10 ms·

Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

356 points by jefflinwood 12y ago

gioele 12y ago
> No way it would be an investment that would give investors a 10x return. I think this kind of expectations ruin good business ideas. A thing like Dinnr may have worked well if run for years, not just tested out for 18 months. It may have not produced a 10x return, but it may have been enough for four people to live on and, maybe, then expand to another city and have four other people live working at Dinnr 2.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  Maybe, but if it was your money paying their salaries, would you pay them to find out if it works on year 2?
  - hatethis 12y ago
    This is probably another lesson: if your business isn't worth investing in for two years to look for growth, it's probably not worth investing for one either. Most real businesses start extremely small, and grow over a span of 3-5 years. Expecting a business to boom immediately is yet another symptom of misguided startup expectations.
gingerlime 12y ago
Funny, I just bumped into a startup[0] that seems to do the same thing, and looks like it received some funding[1]... I wonder how well these guys are going to do. [0] http://signup.marleyspoon.com/ http://signup.marleyspoon.com/ - it's operational in germany at https://www.marleyspoon.de/ https://www.marleyspoon.de/ [1] $1.5M Seed according to https://angel.co/marley-spoon/ https://angel.co/marley-spoon/
- mswift42 12y ago
  Cooking is much more a thing in Germany than in the UK, so it might just work.
  - arthurcolle 12y ago
    Do you know of a resource that describes these various cultural differences? I could research each country/region individually but your post made me wonder how to develop a knowledge of these country-to-country differences that can be used to assess feasible of a product/venture
    - mswift42 12y ago
      > Do you know of a resource that describes these various cultural differences? Unfortunately not. In this case it's just personal experience. I am a German who has been living in the UK for 4 years now. Over here everything is more fast food and 'instant' oriented than in Germany.
  - twic 12y ago
    Could you expand on that? In my experience, cooking is a significant preoccupation for middle-class British people.
  - gingerlime 12y ago
    I'm originally from Israel, but have lived in London for 9 years and now in Berlin in the last 3+ years. I can't say I notice a vast difference. Especially if I look at middle-class, educated, well-earning people, which this kind of service targets. There could be some cultural difference, sure. But I think it's relatively small. Other factors, some mentioned on other comments, can come into play. For example: * much easier way to order fresh groceries online in the UK (including Sunday delivery, 1 hr delivery slot, mobile apps etc) * execution, execution, execution (I can't tell about the OP, but the founder of Marley Spoon is also a founder of Delivery-Hero, which is well-established in the fast-food delivery online market)
    - 12y ago
bhaile 12y ago
Thanks for writing it up. Processing what went wrong will lead you to better opportunities up ahead. Interesting though on #5: "As one of my first investors later told me, you must have developers on your core team in the same room." I think this is never the guess and am surprised when some startups take their devs offshore.
- jefflinwood 12y ago
  I'm not the blog author, I just saw this and thought it was an interesting story to share.
mrfusion 12y ago
So why is plated doing so well?
- gkmoyn 12y ago
  Why don't you go out and do the research, find out if Plated is, actually, doing so well, and then come back with some actual findings, rather than a flippant dismissal of this article?
  - aye 12y ago
    According to CrunchBase [1]: Most Recent Funding $15 Million Series A on August 9, 2014 Not bad! [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plated http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plated
    - benaiah 12y ago
      VC investment does not a successful business make...
      - frozenport 12y ago
        That's precious. Dude, its about the journey, man. Take the 40 Mil spend it on booze. Live fast, pivot and ride the wave to the soft landing. Then do it again. Beats a real coding job any day.
        benaiah 12y ago
        Well, that may be true, but I doubt that process is gonna make successful businesses, unless you lace that booze with copious amounts of adderall. I am not responsible for the state of your liver if you follow the implied advice.
    - brianstorms 12y ago
      Doesn't necessarily mean they are doing well. After all, Color got $41 million and . . . Color, remember them? http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/color-labs http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/color-labs
mrfusion 12y ago
What's an online supermarket?
- petercooper 12y ago
  Not sure if you're serious, but I'll bite. It's a grocery store (typically one of the big 'real world' ones) that also takes complete orders online and delivers them to you. It's a big deal in the UK with most major supermarkets now having an online component.
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    I'm in rural North America so that's a pretty amazing concept. Thanks. So this article is saying people can order the ingriedidnts for a single meal and have them delivered that day? That would definitely put him out of business huh?
    - bshimmin 12y ago
      Most of the online supermarkets in the UK have a minimum delivery spend, which means you wouldn't really be able to do that (unless your idea of a single meal involves lobster and champagne). From what I can tell, Dinnr didn't seem like a bad idea - I know a lot of people in London who really care about food, really enjoy making it themselves, and get excited about anything to which they can attach words like "artisanal"... and many of them don't really care much about the cost. Shame it didn't work out, really.
    - petercooper 12y ago
      Even in England, the population isn't dense enough except in, say, London to support same day grocery deliveries, it's usually the next day, with a minimum spend (not much though), and often a charge of £1-£5 depending on time of day. The problem with London, however, is that even compared to other large world cities, the density of food stores is so high that it's easy to get ingredients.. and the sort of people who are active enough to cook their own food are also the sort who'd be happy to pop out for five minutes for ingredients they can touch and feel first.
usav 12y ago
Thanks for sharing this! I appreciated how candid you were. I'm sure a lot of startup founders are taking a look at what they're building right now to look for the same patterns.
mgkimsal 12y ago
"Having such detailed feedback wouldn’t require diving into the data, but having someone spend an hour stress-testing my thinking and assumptions would have been gold dust and could have prevented a lot of effort wasted." Hrm... I get asked (on occasion) to do this sort of 'stress test' on someone's idea - and usually they don't want to hear the negatives anyway. Sometimes it can morph a not-great idea in to a better/great one, but sometimes the reality is "this should be dropped". I wonder if the author had actually received some of that hyper-critical thinking on dinnr earlier, and the feedback was "this is bad, don't do it", if he'd still pressed on or not.
- kjs3 12y ago
  Absolutely, and mirrors my experience. It seems the more the stress test shows big flaws in the idea, the more the founders want to retrench down to "you just don't understand how great our idea is and how infallible we are". At some level, it's the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship to soldier on when everyone counts you out, but more often than not, fundamentals are fundamentals and maybe you should pay attention to them.
- tchock23 12y ago
  I see this all the time with the startup founders I work with. It's a version of the IKEA effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect). Many founders (myself included) find it difficult to scrap an idea they have created and are emotionally attached to, even after seeing strong evidence to the contrary. I often wonder if YC has seen better results from teams that were accepted without an idea (granted, it's likely a much smaller sample size to work from). I wonder if that somehow makes them less susceptible to this tendency for founders to place a disproportionately high value on the quality of their idea(s), allowing them to focus more broadly on markets and identifying real problems to solve.
burgers 12y ago
> even if your company isn’t tech-heavy (such as Dinnr). I feel like this would be a giant red flag to me. You are essentially a logistics startup, and you believe this is not "tech-heavy". Logistics is likely one of the most complicated tech-heavy problems being solved right now. Things like pricing(30% margins in grocery food sounds very high), recommendations etc. Was there ever a way for food bloggers to have their recipes automatically pulled into Dinnr for readers to purchase? This is almost a 100% tech company. I wonder how much of underestimating that, combined with the founders possible(I'm guessing) lack of tech knowledge contributed to the failure.
- privong 12y ago
  > This is almost a 100% tech company. I wonder how much of underestimating that, combined with the founders possible(I'm guessing) lack of tech knowledge contributed to the failure. I think you are right about logistics being tech-heavy. But, I also do not think that having more knowledege/understanding of tech would have "saved" Dinnr. The tech and logistics (i.e., not being able to scale, fill orders, etc.) were not what did them in – lack of customers/market is what seems to have done them in and I do not think tech alone would solve that problem.
- dmbass 12y ago
  Based on the post, I would guess not very much. It mostly sounded like they were unable to get people to pay for their service, not that they had problems fulfilling the orders they did receive and at their scale (23 orders on Valentines Day), I doubt a super sophisticated pricing algorithm would have helped. This would maybe be a "100% tech company" operating at the scale of say Amazon. Over-engineering the technology would have been a huge waste of time and resources.
- randomflavor 12y ago
  I do not agree - they never even got close to the point of this being a tech heavy logistics play. 26 order on v-day does not require much tech. Maybe some paper and pencil and a spreadsheet if you feel so inclined. I agree that if he got a ton of orders and had the market excited for it - he might have failed from a logistics problem of not being able to serve the customer effectively, killing the brand.
briholt 12y ago
