. I know quite a few lawyers in startups. That's why I mentioned 'underemployed JDs' who have an incentive to explore other avenues if they can't get a job at an established law firm or public body. You might not be aware that there's a major supply-demand imbalance in the legal field right now.

andrewcooke 14y ago

More importantly though, people really didn’t really LIKE anything about our product. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. In fact, some people that participated in the sale didn’t even like our “dynamic pricing” system. They were trying to support the artist, so saving a few dollars didn’t excite them. They could easily have just gotten his music for free elsewhere. 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.

fuddle 14y ago

"Zillionears | Sell your $h!t with Social Sales!" - Sorry but as soon as I seen your landing page title, I was put off.

dpolaske 14y ago
Understandable, most Christian musicians where not excited about our slogan.
- tiredofcareer 14y ago
  Well, that's a comment that betrays a lot about you and, potentially, why your startup failed.
  - ivix 14y ago
    Likely they are extremely young and can't conceive of why that is a terrible thing to put on a serious commercial site.
  - lancer383 14y ago
    That and the landing page video — it was both cheesy, and patronizing to both musicians and their fans. And after watching it I still don't understand the "decrease price by a dollar" pricing scheme.
    - nemrow 14y ago
      All of these things I DO agree with. And yes, we are young. We might not use the word "shit" on our homepage next time. But Hell, I used the word "fuck" on the title of this article, and it sure turned alot of heads.
      - tiredofcareer 14y ago
        I was referring to the dig at Christians. Not the vulgarity.

eah13 14y ago

I love the honesty and the spot on diagnosis. For a site that resonates with artists, check out Reverb Nation: http://www.reverbnation.com/ http://www.reverbnation.com/ A sample artist page here: http://www.reverbnation.com/evangibb 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.

flaktrak 14y ago

Good post and you had me all the way up until you said "journey". I hate that word. Pre-internet Journey meant something now every man and his cat uses it to talk about the incites they had while doing something, it has lost its impact. However like I said I enjoyed the post until then.

rstevenson542 14y ago

Talked to 1,700 potential users and you still couldn't figure out that you were building a shit product. YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR.

arbuge 14y ago

Great story & thanks for sharing this. I was curious about why you chose to go with Amazon Payments... why not PayPal, or your own merchant account?

dpolaske 14y ago
Billing info was authorized, but not captured until the end of the sale period. Similar to what Kickstarter does. Amazon is really the only option (that we could find) that would allow that type of flow.
nemrow 14y ago
Dans right (he's my co-founder). Amazon allowed for a much larger period of time between authorization and capturing. They are the only processor that had the technology on hand for us.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

Music is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest industries to be successful in. Props to them for continuing to press on, hoping for a break and smart enough to throw in the towel and move on. Also, happy to hear you didn't mortgage your life savings and burn out in grand fashion. You're wise beyond your years.

jfb 14y ago

So did mine, largely because I was not able to commit to it for a variety of reasons that wouldn't be unfamiliar. I like reading the success stories, but I get pretty down thinking about my experience -- not the doing, but the way it ended up going down.

wellboy 14y ago

Knowing when to quit is like trading with bitcoins, you never know when to sell.

escaped_hn 14y ago

Can you go indept about what you did wrong that allowed payment processors to freeze your accounts? What about your software didn't comply with their terms that it had to be rewritten?

nemrow 14y ago
We were a middle-man to the artists. We had to setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This was the money goes directly to the artist and we get send a cut directly from amazon

astrojams 14y ago

It was a very successful failure. You are much more likely to succeed given what you learned from it. I'd say that it is a blessing in disguise and very much appreciate that you shared the experience with us.

mikeg8 14y ago

Thank you for sharing your experience but to me, the whole post is about how you didn't really listen at all and built something that people didn't want, which ended up failing, yet you still learned a ton. I bet you learned something but did this experience really teach you a LOT? You don't mention any other learning experience in this post (you say you'll write more later) but somehow in the end, this failure was super insightful. I just don't see how... Sorry if that sounds negative. I wish all entrepreneurs success but the end of this article just fell flat for me.

nemrow 14y ago
I hear what you are saying. I have tons of pages of lessons I learned that I will touch on in later posts. I tried to summarize the whole experience in to one page. My experiences took me to business meeting after business meeting, and opened my eyes to the entire tech / music startup scene. The main lesson I learned was not listening to feedback early on, but I also have insight on co-founder issues, legal issues, budgeting issues, personal/work dilemmas, etc.
- learningram 14y ago
  Can I ask how much money this whole thing cost ? Or is that rude ?

espadagroup 14y ago

Someone should make a new Amiestreet. The business model worked (dynamic pricing) and the company was acquired, then it went away...

cmos 14y ago

You done good. It's not supposed to be easy. You get an A for effort, and next time when you place your 120% into something you'll thank your younger self for getting the early learning phase out of the way when you were young and had unlimited energy. Do take a break. A year sounds about right.

pbreit 14y ago

Reminds me of Pud's Fandalism which he created pretty quickly and ramped up traffic also quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081 When it comes to commerce, I'm liking the model of first building an audience and then adding commerce.

