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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 y

by 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.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Startups often live on the cusp of 'other people think we should quit but we're not going to!' I appreciated these sorts of posts because they are illustrative. The only thing to be bothered by is if you don't find anything to learn from the experience.
3am 14y ago
So, I guess I'll be the wet blanket here. It's pretty clear to me reading this that this person and their partner were nowhere near ready to found a startup. It highlighted the potential benefits for some people of getting a corporate(ish) job, learning about the business world, and learning the trade a little more before trying to starting a company. It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as a cautionary tail for people that have a startup itch, but don't necessarily have the necessary skills yet. I mean, this really talked about business and technology problems, but even assume they hit lighting in a bottle with the business model and didn't run into the technical issues, does it sounds like they would have been able to capitalize on it? I got a feeling that it was organized in an ad hoc way, and they weren't set up as an llc/s-corp/etc, had equity agreements, or basic contracts (otherwise, how did the one artist change not know they terms of the business, or opt out so quickly?) I feel like they would have ended up in trouble with the IRS, in a lawsuit with each other, or getting screwed by a less than scrupulous VC. That said, everyone is better off from sharing, and I thank the author for it.
- avenger123 14y ago
  You know, I respectfully really disagree with you. Based on the blog, I get the sense that the founders are in their early twenties. At that age, no one is "ready" for a startup. I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, etc. were ready to start their company. At that age, you just do it, since the risks are low. Unless your parents are wealthy or you have access to a lot of money, at that age its unlikely that a lot of money is on the line. Sure, they "wasted" time on this startup but this is valuable for the next company they will build. Also, if there was a lot of money involved (and it wasn't their's) its likely that the business would not have gone as far as stakeholders would have wanted validation.
  - dquail 14y ago
    Age is largely irrelevant. I'd argue that no one is truly ready to found a startup.
- dave_sullivan 14y ago
  Hmmm, not sure about that. I mean, it's clear to me that their startup failed. But "nowhere near ready to found a startup"? What does that even mean? Where do I get my secret decoder badge of startup readiness exactly? Reading through it, I saw and empathized with their mistakes--they decided they'd found validation before they really had. They kept it going too long. They ignored the writing on the wall for too long. But aren't those always the tough questions? When should a founder give up versus persevere? It's not a straightforward answer and as a business owner I find it frustrating when I see people (particularly other business owners) suggest it is. Bottom line though--everyone needs to decide for themselves if they want to go into business for themselves. But are they "ready"? Who the hell knows? There isn't a list of required skills and credentials for this position.
starpilot 14y ago
Learning from failures is invaluable. Focusing only on successes is like getting a math exam back and only studying the ones you got right. Paraphrasing Tolstoy: all successes are alike, each failure is unique. It seems like there are far more ways to go wrong than right, but developing that catalog of mistakes from which to learn is difficult when it can be so painful to share (and often to listen to) unpleasant experiences.
- guptaneil 14y ago
  I like the idea of a catalog of mistakes. TechCrunch makes it easy to get caught up in all the success stories, but there's no easy way to learn from the failures, which can be far more enlightening. I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know! https://twitter.com/StartupGrave https://twitter.com/StartupGrave
  - tmoullet 14y ago
    There's the TechCrunch deadpool. http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/ http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/
    - guptaneil 14y ago
      True, but those are more like PSA's than post-mortems. There's not much one can learn from those announcements.
- colemorrison 14y ago
  Great pull in from Tolstoy!
zimpenfish 14y ago
Definite commendation for even giving it a go. Remember the famous maxim: "I failed a thousand times but each one brought me a step closer to stealing what I needed from Tesla"

by cup 14y ago

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.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Startups often live on the cusp of 'other people think we should quit but we're not going to!' I appreciated these sorts of posts because they are illustrative. The only thing to be bothered by is if you don't find anything to learn from the experience.

3am 14y ago

So, I guess I'll be the wet blanket here. It's pretty clear to me reading this that this person and their partner were nowhere near ready to found a startup. It highlighted the potential benefits for some people of getting a corporate(ish) job, learning about the business world, and learning the trade a little more before trying to starting a company. It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as a cautionary tail for people that have a startup itch, but don't necessarily have the necessary skills yet. I mean, this really talked about business and technology problems, but even assume they hit lighting in a bottle with the business model and didn't run into the technical issues, does it sounds like they would have been able to capitalize on it? I got a feeling that it was organized in an ad hoc way, and they weren't set up as an llc/s-corp/etc, had equity agreements, or basic contracts (otherwise, how did the one artist change not know they terms of the business, or opt out so quickly?) I feel like they would have ended up in trouble with the IRS, in a lawsuit with each other, or getting screwed by a less than scrupulous VC. That said, everyone is better off from sharing, and I thank the author for it.

avenger123 14y ago
You know, I respectfully really disagree with you. Based on the blog, I get the sense that the founders are in their early twenties. At that age, no one is "ready" for a startup. I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, etc. were ready to start their company. At that age, you just do it, since the risks are low. Unless your parents are wealthy or you have access to a lot of money, at that age its unlikely that a lot of money is on the line. Sure, they "wasted" time on this startup but this is valuable for the next company they will build. Also, if there was a lot of money involved (and it wasn't their's) its likely that the business would not have gone as far as stakeholders would have wanted validation.
- dquail 14y ago
  Age is largely irrelevant. I'd argue that no one is truly ready to found a startup.
dave_sullivan 14y ago
Hmmm, not sure about that. I mean, it's clear to me that their startup failed. But "nowhere near ready to found a startup"? What does that even mean? Where do I get my secret decoder badge of startup readiness exactly? Reading through it, I saw and empathized with their mistakes--they decided they'd found validation before they really had. They kept it going too long. They ignored the writing on the wall for too long. But aren't those always the tough questions? When should a founder give up versus persevere? It's not a straightforward answer and as a business owner I find it frustrating when I see people (particularly other business owners) suggest it is. Bottom line though--everyone needs to decide for themselves if they want to go into business for themselves. But are they "ready"? Who the hell knows? There isn't a list of required skills and credentials for this position.

starpilot 14y ago

Learning from failures is invaluable. Focusing only on successes is like getting a math exam back and only studying the ones you got right. Paraphrasing Tolstoy: all successes are alike, each failure is unique. It seems like there are far more ways to go wrong than right, but developing that catalog of mistakes from which to learn is difficult when it can be so painful to share (and often to listen to) unpleasant experiences.

guptaneil 14y ago
I like the idea of a catalog of mistakes. TechCrunch makes it easy to get caught up in all the success stories, but there's no easy way to learn from the failures, which can be far more enlightening. I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know! https://twitter.com/StartupGrave https://twitter.com/StartupGrave
- tmoullet 14y ago
  There's the TechCrunch deadpool. http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/ http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/
  - guptaneil 14y ago
    True, but those are more like PSA's than post-mortems. There's not much one can learn from those announcements.
colemorrison 14y ago
Great pull in from Tolstoy!

zimpenfish 14y ago

Definite commendation for even giving it a go. Remember the famous maxim: "I failed a thousand times but each one brought me a step closer to stealing what I needed from Tesla"