I can't help but have a very negative reaction to this, not necessarily at the author, but at the startup ecosystem as a whole. These are posted as "lessons" as if they were difficult to learn, when this really should be labeled "things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." Of course you should be self-critical of your product, of course you should test with real customers, of course you need a technical co-founder, of course you should pick a market with a bigger niche than tech-saavy-foodie-cooks-in-major-cities. Every mistake was classic marketing grad trying to do startup things in a bubble environment. These are the types of "lessons from my failed startup" that have been written a thousand times before. I fear over-exuberant and irresponsible entrepreneurs will repeat these mistakes for as long as startups exist.
- maxbrown 12y ago
  I can't help but have a negative reaction to your comment. Yes, similar "lessons learned" are proliferated throughout the startup world, primarily because these are some of the hardest things about building a successful business even if you already know that they're the hardest things. This is clearly just a self-reflective piece, entitled "lessons I learned" not "lessons you should learn". If the rest of us want the story, or the reminders, great. If not, no sweat. The ad hominem is a little rough.
  - personZ 12y ago
    Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem: They are specifically criticizing the message, not the speaker. And their point is valid: There is a wide "startup" belief that you needn't know the market or domain, the customers, etc. You just need to find a domain name and make a web page and customers will come and somehow a business will fall together. Only the overwhelming odds are that it will face likely failure. Another trait of many of these types of posts is what idlewords points out: The tendency for people to generalize lessons. This is the risk of the dirty sushi restaurant with poor service that inevitably fails, but then writes a broad treatise about how the area won't support sushi restaurants. We see this constantly among such "lessons learned", where macro inputs are often substituted for micro failures.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
This is only one level removed from what munchery does and I actually would pay for this service if it was in SF and they also offered on premise cooking lessons or something along those lines. This is still in my opinion a pretty good idea and has wings.
- diziet 12y ago
  On premise cooking lessons is not something that can scale / can be implemented easy. It also comes with a whole bunch of problems (letting a stranger into your home / kitchen while you are there, etc)
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    It's quite normal for the rich in the UK - as opposed to the merely middle class - to hire a personal cook to live on or near the premises and work full-time. These people used to be called 'house keepers'. Some of them offer other domestic services and may be called 'butlers.' That aside - there are some useful reality checks in the piece. Back around 2000 I had a conversation with someone who was trying to launch a pickup-your-goods service for online shoppers. He said that out of everyone he'd talked to, I was the only person who told him it was a losing idea with no commercial prospects. (It sank without trace not long after the first dotcom bust. After about a decade of unstoppable brand building, Amazon eventually reinvented something not unlike it.) It's interesting that he had the same experience of alleged market research and comments from prospective customers that gave him totally worthless and misleading information.
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    It doesn't have to be at your house. It can be at a dedicated location which does scale.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Doesn't that business already exist, and isn't it called "cooking classes"? Near as I can tell, none of them are drowning in cash. People generally figure out how to cook on their own. This gets into one of the points the post made: you need to verify that people actually prioritize the problem you want to solve. Cooking might fall into an uncomfortable crack, in this model, because the people most receptive to the benefits of a home-cooked meal with greater variety and quality ingredients are also disproportionally likely to be DIY cooks.
vinceguidry 12y ago
> I really would have needed a critic who said: > “Look, you have the following problems: > 1. Show me your market research. > 2. You do realize there’s no comprehensive online supermarket in Sweden, right? > 3. What are your assumptions about the customer’s problem? Yeah, after trying, I've found it's very difficult to get people to listen to this kind of advice and give it the weight it deserves. I feel like most would-be entrepreneurs either can already think in this manner themselves and so don't need me or anyone else to do it for them or are destined to learn how, expensively.
- twic 12y ago
  For "would-be entrepreneurs", can we substitute "people"? Is it the case that all people are either already self-critical, or immune to external criticism? That strikes me as a pattern i see a lot.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    From what I've gathered the problem is one of comfort. The state of mind that got them in the mood to build something is completely orthogonal to the state of mind they need to make that something grow and be successful. Plus it involves a lot more consideration than just 'getting out there and doing stuff'. So when you bring up all this other stuff, you're messing with their flow, breaking them out of their comfort zone, killing their buzz. You become that weird guy who's always telling them no, the more you try to impress upon them the need to critically analyze what they're trying to do, and to keep doing it as time goes on and they make limited progress. There is that rare breed of "person", as you want to put it, that can sustain a critical dialogue about themselves, but these people won't need you to do it for them.
idlewords 12y ago
I like post-mortems but I vehemently disagree with the author's approach of trying to draw more general conclusions, to appeal to a startup audience. What specifically happened? What were the recipes like? Did anyone like the food? Your experience is the most valuable thing you gain from a failed experiement. I urge you not to try to distill it into business platitudes. Be specific and descriptive!
tptacek 12y ago
This post links to an e-book by @robfitz called _The Mom Test_, which I hadn't known about before. It's fantastic and totally worth the price; also, that guy can write. I can see so much of my own bad pitching in the "how not to do it" examples he gives.
- mbesto 12y ago
  I've met Rob in London. Good guy and his thesis is spot on (both in the book and outside of it).
- chippy 12y ago
  How do you know that book is "fantastic and totally worth the price" if you hadn't known about it before? Have you purchased and read it in the day between reading the article and writing your comment?
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I don't understand your question, but I think the answer might be: yes, obviously, I found out about the book, bought it, read it, and liked it.
    - chippy 12y ago
      You write "which I hadn't known about before". I suppose it depends on what you refer to as "before". I assume it means before you read the article. The other alternative is that it was not the book which you hadn't known about before - but rather that the article had the link to the book .... but in this case, what does "before" refer to? Did you submit another comment earlier in the thread?
      - infinite8s 12y ago
        Well, the most logical reading of the grandparent is that he hadn't heard of the book before seeing the article, purchased and read it, and then submitted the above comment. Some people are fast readers :)
spydertennis 12y ago
You should have just delivered multiple meals at once. With an accompanying schedule and appropriate food that wouldn't go bad before its time. Then you are removing the inefficiency of buying food items that you only use portions of and eliminate things going bad.
learnstats2 12y ago
All the A/B testing in the world feels desperately pointless when a founder claims that the #1 lesson learned was a 7th grade statistics lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestive_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestive_question
l33tbro 12y ago
Post mordems like this make me sad. Not for the founder's bank account per se, but for the fact that he has all the wrong takeaways from his startup experience. You started off well. You did the market research. Great. You've clearly gotten people interested in the service. Even better. You demonstrated in your post that a clear-headed approach was taken and you objectively determined people would want your product. But then ... what ... you just buy a bunch of groceries and think people will just engage with your service? Not once in your start-up debrief do you mention your marketing approach. That's a huge red-flag for me about how you thought about your business. Lesson 8. Marketing. I believe this idea would have worked if you had decent marketing. Do I live in England? No. But I still know that the Brits are getting a lot more concerned about health. Even Jamie Oliver with school dinners and other social ventures. It's a sentiment that has cultural traction and I think the idea here is great. But marketing ... oh yeah that thing: - What was your overall engagement strategy? - What genuinely creative concepts did you come up with that would make your service compelling and sexy to your people? - How did you demonstrate how to use the service? - How did you make others see the value your market research subjects saw? - What compelled people to emotionally invest in your company as a consumer? OP, you're a smart guy - so I'm using your failure as a case-study for a greater trend I see amongst startups around "pain points". Sure, pain points are important. But people forget that marketing, done well, is the creation of pain points. I believe most startups die because founders don't have a vision beyond the mechanics of the business. It's sad to see post-mortems like these that point the finger back at the idea - which was inspired and had legs. I'm not sure what the marketing strategy was here (OP didn't think it was important enough to tell us), but I'm assuming like most he was happy enough with I-stock artwork and a quirky explainer animation that the public is so thoroughly bored of.
- twic 12y ago
  All the marketing in the world won't make any lasting difference if the product doesn't create value for customers. This product didn't.
  - l33tbro 12y ago
    Poppycock. This product has worked in similar environments. What's more, Rob found a proven value for it through extensive market research. To me it didn't land because of poor execution on marketing.
DontBeADick 12y ago
> b) People are too optimistic about their future behaviour. I read about a focus group once where a company was asking consumers about different color tea kettles. They had tea kettles in a dozen colors and asked people which one they would purchase. The responses were split fairly evenly among all the different colors. At the end of the day, the people who participated in the focus group were allowed to take home one of the tea kettles for free. Almost all of them chose white or black.