locacorten 14y ago

I'm sorry but let me offer a different perspective. 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.

orangethirty 14y ago

Now that you have learned how not to build product, I suggest you take a one month break, and go build something else.Don't build the product without knowing what the market wants. In your case, people wanted an easy way to support their artists.Don't market a product in such way. In your case, learn the basics of online marketing, and pay someone to build a good landing page for the product.Don't take it so personally. Shit happens. It failed. Who cares? The more value you put on failure, the less value you put on iterating. That's where success comes from.I do have to say that your landing page is pretty crummy. That contributed in a huge way towards the failure.

rtexal 14y ago

Your startup may have failed for other reasons. Just saw the promo video on your website, am not impressed. It actually looked like a parody video. And the reference to drugs (are you saying that all musicians take drugs?). NOT impressed. Product with maybe a good idea but seriously poor execution/marketing. Be more serious when doing a startup (unless your intention is to be less serious, ala 9gag) or risk being a terrible parody joke.

onan_barbarian 14y ago

If there's a common thread between endless startup failure stories, then it is "we talked to a bunch of people who said they'd spend money on this" and when push came to shove said people didn't actually spend money. 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.

SurfScore 14y ago
I like to live by the motto: 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)
- ronyeh 14y ago
  So then... is Kickstarter the only true way to validate a startup idea? 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. :-)
  - hayksaakian 14y ago
    PPC + Landing page works wonders. Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea. Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale. (You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)
    - d4nt 14y ago
      I'm sure this works for things which you might buy having only see the website (and maybe a few screenshots) but beyond a certain level of cost/complexity you actually need to have some real software for them to try before they'll pay.

kingkawn 14y ago

A lot of comments have thrown flak, justifiably, at your landing page video; it is terrible. But the reason is not simply aesthetic, it's because you chose to present an image of musicians that relies on tropes which could only possibly be relevant to non-musicians, and even they would probably think it was not funny. Nobody who is seriously pursuing art thinks of themselves or their work in the way you portrayed them. Your problem wasn't amazon payments, or flakey artists jumping ship. It was that your audience wasn't even on your radar.

mrtksn 14y ago
I had a similar impression. the video looks like the founders really don't know anything about the business they are getting into. The video looks cheesy, like a corporation trying to speak teen's language to sell them ice cream, not like somebody who understands artists. 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.

jchulani 14y ago

Fast iteration is cool assuming you have customer validation plans. In this case, it didn't sound like one existed.

chmike 14y ago

Maybe it is a marketing problem. The domain name is nice, but what does it tell about you, about your product, about people sharing the url ? For you it was probably a matter of being zillionears but for music lovers ? The dynamic pricing thing looks also fishy in the sense that no one except you are in control of pricing, or its algorithm. This gives the feeling to be exposed to be screwed, the artists and the potential buyers. 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.

yoster 14y ago

Definitely a great learning experience. I myself had my own business. Made enough to live comfortably, but in the end, the IRS made me pay back every red cent in back taxes, and then some when it came to a screeching halt.

WillThisFly 14y ago

Man, I feel your pain. I have developed the most awesome products the world has never seen 4 times now. We had a "build it and they will come" attitude too :( 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 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...

chmike 14y ago
Excellent initiative. I'll check it. I hope you will also provide some general talks on strategies we could use to test this as early as possible. 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.
- WillThisFly 14y ago
  The main point of WillThisFly? is to test out an idea or project at any stage of its development before committing too many resources and finding that your awesome idea isn't so awesome after all. 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 :)

brendanborginc 14y ago

I wish you had read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It stresses the fact of build a Mean Viable Product very early on and testing hypothesis like "will artists pay for this service" in a real life scenario with an ok product. Aardvark did this in a really cool way (check Aardvark out). 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.

D9u 14y ago

"Fall down seven times, get up eight times..."

ausjke 14y ago

Hate the F word in the title, that word is for your mouth, not for writing on the public network so all can see(including my kids), unless, you have a 18-year-old warning on your homepage.

smackfu 14y ago

>Hit me up on twitter! I just got on there. This is not something I would be telling tech-savvy people.

workbench 14y ago

Read the whole thing… still no idea what "dynamic pricing" is.

rexreed 14y ago

"we felt like we had already gone too far to quit" -- the bane of many a startup that should just pack it up / pivot / rethink things the moment this thought crosses their minds. If you're already thinking you've gone too far, you've gone too far.

matehat 14y ago
I think part of the problem is that there is so many credible sources to draw from when faced with this sort of thoughts. The Lean crowd will tell you to pivot, but others will tell you to never give up, that big ideas are often brought to life by stubborn entrepreneurs. Many early entrepreneurs are often inspired by such stories and so that's probably quite natural for them to react that way.

ssw1n 14y ago

gg go next

tedchs 14y ago

Sorry to hear it didn't work out. I might just share two thoughts that occurred to me: 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.

jimmaswell 14y ago

Really seems like this was a great idea but somewhat poorly executed with the presentation on the site.

cybernomad99 13y ago

You actually have spoken to 1700+ artists? See if you could learn a few things about the market, and do a "pivot" as so many start ups have done. AirBNB started out selling air mattress...