- steilpass 12y ago
  Nice story. Do you have the source to read it up?
  - davemel37 12y ago
    I definitely read this story as well. It is possible it was in Robert Cialdini's book, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." I may be wrong, but either way it is a must read book.
  - DontBeADick 12y ago
    I wish I did, I've spent hours trying to find it again. If anyone could link to the study I'd be eternally grateful.
chvid 12y ago
I am reading thru this and it is a good, recommended read however I am getting slightly annoyed with academic attitude of the author. Like batman in the cartoon I want to slap him but not for "sloppy market research". But for using the term "market research" at all. (This is essientially the first and maybe the second point reiterated.) Suppose you were a cook with your own restaurant. How do you figure out what works and what doesn't? Do you go and do market research, have questionaries, focus groups, do statistics, user-driven cooking or whatever? Surely not. You create dishes, put the new ones in the menu as today's special. Then you figure out whether people like them or not. How do you figure that out? Do you ask them? Of course you don't because you know that if you ask "did you enjoy your dinner?" People will just be polite and tell you "yes - it was excellent - thank you very much". No. You look at whether they finished their plates or send it back half-full. Whether you get any sales. Whether they come back for more. Even my mother knows this. When she cooks cookies, she doesn't ask me "do you like them?" Because she knows I will just say "yes - they are the best cookies in the world, mum". She asks me if I want another. And if I stay the night, she looks at whether I get up at 3 am to roam the kitchen for more of them cookies. This is basic human behaviour but somehow lost in the academics of business administration. The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all. How about - this is essientially takeway but you have to heat the curry in your microwave and then add the fresh coriander yourself - the upshot is that it will last a week in your fridge should you not eat it all tonight. Or maybe: It is protein shakes and vitamin pills for a week - no problem - it stays "fresh" for 5 years. Or: It is the latest Jamie Oliver book with ingredients to get you started on the first three dishes.
- chvid 12y ago
  Oh - I forgot the must basic thing that both my mum and the cook does: Tasting and eating their own stuff.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  How are the strategies you listed not market research?
james1071 12y ago
I am in London and just don't see who the target customer was meant to be. If I wanted to buy some ingredients, I would go to the supermarket or (usually a better choice) one of the many different foreign grocers that are 5 minutes away.
liuw 12y ago
The "Turd Polishers" picture really makes me laugh.
rcarrigan87 12y ago
This seems like a fairly easy idea to test without any capital investment but a bike and a landing page. 1. Throw up landing page explaining service 2. Have people put in orders via email or form submission 3. Ride bike to grocery and deliver items 4. Collect cash or use Square upon delivery Market test complete. Failure with minimal $ committed. It worries me that an idea that could be done for so little capital is able to raise money. These are heady times. Question to OP: did you ever consider targeting caregivers who would like to cook for their loved ones but can't leave the house for significant periods?
- pairing 12y ago
  This is the common advice I've seen for being lean but step #2 is really hard. How do you get people to put in orders on a brand new webpage? It's far from trivial to get an audience for your landing page and kind of goes against lean to throw 5k in ad money to validate something. Who has that kind of money to throw around?
  - rcarrigan87 12y ago
    step #2 is the absolute hardest part. If you can't figure out #2 then why invest in staff, logistics, a refrigerator...? The idea is to only focus on traction(#2). If you can't get traction then you don't have anything.
    - conductr 12y ago
      I agree but I can't help but think a subscription model would have benefited this service. Require people to buy 1 meal a week/month, try to automate it, reduce friction from the user's process of meal planning; these are things that may have actually gone the extra mile for the user + increased orders. Granted they may have tried this
  - rcarrigan87 12y ago
    Another thought, to prove the concept, spend $20 to print flyers, stand out at the grocery and explain to people what you're doing. If after awhile no one is hitting the page and placing an order, then maybe you need to rethink your idea.
tchock23 12y ago
It's a bad idea for founders to be doing their own market research. The prevailing advice from "startup gurus" like Steve Blank is that you must "get out of the building" and talk to customers face-to-face. Here's the problem with that advice (as Dinnr found out): 1. Very few people will tell a founder their idea is bad right in front of them; and 2. Founders suffer from the worst case of confirmation bias ever. They are only looking for positive signs that their idea is good. There are ways around this error if you know market research methods well enough, but unfortunately the prevailing wisdom in the startup community is the only way to do thorough market research is for the founders to "get out of the building" and do in-person interviews. It's refreshing to see articles like this where the founder realized their errors and didn't just outright blame the process of market research.
- michaelbuckbee 12y ago
  It's for reason #1 that for all support and followup emails I sign my emails as coming from "Developer Support", despite being the founder. I've gotten some great feedback from customers 'venting at the support guy' that I don't think I would have if they knew I was actually the founder.
- pimlottc 12y ago
  Thank you. Market research is a formal practice performed by trained professionals with experience in (among other things) framing the questions correctly and interpreting the responses. It's not something you can replace with surveymonkey and a few ad-hoc interviews.
- nashadelic 12y ago
  Very valid points and I believe Stave Blank addresses these by stating the users decide with their wallets. This is a key part of his strategy on model validation. The early customers have to sign up. He's even against tu I g early customers discount.
hartator 12y ago
"I will try not to go too much into the Dinnr specifics. Most of the readers of this post will not be interested in Dinnr itself." It's actualy the interesting part. Advices or lessons don't have a lot of value without context.
- 3am 12y ago
  Maybe I missed it, but I wonder what their pricing was like, in particular. edit: never mind, I found http://meatinabox.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/dinnr-a-review/ http://meatinabox.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/dinnr-a-review/ and it suggests it was in the $20-25/person/meal. That seems steep... I see other reviews (they did a nice job getting reviews and getting good search placement with them) saying 22GBP for an entree for 2, and 12GBP for an app for 2.
  - hartator 12y ago
    Yeah, I feel his conclusion was that the idea was bad by itself and blame people to be nice with him. But, maybe, it was the execution which was bad. Like crappy recipes with crappy ingredients and a poor experience.
xux 12y ago
>However, 5 months later, after the new website was up and running Why take 5 months to make a new site?
- michaelq 12y ago
  Probably because he outsourced it. He mentioned this as one of his takeaways - have developers in the same room with you.
sblank 12y ago
Hmm. Was this written in 1999? Or perhaps the notion of the Lean Startup is not understood in London? Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist. Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them. What's missing?
- benihana 12y ago
  The author mentions that Lean Startup was one of the most important books they read.
  - sblank 12y ago
    There wasn't much evidence that he understood it.
sgdesign 12y ago
Something I see missing from a lot of these startup discussions are the ideas of identity and community. Sure, "solving a problem" is important. But Nike isn't solving a problem that other shoe companies haven't solved a thousand times over. The reason they're successful is that buying into their brand makes you part of a bigger community, and that community has a positive identity attached to it. Same thing with a startup like Exposure (https://exposure.co/ https://exposure.co/). Sure, the product is great, but they're also fostering a community and projecting a very specific image. Without that special "something" they'd be no different from Flickr or the countless other photo sharing services out there. This brings me to Dinnr. Did you try to grow a community of passionate members organically by writing a blog, hosting events, being active on forums like whatever the Hacker News for cooking is? Or did you just try to "solve a problem"?
- theseoafs 12y ago
  > Or did you just try to "solve a problem"? This comment misses the point. The first goal of a startup should be to solve a problem. Companies identify problems and offer solutions to customers. If you've started a company without having identified and solved a problem a lot of people face, you've already failed as a business. Trying to organize a "community of passionate members" should be considered incidental, particularly considering that the overwhelming majority of successful companies (particularly young ones) have no organized "passionate" community whatsoever. You don't need to spend your free time hosting events to rally people around your brand identity if your product is legitimately good and useful -- and if your product is legitimately good and useful you'll attract brand loyalty organically anyway. Trying to do this in the opposite order by attempting to bind people to a brand that hasn't proven its worth and doesn't actually do anything worthwhile is going to be futile.
  - sgdesign 12y ago
    Well, there are countless successful products that don't "solve a problem". What problem do Call of Duty or League of Legends solve? What "problem" would the hypothetical iWatch solve? In other words, solving problems is great and all, but you can also make a great product that people just enjoy using, and let it grow organically. Of course, you could argue that any good product does solve a problem. But my point is that despite what everybody says, the problem doesn't always have to be the starting point.
mbohanes 12y ago
Hi all, I am the author of this post. Thank you very much for your comments, some of which were really thought-provoking. I will address them in a separate blog post when I find the time, probably next weekend. @mbohanes
- bbarn 12y ago
  waving goodbye to my 82 HN points with this one Dude, you're obsessed with being a founder, more than you have vision/plan/reason/skill to actually be one. You have all of the lingo right, all of the right words, hell, your post here even knows how to speak to why you failed in a voice that will get the rest of this community to read it. Your company name even had an "r" at the end with a missing vowel! Reading your article, like many others before me, I was annoyed at first but thought, you know, maybe this is just another young wantrepenuer who needed to learn for himself... Then I saw this response. "I will address your comments in a blog post". Really? Look at the great posters/founders that come in here and respond to comments. They do so comment by comment, to the point where sometimes I wonder how they've got the time and then remember how much I cared when I was trying to do my own thing and know I'd have done the same. Do you really think we're all waiting with baited breath to see your next blog post? Think it'll get upvoted too? Not likely. Something cool with security/lisp/new tech x/can't believe someone just did y/PG's thoughts on life/3D 2048 MMORPG will drown it in seconds. I'm not saying to quit, you're terrible, or anything like that. Just start being real, stop thinking about your presence, funding, seeding round 22, or whatever, and get to building something actually awesome, and you'll have the startup ecosystem banging your door down. The rest just makes you look hungry to be something you're not.
  - kristiandupont 12y ago
    Wow, I think that's quite a low blow in response to what I found to be an honest and introspective post. And what's wrong with commenting in a new blog post? So what if it doesn't get upvoted, that just means that he won't get exposed to another round of this.
    - taigeair 12y ago
pbreit 12y ago
Count me among the many wondering if the correct lessons were learned. I still have the feeling that the basic concept is OK and that the execution was lousy. He needed 10 very good, easy-to-provide/make recipes at a decent price point. And then market/sell the bejeezus out of it.
JackuB 12y ago
https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/432658088605515776 https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/432658088605515776
jqm 12y ago
I'm sorry to hear all the "psh...of course it didn't work. he should have done this and that's!". I thought this was an interesting read. Armchair after-the-fact analysis when you weren't the one involved (which can cloud judgement) is pretty easy. Thanks to the author for taking the time to write up his experiences.
ufmace 12y ago
Right after I read this, my immediate reaction was to feel kind of annoyed at the author. A little superficially, no tech or design talent in house, no food industry experience, and not much marketing and sales expertise, so what exactly does he bring to the table here, besides really wanting a startup? Also, this idea hits on one of those things that lots of people really want to believe that they would do - cook their own healthy, organic, gourmet, etc food - but very few will actually take much initiative to do on their own. That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't viable, but it does mean that your big challenge is going to be marketing and conversions - getting people to go beyond saying things that basically mean "I really want to believe that I am the kind of person who would use something like this, even though I'm not", and actually buy the product regularly. After thinking about it some more and reading some of the posts on here, this might be a viable idea, but it's going to need a lot better marketing to go anywhere. A few ideas, some stolen from other posts, mostly in an attempt to exercise my own marketing-think muscles: Make the product stickier - try to sell a recurring plan of a meal a week that has to be explicitly cancelled. Or at least email people who have ordered regularly to suggest new meals for them. You do have new, promoted meals, right? Have a spread of products, from things that just require heating, barely a step above microwavable, though mild prep, up to things that may require an hour or 2 in the kitchen to make. See which ones sell the best, and emphasize those. Try to partner with anybody involved in cooking or recipes with an audience in the area. If they're on the web, make it super easy for them to submit ingredient lists for their recipes to you, then an easy way for them to put a link on their site for "Get the ingredients for my [whatever] delivered to your door today with Dinnr!", with affiliate payments for orders. Now you're helping them monetize their sites too, so they have a good incentive to work with you. In person, too. There's probably some cooking classes in the area. Get those classes to plug your site for their students to get ingredients for an affiliate fee. Get some cooking experts on staff, and start producing your own youtube videos and blog content on how to cook things, with an emphasis on explaining the basics for newbie cooks. It would probably help you make sure you're actually getting good quality ingredients too. Make social connections. Make a way for people to tell their friends on FaceTwitInstaPint that they just cooked X, and it was awesome! It might even be good to make it so that they can only order basic things at first, and they get points or something from cooking them, which will eventually make them eligible to order the more advanced things. They can brag about how many Dinnr points they have. They can see that they're either getting more than the other guy, so they can think they're better than them, or they aren't getting as much as somebody else, so they need to order more stuff. Then you can suggest new meals, too, based on their skill level and their preferences. The real pain point isn't shopping, getting ingredients, or throwing away unused ingredients. It's wanting to be seen to their social circle as the kind of person who cooks awesome stuff. Figure out how to hit that, and you'll probably sell.
deleted 12y ago
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markdown 12y ago
An entrepreneur in New Zealand created such a service in March 2013. It's now worth $27m and is expanding into Australia. http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/mid-market/how_frustrated_cooks_built_my_food_LRXkljPy7bKBAcvUiZ48JP http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/mid-market/how_frustrated_c... http://www.myfoodbag.co.nz/ http://www.myfoodbag.co.nz/
- hv23 12y ago
  From "Creativity, Inc." (fantastic book), this quote: "Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better."
- taigeair 12y ago
  Seems like it could of worked..
- jpatokal 12y ago
  HelloFresh is doing pretty much the same as well: http://www.pehub.com/2013/09/berlin-based-food-site-hellofresh-cooks-7-5-mln-series-c-funds/ http://www.pehub.com/2013/09/berlin-based-food-site-hellofre... I signed up in Australia when they were doing a 50% off promo, figuring on getting a cheap box of groceries and then cancelling immediately. My wife loved it and now we're paying full price. Also, I found this bit about their target market weird: urban professionals, couples without kids or with one baby max Urban professionals without kids have time to shop. It's families with young kids that don't!
  - infinite8s 12y ago
    It's not only a matter of time, but taking your children to the store can also be an exercise in continuously saying no.
dusklight 12y ago
Uh so the author ventures the hypothesis, that no one used his product because there was no demand. Can I venture a second hypothesis? No one used his product because it was too expensive? How much did things cost and how did dinnr experiment with pricing?
porker 12y ago
I disagree strongly with the generalisations in #2. I do not find people in the UK people who actively do. The education model sounds very similar to Austria. London Business School is world-class and the self-starters who go there are self-selecting.
girvo 12y ago
Amazingly negative comments on this. How interesting. I thought the post has value, even if they are mistakes that people make over and over... which is interesting, to my mind, and means I should try extra hard to not fall prey to them. It seems like that's easier said than done however, no matter how "obvious" and "simple" it is...
- davemel37 12y ago
  I was also genuinely shocked by how negative the feedback here was. I almost feel like these negative comments are coming from founders who feel like frauds on the inside and need to call out others as frauds to elevate themselves and their own egos. Here's the truth. This guy took a shot. That makes him more entrepreneurial than 99% of the folks out there! Did he make mistakes. Yes. Could they have been avoided. Probably. But... he took a shot. He who fails the most, succeeds! You only need one success.
porker 12y ago
If anyone wants to hire a critic (per #4) I am your man! I find entrepreneurs don't like hanging out with me because I am "not positive" enough (you're meant to surround yourself with upbeat go-do people right?). However, this pessimism also translates to realism. I'm not always right, many times too pessimistic esp about new ideas, but many times right about why an idea isn't going to fly and where the weaknesses are. If you have ideas how to make that skill marketable (or even better received)...
- gnosek 12y ago
  "An experienced optimist for hire" ;)
endzone 12y ago
this guy has some funny ideas about "anglo saxon" education. british education is by and large very much like the austrian model in delivery at least, though we are not as keen on specificity.
freddyduarte 12y ago
My only question is: Why would anyone invest on Dinnr when it had an insignificant client base and no profits? OP must be a great sales person or have great connections.
mikpanko 12y ago
Looks like Blue Apron is doing much better with the same idea in the USA - according to CrunchBase they raised $50M in round C several months ago (http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blue-apron http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blue-apron).
mbohanes 12y ago
I am the author of this medium post. Thank you for bringing it to this forum and for the intense debate around it, some comments were highly interesting and brought me to re-assess my own lessons learned. I will set aside some time in the next few days to write a response to most of the points raised. I'll then post the link here (or you can follow me on twitter @mbohanes) Again, many thanks for taking the time.
mbohanes 12y ago
I am the author of this medium post. Thank you for bringing it to this forum and for the intense debate around it, some comments were highly interesting and brought me to re-assess my own lessons learned. I will set aside some time in the next few days to write a response to most of the points raised. I'll then post the link here (or you can follow me on twitter @mbohanes) Again, many thanks for taking the time.
thehal84 12y ago
Not suprising the story sounds similar to the pets.com failure. Groceries distribution requires good experience and knowledge of logistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

356 points by jefflinwood 12y ago

> No way it would be an investment that would give investors a 10x return. I think this kind of expectations ruin good business ideas. A thing like Dinnr may have worked well if run for years, not just tested out for 18 months. It may have not produced a 10x return, but it may have been enough for four people to live on and, maybe, then expand to another city and have four other people live working at Dinnr 2.

hayksaakian 12y ago
Maybe, but if it was your money paying their salaries, would you pay them to find out if it works on year 2?
- hatethis 12y ago
  This is probably another lesson: if your business isn't worth investing in for two years to look for growth, it's probably not worth investing for one either. Most real businesses start extremely small, and grow over a span of 3-5 years. Expecting a business to boom immediately is yet another symptom of misguided startup expectations.

gingerlime 12y ago

Funny, I just bumped into a startup[0] that seems to do the same thing, and looks like it received some funding[1]... I wonder how well these guys are going to do. [0] http://signup.marleyspoon.com/ http://signup.marleyspoon.com/ - it's operational in germany at https://www.marleyspoon.de/ https://www.marleyspoon.de/ [1] $1.5M Seed according to https://angel.co/marley-spoon/ https://angel.co/marley-spoon/

mswift42 12y ago
Cooking is much more a thing in Germany than in the UK, so it might just work.
- arthurcolle 12y ago
  Do you know of a resource that describes these various cultural differences? I could research each country/region individually but your post made me wonder how to develop a knowledge of these country-to-country differences that can be used to assess feasible of a product/venture
  - mswift42 12y ago
    > Do you know of a resource that describes these various cultural differences? Unfortunately not. In this case it's just personal experience. I am a German who has been living in the UK for 4 years now. Over here everything is more fast food and 'instant' oriented than in Germany.
- twic 12y ago
  Could you expand on that? In my experience, cooking is a significant preoccupation for middle-class British people.
- gingerlime 12y ago
  I'm originally from Israel, but have lived in London for 9 years and now in Berlin in the last 3+ years. I can't say I notice a vast difference. Especially if I look at middle-class, educated, well-earning people, which this kind of service targets. There could be some cultural difference, sure. But I think it's relatively small. Other factors, some mentioned on other comments, can come into play. For example: * much easier way to order fresh groceries online in the UK (including Sunday delivery, 1 hr delivery slot, mobile apps etc) * execution, execution, execution (I can't tell about the OP, but the founder of Marley Spoon is also a founder of Delivery-Hero, which is well-established in the fast-food delivery online market)
  - 12y ago

bhaile 12y ago

Thanks for writing it up. Processing what went wrong will lead you to better opportunities up ahead. Interesting though on #5: "As one of my first investors later told me, you must have developers on your core team in the same room." I think this is never the guess and am surprised when some startups take their devs offshore.

jefflinwood 12y ago
I'm not the blog author, I just saw this and thought it was an interesting story to share.

mrfusion 12y ago

So why is plated doing so well?

gkmoyn 12y ago
Why don't you go out and do the research, find out if Plated is, actually, doing so well, and then come back with some actual findings, rather than a flippant dismissal of this article?
- aye 12y ago
  According to CrunchBase [1]: Most Recent Funding $15 Million Series A on August 9, 2014 Not bad! [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plated http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plated
  - benaiah 12y ago
    VC investment does not a successful business make...
    - frozenport 12y ago
      That's precious. Dude, its about the journey, man. Take the 40 Mil spend it on booze. Live fast, pivot and ride the wave to the soft landing. Then do it again. Beats a real coding job any day.
      - benaiah 12y ago
        Well, that may be true, but I doubt that process is gonna make successful businesses, unless you lace that booze with copious amounts of adderall. I am not responsible for the state of your liver if you follow the implied advice.
  - brianstorms 12y ago
    Doesn't necessarily mean they are doing well. After all, Color got $41 million and . . . Color, remember them? http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/color-labs http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/color-labs

mrfusion 12y ago

What's an online supermarket?

petercooper 12y ago
Not sure if you're serious, but I'll bite. It's a grocery store (typically one of the big 'real world' ones) that also takes complete orders online and delivers them to you. It's a big deal in the UK with most major supermarkets now having an online component.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  I'm in rural North America so that's a pretty amazing concept. Thanks. So this article is saying people can order the ingriedidnts for a single meal and have them delivered that day? That would definitely put him out of business huh?
  - bshimmin 12y ago
    Most of the online supermarkets in the UK have a minimum delivery spend, which means you wouldn't really be able to do that (unless your idea of a single meal involves lobster and champagne). From what I can tell, Dinnr didn't seem like a bad idea - I know a lot of people in London who really care about food, really enjoy making it themselves, and get excited about anything to which they can attach words like "artisanal"... and many of them don't really care much about the cost. Shame it didn't work out, really.
  - petercooper 12y ago
    Even in England, the population isn't dense enough except in, say, London to support same day grocery deliveries, it's usually the next day, with a minimum spend (not much though), and often a charge of £1-£5 depending on time of day. The problem with London, however, is that even compared to other large world cities, the density of food stores is so high that it's easy to get ingredients.. and the sort of people who are active enough to cook their own food are also the sort who'd be happy to pop out for five minutes for ingredients they can touch and feel first.

usav 12y ago

Thanks for sharing this! I appreciated how candid you were. I'm sure a lot of startup founders are taking a look at what they're building right now to look for the same patterns.

mgkimsal 12y ago

"Having such detailed feedback wouldn’t require diving into the data, but having someone spend an hour stress-testing my thinking and assumptions would have been gold dust and could have prevented a lot of effort wasted." Hrm... I get asked (on occasion) to do this sort of 'stress test' on someone's idea - and usually they don't want to hear the negatives anyway. Sometimes it can morph a not-great idea in to a better/great one, but sometimes the reality is "this should be dropped". I wonder if the author had actually received some of that hyper-critical thinking on dinnr earlier, and the feedback was "this is bad, don't do it", if he'd still pressed on or not.

kjs3 12y ago
Absolutely, and mirrors my experience. It seems the more the stress test shows big flaws in the idea, the more the founders want to retrench down to "you just don't understand how great our idea is and how infallible we are". At some level, it's the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship to soldier on when everyone counts you out, but more often than not, fundamentals are fundamentals and maybe you should pay attention to them.
tchock23 12y ago
I see this all the time with the startup founders I work with. It's a version of the IKEA effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect). Many founders (myself included) find it difficult to scrap an idea they have created and are emotionally attached to, even after seeing strong evidence to the contrary. I often wonder if YC has seen better results from teams that were accepted without an idea (granted, it's likely a much smaller sample size to work from). I wonder if that somehow makes them less susceptible to this tendency for founders to place a disproportionately high value on the quality of their idea(s), allowing them to focus more broadly on markets and identifying real problems to solve.

burgers 12y ago

> even if your company isn’t tech-heavy (such as Dinnr). I feel like this would be a giant red flag to me. You are essentially a logistics startup, and you believe this is not "tech-heavy". Logistics is likely one of the most complicated tech-heavy problems being solved right now. Things like pricing(30% margins in grocery food sounds very high), recommendations etc. Was there ever a way for food bloggers to have their recipes automatically pulled into Dinnr for readers to purchase? This is almost a 100% tech company. I wonder how much of underestimating that, combined with the founders possible(I'm guessing) lack of tech knowledge contributed to the failure.

privong 12y ago
> This is almost a 100% tech company. I wonder how much of underestimating that, combined with the founders possible(I'm guessing) lack of tech knowledge contributed to the failure. I think you are right about logistics being tech-heavy. But, I also do not think that having more knowledege/understanding of tech would have "saved" Dinnr. The tech and logistics (i.e., not being able to scale, fill orders, etc.) were not what did them in – lack of customers/market is what seems to have done them in and I do not think tech alone would solve that problem.
dmbass 12y ago
Based on the post, I would guess not very much. It mostly sounded like they were unable to get people to pay for their service, not that they had problems fulfilling the orders they did receive and at their scale (23 orders on Valentines Day), I doubt a super sophisticated pricing algorithm would have helped. This would maybe be a "100% tech company" operating at the scale of say Amazon. Over-engineering the technology would have been a huge waste of time and resources.
randomflavor 12y ago
I do not agree - they never even got close to the point of this being a tech heavy logistics play. 26 order on v-day does not require much tech. Maybe some paper and pencil and a spreadsheet if you feel so inclined. I agree that if he got a ton of orders and had the market excited for it - he might have failed from a logistics problem of not being able to serve the customer effectively, killing the brand.

briholt 12y ago

I can't help but have a very negative reaction to this, not necessarily at the author, but at the startup ecosystem as a whole. These are posted as "lessons" as if they were difficult to learn, when this really should be labeled "things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." Of course you should be self-critical of your product, of course you should test with real customers, of course you need a technical co-founder, of course you should pick a market with a bigger niche than tech-saavy-foodie-cooks-in-major-cities. Every mistake was classic marketing grad trying to do startup things in a bubble environment. These are the types of "lessons from my failed startup" that have been written a thousand times before. I fear over-exuberant and irresponsible entrepreneurs will repeat these mistakes for as long as startups exist.

maxbrown 12y ago
I can't help but have a negative reaction to your comment. Yes, similar "lessons learned" are proliferated throughout the startup world, primarily because these are some of the hardest things about building a successful business even if you already know that they're the hardest things. This is clearly just a self-reflective piece, entitled "lessons I learned" not "lessons you should learn". If the rest of us want the story, or the reminders, great. If not, no sweat. The ad hominem is a little rough.
- personZ 12y ago
  Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem: They are specifically criticizing the message, not the speaker. And their point is valid: There is a wide "startup" belief that you needn't know the market or domain, the customers, etc. You just need to find a domain name and make a web page and customers will come and somehow a business will fall together. Only the overwhelming odds are that it will face likely failure. Another trait of many of these types of posts is what idlewords points out: The tendency for people to generalize lessons. This is the risk of the dirty sushi restaurant with poor service that inevitably fails, but then writes a broad treatise about how the area won't support sushi restaurants. We see this constantly among such "lessons learned", where macro inputs are often substituted for micro failures.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

This is only one level removed from what munchery does and I actually would pay for this service if it was in SF and they also offered on premise cooking lessons or something along those lines. This is still in my opinion a pretty good idea and has wings.

diziet 12y ago
On premise cooking lessons is not something that can scale / can be implemented easy. It also comes with a whole bunch of problems (letting a stranger into your home / kitchen while you are there, etc)
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  It's quite normal for the rich in the UK - as opposed to the merely middle class - to hire a personal cook to live on or near the premises and work full-time. These people used to be called 'house keepers'. Some of them offer other domestic services and may be called 'butlers.' That aside - there are some useful reality checks in the piece. Back around 2000 I had a conversation with someone who was trying to launch a pickup-your-goods service for online shoppers. He said that out of everyone he'd talked to, I was the only person who told him it was a losing idea with no commercial prospects. (It sank without trace not long after the first dotcom bust. After about a decade of unstoppable brand building, Amazon eventually reinvented something not unlike it.) It's interesting that he had the same experience of alleged market research and comments from prospective customers that gave him totally worthless and misleading information.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  It doesn't have to be at your house. It can be at a dedicated location which does scale.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Doesn't that business already exist, and isn't it called "cooking classes"? Near as I can tell, none of them are drowning in cash. People generally figure out how to cook on their own. This gets into one of the points the post made: you need to verify that people actually prioritize the problem you want to solve. Cooking might fall into an uncomfortable crack, in this model, because the people most receptive to the benefits of a home-cooked meal with greater variety and quality ingredients are also disproportionally likely to be DIY cooks.

vinceguidry 12y ago

> I really would have needed a critic who said: > “Look, you have the following problems: > 1. Show me your market research. > 2. You do realize there’s no comprehensive online supermarket in Sweden, right? > 3. What are your assumptions about the customer’s problem? Yeah, after trying, I've found it's very difficult to get people to listen to this kind of advice and give it the weight it deserves. I feel like most would-be entrepreneurs either can already think in this manner themselves and so don't need me or anyone else to do it for them or are destined to learn how, expensively.

twic 12y ago
For "would-be entrepreneurs", can we substitute "people"? Is it the case that all people are either already self-critical, or immune to external criticism? That strikes me as a pattern i see a lot.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  From what I've gathered the problem is one of comfort. The state of mind that got them in the mood to build something is completely orthogonal to the state of mind they need to make that something grow and be successful. Plus it involves a lot more consideration than just 'getting out there and doing stuff'. So when you bring up all this other stuff, you're messing with their flow, breaking them out of their comfort zone, killing their buzz. You become that weird guy who's always telling them no, the more you try to impress upon them the need to critically analyze what they're trying to do, and to keep doing it as time goes on and they make limited progress. There is that rare breed of "person", as you want to put it, that can sustain a critical dialogue about themselves, but these people won't need you to do it for them.

idlewords 12y ago

I like post-mortems but I vehemently disagree with the author's approach of trying to draw more general conclusions, to appeal to a startup audience. What specifically happened? What were the recipes like? Did anyone like the food? Your experience is the most valuable thing you gain from a failed experiement. I urge you not to try to distill it into business platitudes. Be specific and descriptive!

tptacek 12y ago

This post links to an e-book by @robfitz called _The Mom Test_, which I hadn't known about before. It's fantastic and totally worth the price; also, that guy can write. I can see so much of my own bad pitching in the "how not to do it" examples he gives.

mbesto 12y ago
I've met Rob in London. Good guy and his thesis is spot on (both in the book and outside of it).
chippy 12y ago
How do you know that book is "fantastic and totally worth the price" if you hadn't known about it before? Have you purchased and read it in the day between reading the article and writing your comment?
- tptacek 12y ago
  I don't understand your question, but I think the answer might be: yes, obviously, I found out about the book, bought it, read it, and liked it.
  - chippy 12y ago
    You write "which I hadn't known about before". I suppose it depends on what you refer to as "before". I assume it means before you read the article. The other alternative is that it was not the book which you hadn't known about before - but rather that the article had the link to the book .... but in this case, what does "before" refer to? Did you submit another comment earlier in the thread?
    - infinite8s 12y ago
      Well, the most logical reading of the grandparent is that he hadn't heard of the book before seeing the article, purchased and read it, and then submitted the above comment. Some people are fast readers :)

spydertennis 12y ago

You should have just delivered multiple meals at once. With an accompanying schedule and appropriate food that wouldn't go bad before its time. Then you are removing the inefficiency of buying food items that you only use portions of and eliminate things going bad.

learnstats2 12y ago

All the A/B testing in the world feels desperately pointless when a founder claims that the #1 lesson learned was a 7th grade statistics lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestive_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestive_question

l33tbro 12y ago

Post mordems like this make me sad. Not for the founder's bank account per se, but for the fact that he has all the wrong takeaways from his startup experience. You started off well. You did the market research. Great. You've clearly gotten people interested in the service. Even better. You demonstrated in your post that a clear-headed approach was taken and you objectively determined people would want your product. But then ... what ... you just buy a bunch of groceries and think people will just engage with your service? Not once in your start-up debrief do you mention your marketing approach. That's a huge red-flag for me about how you thought about your business. Lesson 8. Marketing. I believe this idea would have worked if you had decent marketing. Do I live in England? No. But I still know that the Brits are getting a lot more concerned about health. Even Jamie Oliver with school dinners and other social ventures. It's a sentiment that has cultural traction and I think the idea here is great. But marketing ... oh yeah that thing: - What was your overall engagement strategy? - What genuinely creative concepts did you come up with that would make your service compelling and sexy to your people? - How did you demonstrate how to use the service? - How did you make others see the value your market research subjects saw? - What compelled people to emotionally invest in your company as a consumer? OP, you're a smart guy - so I'm using your failure as a case-study for a greater trend I see amongst startups around "pain points". Sure, pain points are important. But people forget that marketing, done well, is the creation of pain points. I believe most startups die because founders don't have a vision beyond the mechanics of the business. It's sad to see post-mortems like these that point the finger back at the idea - which was inspired and had legs. I'm not sure what the marketing strategy was here (OP didn't think it was important enough to tell us), but I'm assuming like most he was happy enough with I-stock artwork and a quirky explainer animation that the public is so thoroughly bored of.

twic 12y ago
All the marketing in the world won't make any lasting difference if the product doesn't create value for customers. This product didn't.
- l33tbro 12y ago
  Poppycock. This product has worked in similar environments. What's more, Rob found a proven value for it through extensive market research. To me it didn't land because of poor execution on marketing.

DontBeADick 12y ago

> b) People are too optimistic about their future behaviour. I read about a focus group once where a company was asking consumers about different color tea kettles. They had tea kettles in a dozen colors and asked people which one they would purchase. The responses were split fairly evenly among all the different colors. At the end of the day, the people who participated in the focus group were allowed to take home one of the tea kettles for free. Almost all of them chose white or black.

steilpass 12y ago
Nice story. Do you have the source to read it up?
- davemel37 12y ago
  I definitely read this story as well. It is possible it was in Robert Cialdini's book, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." I may be wrong, but either way it is a must read book.
- DontBeADick 12y ago
  I wish I did, I've spent hours trying to find it again. If anyone could link to the study I'd be eternally grateful.

chvid 12y ago

I am reading thru this and it is a good, recommended read however I am getting slightly annoyed with academic attitude of the author. Like batman in the cartoon I want to slap him but not for "sloppy market research". But for using the term "market research" at all. (This is essientially the first and maybe the second point reiterated.) Suppose you were a cook with your own restaurant. How do you figure out what works and what doesn't? Do you go and do market research, have questionaries, focus groups, do statistics, user-driven cooking or whatever? Surely not. You create dishes, put the new ones in the menu as today's special. Then you figure out whether people like them or not. How do you figure that out? Do you ask them? Of course you don't because you know that if you ask "did you enjoy your dinner?" People will just be polite and tell you "yes - it was excellent - thank you very much". No. You look at whether they finished their plates or send it back half-full. Whether you get any sales. Whether they come back for more. Even my mother knows this. When she cooks cookies, she doesn't ask me "do you like them?" Because she knows I will just say "yes - they are the best cookies in the world, mum". She asks me if I want another. And if I stay the night, she looks at whether I get up at 3 am to roam the kitchen for more of them cookies. This is basic human behaviour but somehow lost in the academics of business administration. The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all. How about - this is essientially takeway but you have to heat the curry in your microwave and then add the fresh coriander yourself - the upshot is that it will last a week in your fridge should you not eat it all tonight. Or maybe: It is protein shakes and vitamin pills for a week - no problem - it stays "fresh" for 5 years. Or: It is the latest Jamie Oliver book with ingredients to get you started on the first three dishes.

chvid 12y ago
Oh - I forgot the must basic thing that both my mum and the cook does: Tasting and eating their own stuff.
jjoonathan 12y ago
How are the strategies you listed not market research?

james1071 12y ago

I am in London and just don't see who the target customer was meant to be. If I wanted to buy some ingredients, I would go to the supermarket or (usually a better choice) one of the many different foreign grocers that are 5 minutes away.

liuw 12y ago

The "Turd Polishers" picture really makes me laugh.

rcarrigan87 12y ago

This seems like a fairly easy idea to test without any capital investment but a bike and a landing page. 1. Throw up landing page explaining service 2. Have people put in orders via email or form submission 3. Ride bike to grocery and deliver items 4. Collect cash or use Square upon delivery Market test complete. Failure with minimal $ committed. It worries me that an idea that could be done for so little capital is able to raise money. These are heady times. Question to OP: did you ever consider targeting caregivers who would like to cook for their loved ones but can't leave the house for significant periods?

pairing 12y ago
This is the common advice I've seen for being lean but step #2 is really hard. How do you get people to put in orders on a brand new webpage? It's far from trivial to get an audience for your landing page and kind of goes against lean to throw 5k in ad money to validate something. Who has that kind of money to throw around?
- rcarrigan87 12y ago
  step #2 is the absolute hardest part. If you can't figure out #2 then why invest in staff, logistics, a refrigerator...? The idea is to only focus on traction(#2). If you can't get traction then you don't have anything.
  - conductr 12y ago
    I agree but I can't help but think a subscription model would have benefited this service. Require people to buy 1 meal a week/month, try to automate it, reduce friction from the user's process of meal planning; these are things that may have actually gone the extra mile for the user + increased orders. Granted they may have tried this
- rcarrigan87 12y ago
  Another thought, to prove the concept, spend $20 to print flyers, stand out at the grocery and explain to people what you're doing. If after awhile no one is hitting the page and placing an order, then maybe you need to rethink your idea.

tchock23 12y ago

It's a bad idea for founders to be doing their own market research. The prevailing advice from "startup gurus" like Steve Blank is that you must "get out of the building" and talk to customers face-to-face. Here's the problem with that advice (as Dinnr found out): 1. Very few people will tell a founder their idea is bad right in front of them; and 2. Founders suffer from the worst case of confirmation bias ever. They are only looking for positive signs that their idea is good. There are ways around this error if you know market research methods well enough, but unfortunately the prevailing wisdom in the startup community is the only way to do thorough market research is for the founders to "get out of the building" and do in-person interviews. It's refreshing to see articles like this where the founder realized their errors and didn't just outright blame the process of market research.

michaelbuckbee 12y ago
It's for reason #1 that for all support and followup emails I sign my emails as coming from "Developer Support", despite being the founder. I've gotten some great feedback from customers 'venting at the support guy' that I don't think I would have if they knew I was actually the founder.
pimlottc 12y ago
Thank you. Market research is a formal practice performed by trained professionals with experience in (among other things) framing the questions correctly and interpreting the responses. It's not something you can replace with surveymonkey and a few ad-hoc interviews.
nashadelic 12y ago
Very valid points and I believe Stave Blank addresses these by stating the users decide with their wallets. This is a key part of his strategy on model validation. The early customers have to sign up. He's even against tu I g early customers discount.

hartator 12y ago

"I will try not to go too much into the Dinnr specifics. Most of the readers of this post will not be interested in Dinnr itself." It's actualy the interesting part. Advices or lessons don't have a lot of value without context.

3am 12y ago
Maybe I missed it, but I wonder what their pricing was like, in particular. edit: never mind, I found http://meatinabox.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/dinnr-a-review/ http://meatinabox.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/dinnr-a-review/ and it suggests it was in the $20-25/person/meal. That seems steep... I see other reviews (they did a nice job getting reviews and getting good search placement with them) saying 22GBP for an entree for 2, and 12GBP for an app for 2.
- hartator 12y ago
  Yeah, I feel his conclusion was that the idea was bad by itself and blame people to be nice with him. But, maybe, it was the execution which was bad. Like crappy recipes with crappy ingredients and a poor experience.

xux 12y ago

>However, 5 months later, after the new website was up and running Why take 5 months to make a new site?

michaelq 12y ago
Probably because he outsourced it. He mentioned this as one of his takeaways - have developers in the same room with you.

sblank 12y ago

Hmm. Was this written in 1999? Or perhaps the notion of the Lean Startup is not understood in London? Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist. Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them. What's missing?

benihana 12y ago
The author mentions that Lean Startup was one of the most important books they read.
- sblank 12y ago
  There wasn't much evidence that he understood it.

sgdesign 12y ago

Something I see missing from a lot of these startup discussions are the ideas of identity and community. Sure, "solving a problem" is important. But Nike isn't solving a problem that other shoe companies haven't solved a thousand times over. The reason they're successful is that buying into their brand makes you part of a bigger community, and that community has a positive identity attached to it. Same thing with a startup like Exposure (https://exposure.co/ https://exposure.co/). Sure, the product is great, but they're also fostering a community and projecting a very specific image. Without that special "something" they'd be no different from Flickr or the countless other photo sharing services out there. This brings me to Dinnr. Did you try to grow a community of passionate members organically by writing a blog, hosting events, being active on forums like whatever the Hacker News for cooking is? Or did you just try to "solve a problem"?

theseoafs 12y ago
> Or did you just try to "solve a problem"? This comment misses the point. The first goal of a startup should be to solve a problem. Companies identify problems and offer solutions to customers. If you've started a company without having identified and solved a problem a lot of people face, you've already failed as a business. Trying to organize a "community of passionate members" should be considered incidental, particularly considering that the overwhelming majority of successful companies (particularly young ones) have no organized "passionate" community whatsoever. You don't need to spend your free time hosting events to rally people around your brand identity if your product is legitimately good and useful -- and if your product is legitimately good and useful you'll attract brand loyalty organically anyway. Trying to do this in the opposite order by attempting to bind people to a brand that hasn't proven its worth and doesn't actually do anything worthwhile is going to be futile.
- sgdesign 12y ago
  Well, there are countless successful products that don't "solve a problem". What problem do Call of Duty or League of Legends solve? What "problem" would the hypothetical iWatch solve? In other words, solving problems is great and all, but you can also make a great product that people just enjoy using, and let it grow organically. Of course, you could argue that any good product does solve a problem. But my point is that despite what everybody says, the problem doesn't always have to be the starting point.

mbohanes 12y ago

Hi all, I am the author of this post. Thank you very much for your comments, some of which were really thought-provoking. I will address them in a separate blog post when I find the time, probably next weekend. @mbohanes

bbarn 12y ago
waving goodbye to my 82 HN points with this one Dude, you're obsessed with being a founder, more than you have vision/plan/reason/skill to actually be one. You have all of the lingo right, all of the right words, hell, your post here even knows how to speak to why you failed in a voice that will get the rest of this community to read it. Your company name even had an "r" at the end with a missing vowel! Reading your article, like many others before me, I was annoyed at first but thought, you know, maybe this is just another young wantrepenuer who needed to learn for himself... Then I saw this response. "I will address your comments in a blog post". Really? Look at the great posters/founders that come in here and respond to comments. They do so comment by comment, to the point where sometimes I wonder how they've got the time and then remember how much I cared when I was trying to do my own thing and know I'd have done the same. Do you really think we're all waiting with baited breath to see your next blog post? Think it'll get upvoted too? Not likely. Something cool with security/lisp/new tech x/can't believe someone just did y/PG's thoughts on life/3D 2048 MMORPG will drown it in seconds. I'm not saying to quit, you're terrible, or anything like that. Just start being real, stop thinking about your presence, funding, seeding round 22, or whatever, and get to building something actually awesome, and you'll have the startup ecosystem banging your door down. The rest just makes you look hungry to be something you're not.
- kristiandupont 12y ago
  Wow, I think that's quite a low blow in response to what I found to be an honest and introspective post. And what's wrong with commenting in a new blog post? So what if it doesn't get upvoted, that just means that he won't get exposed to another round of this.
  - taigeair 12y ago

pbreit 12y ago

Count me among the many wondering if the correct lessons were learned. I still have the feeling that the basic concept is OK and that the execution was lousy. He needed 10 very good, easy-to-provide/make recipes at a decent price point. And then market/sell the bejeezus out of it.

JackuB 12y ago

https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/432658088605515776 https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/432658088605515776

jqm 12y ago

I'm sorry to hear all the "psh...of course it didn't work. he should have done this and that's!". I thought this was an interesting read. Armchair after-the-fact analysis when you weren't the one involved (which can cloud judgement) is pretty easy. Thanks to the author for taking the time to write up his experiences.

ufmace 12y ago

Right after I read this, my immediate reaction was to feel kind of annoyed at the author. A little superficially, no tech or design talent in house, no food industry experience, and not much marketing and sales expertise, so what exactly does he bring to the table here, besides really wanting a startup? Also, this idea hits on one of those things that lots of people really want to believe that they would do - cook their own healthy, organic, gourmet, etc food - but very few will actually take much initiative to do on their own. That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't viable, but it does mean that your big challenge is going to be marketing and conversions - getting people to go beyond saying things that basically mean "I really want to believe that I am the kind of person who would use something like this, even though I'm not", and actually buy the product regularly. After thinking about it some more and reading some of the posts on here, this might be a viable idea, but it's going to need a lot better marketing to go anywhere. A few ideas, some stolen from other posts, mostly in an attempt to exercise my own marketing-think muscles: Make the product stickier - try to sell a recurring plan of a meal a week that has to be explicitly cancelled. Or at least email people who have ordered regularly to suggest new meals for them. You do have new, promoted meals, right? Have a spread of products, from things that just require heating, barely a step above microwavable, though mild prep, up to things that may require an hour or 2 in the kitchen to make. See which ones sell the best, and emphasize those. Try to partner with anybody involved in cooking or recipes with an audience in the area. If they're on the web, make it super easy for them to submit ingredient lists for their recipes to you, then an easy way for them to put a link on their site for "Get the ingredients for my [whatever] delivered to your door today with Dinnr!", with affiliate payments for orders. Now you're helping them monetize their sites too, so they have a good incentive to work with you. In person, too. There's probably some cooking classes in the area. Get those classes to plug your site for their students to get ingredients for an affiliate fee. Get some cooking experts on staff, and start producing your own youtube videos and blog content on how to cook things, with an emphasis on explaining the basics for newbie cooks. It would probably help you make sure you're actually getting good quality ingredients too. Make social connections. Make a way for people to tell their friends on FaceTwitInstaPint that they just cooked X, and it was awesome! It might even be good to make it so that they can only order basic things at first, and they get points or something from cooking them, which will eventually make them eligible to order the more advanced things. They can brag about how many Dinnr points they have. They can see that they're either getting more than the other guy, so they can think they're better than them, or they aren't getting as much as somebody else, so they need to order more stuff. Then you can suggest new meals, too, based on their skill level and their preferences. The real pain point isn't shopping, getting ingredients, or throwing away unused ingredients. It's wanting to be seen to their social circle as the kind of person who cooks awesome stuff. Figure out how to hit that, and you'll probably sell.

deleted 12y ago

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markdown 12y ago

An entrepreneur in New Zealand created such a service in March 2013. It's now worth $27m and is expanding into Australia. http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/mid-market/how_frustrated_cooks_built_my_food_LRXkljPy7bKBAcvUiZ48JP http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/mid-market/how_frustrated_c... http://www.myfoodbag.co.nz/ http://www.myfoodbag.co.nz/

hv23 12y ago
From "Creativity, Inc." (fantastic book), this quote: "Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better."
taigeair 12y ago
Seems like it could of worked..
jpatokal 12y ago
HelloFresh is doing pretty much the same as well: http://www.pehub.com/2013/09/berlin-based-food-site-hellofresh-cooks-7-5-mln-series-c-funds/ http://www.pehub.com/2013/09/berlin-based-food-site-hellofre... I signed up in Australia when they were doing a 50% off promo, figuring on getting a cheap box of groceries and then cancelling immediately. My wife loved it and now we're paying full price. Also, I found this bit about their target market weird: urban professionals, couples without kids or with one baby max Urban professionals without kids have time to shop. It's families with young kids that don't!
- infinite8s 12y ago
  It's not only a matter of time, but taking your children to the store can also be an exercise in continuously saying no.

dusklight 12y ago

Uh so the author ventures the hypothesis, that no one used his product because there was no demand. Can I venture a second hypothesis? No one used his product because it was too expensive? How much did things cost and how did dinnr experiment with pricing?

porker 12y ago

I disagree strongly with the generalisations in #2. I do not find people in the UK people who actively do. The education model sounds very similar to Austria. London Business School is world-class and the self-starters who go there are self-selecting.

girvo 12y ago

Amazingly negative comments on this. How interesting. I thought the post has value, even if they are mistakes that people make over and over... which is interesting, to my mind, and means I should try extra hard to not fall prey to them. It seems like that's easier said than done however, no matter how "obvious" and "simple" it is...

davemel37 12y ago
I was also genuinely shocked by how negative the feedback here was. I almost feel like these negative comments are coming from founders who feel like frauds on the inside and need to call out others as frauds to elevate themselves and their own egos. Here's the truth. This guy took a shot. That makes him more entrepreneurial than 99% of the folks out there! Did he make mistakes. Yes. Could they have been avoided. Probably. But... he took a shot. He who fails the most, succeeds! You only need one success.

porker 12y ago

If anyone wants to hire a critic (per #4) I am your man! I find entrepreneurs don't like hanging out with me because I am "not positive" enough (you're meant to surround yourself with upbeat go-do people right?). However, this pessimism also translates to realism. I'm not always right, many times too pessimistic esp about new ideas, but many times right about why an idea isn't going to fly and where the weaknesses are. If you have ideas how to make that skill marketable (or even better received)...

gnosek 12y ago
"An experienced optimist for hire" ;)

endzone 12y ago

this guy has some funny ideas about "anglo saxon" education. british education is by and large very much like the austrian model in delivery at least, though we are not as keen on specificity.

freddyduarte 12y ago

My only question is: Why would anyone invest on Dinnr when it had an insignificant client base and no profits? OP must be a great sales person or have great connections.

mikpanko 12y ago

Looks like Blue Apron is doing much better with the same idea in the USA - according to CrunchBase they raised $50M in round C several months ago (http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blue-apron http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blue-apron).

mbohanes 12y ago

I am the author of this medium post. Thank you for bringing it to this forum and for the intense debate around it, some comments were highly interesting and brought me to re-assess my own lessons learned. I will set aside some time in the next few days to write a response to most of the points raised. I'll then post the link here (or you can follow me on twitter @mbohanes) Again, many thanks for taking the time.

mbohanes 12y ago

thehal84 12y ago

Not suprising the story sounds similar to the pets.com failure. Groceries distribution requires good experience and knowledge of logistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com