7 ms·

Postmortem of Venture-Backed Startup, Sonar

180 points by joshfraser 12y ago

jmspring 12y ago
Sonar, for me, is an example of a feature rather than a product to base a company off of. Certainly set ideas in motion as to what one could do with location, etc., but I suspect this particular story will be told a few times over the next few years.
- themoonbus 12y ago
  I think the problem with these sorts of "connect with people near you" apps is they do a poor job of providing you with a context within which to connect. If you meet someone at a networking event, or at a bar, there is inherently some common ground or common expectation. Something like Sonar is context-agnostic: I could be running late to something, hanging out with people I already know, at work, etc. It might be a nice idea in theory to think you are bringing people together, but the real question is do those people want to be brought together at that time in the way you are bringing them together?
  - jmspring 12y ago
    The Facebook feature "friends nearby" is still around. I know a couple of people that used it for all of about a month then stopped. You are right in that context is key.
- shawnreilly 12y ago
  I agree; I think the concept has potential, but it was never executed properly. So it's still kind of vague in terms of what the value might be. I also agree with the comment about context. Hit the nail on the head. Without context, it just becomes useless noise, no longer any value.
searine 12y ago
What a cluster fuck of a product.
wehadfun 12y ago
They could have pivoted this into a way for companies to send instant coupons to people that happened to be close.
- joshrotenberg 12y ago
  I was thinking a 180 pivot: tell me when people I dont't want to see are nearby so I can bail.
themoonbus 12y ago
I don't know much about the product itself, but this was one of the better postmortems I've read. Well organized.
boomshucka 12y ago
It is too easy to assume this didn't work because of these mistakes. I'd guess it didn't work because it's a stupid idea in the first place. So, it's hard to really see if these are "lessons" or just noise.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Everything is a stupid idea unless it works. No one can tell the stupid ideas from the smart ones until after the fact. Facebook and Twitter: both stupid ideas that now have dominant market positions. The iPhone was "too late, too expensive, too lame" to take off when it was first released, at least in the opinion of some professional pundits. These lessons or observations are all OK, although I'd say that figuring out what people are willing to use or pay for is and always will be a huge unsolved problem. Sometimes you build something for a market that turns out not to be there. There are two types of technology: ones that everyone wants and no one knows how to do (think SpaceX) and ones that everyone knows how to do but nobody knows anyone wants (think Facebook). Everything in the social media/mobile space is a lot more like the second kind. There's not rocket science. It's all HTML and CSS and .js and nosql and whatnot. But knowing what people are willing to buy into, out of all the infinite things we could do with those parts, is a mystery.
  - derefr 12y ago
    > Facebook and Twitter: both stupid ideas that now have dominant market positions. No, they weren't. They were tasteless ideas. Pundits hate tasteless ideas (because their job is predicated on [being perceived as] having better taste than you), but regular people don't mind them. Some of the best ideas are tasteless. The entirety of the casual games industry (a $3bn market) is built on tasteless ideas. McDonalds' food is (both literally and figuratively) tasteless. Walmart's curation is tasteless. Summer Hollywood blockbusters are tasteless. Casinos are the most tasteless places on earth. But none of them are stupid—they all make complete sense, economically. They align with people's incentives; it's clear exactly why they make money, and it would be easy to imagine their business models working out if they were pitched to you. A stupid idea, on the other hand, is the opposite of something like a McDonalds or a Walmart: something that might be tasteful, might sound great in some abstract/idealistic sense, but is very obviously not aligned with anyone's incentives, and so has no valid route to adoption. Pets.com was a stupid idea. People didn't want to put in the effort to order household consumables over the internet in 1999. Ordering something over the internet in 1999 entailed an amount of effort about equal to buying it from a mail-order catalogue—and nobody was selling pet food that way, either. The logistics didn't, and couldn't, work out, without a whole lot of supply-chain scale borrowed from other lines of business, ala Amazon. And remember, pet food is perishable. If the only things you can think to say about an idea are reasons it won't work—and you can't think of even one cynical/self-serving reason people might use it anyway—then it's a stupid idea. If it would be great, if not for [some huge list of flaws], but there's at least one person out there in the world that none of those flaws will matter to? Then it's not stupid; it's a disruptive idea, and the next version will probably iron a lot of those flaws out and become a pretty great idea.
pea 12y ago
That was one of the best and most honest things I've read re realities of startups. Props and gl
mgkimsal 12y ago
"The decoupling of responsibility from control created ambiguity and confusion, tension and frustration for all parties." Blindingly obvious to some, and will never been seen by others. Being responsible for something you have no control over is probably the worst position to be in in any aspect of work/life.
petersouth 12y ago
Something I didn't understand is that if Sonar had millions of downloads is that just due to hype and marketing or did the users just plateau? Did they have a thing that nobody really wanted with alot of churn or dedicated users with slow growth at end?
- pkaye 12y ago
  The goal for these kind of companies is to package something together for a big guy to acquire before it all tumbles down. Sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn't.
- shawnreilly 12y ago
  My own personal opinion; The concept of Ambient Social Discovery should have been approached with more sensitivity towards the Users privacy. Lots of people were kind of creeped out by the concept; it was just too personal. Because of this, people were less likely to give it a try. I believe this placed the Ambient Social Discovery space into somewhat of a fringe Service, where technologists and early adopters were willing to give it a try because it's cool from a Technology standpoint, but your average Users wouldn't try it out unless their Friends had used it (aka it had caught real Traction, chicken and the egg). So this kind of put Sonar (and others) in a bad position because not only do they have the regular challenges that every Startup faces, they also had to deal with a negative perception of the concept in general (which was forward thinking at the time). I believe this greatly influenced the growth rate and adoption of many Ambient Social Discovery Apps/Services. Disclaimer: I bootstapped a competitor to Sonar, Highlight, and Glancee during this time period, but we never made it to Launch (problems with execution). My opinions above are based on all the (exhaustive) customer validation work that was performed.
willholloway 12y ago
I've been watching Ken Burns documentaries on American presidents while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional prototype for a hardware product I'm building. I find a lot of wisdom and courage in the biographies of people who have done great things. Teddy Roosevelt and his father suffered from bouts of depression, and the remedy they found was constant movement. They had a saying they would repeat, "Get action, be sane". Keep moving. It's the striving that counts more than the results. You've probably heard this one before but its fitting upon the death of a dream: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat" - Teddy Roosevelt So I raise a glass to Sonar, and all the (wo)men in the arena, whether they find victory or defeat. And in the final counting it's not a defeat, it's a strategic retreat. They will fall back, consolidate their position and go once more into the breach.
- kzhahou 12y ago
  I don't know man, I'm not a fan of inspiration by once-in-a-generation leaders. Not everyone's a Roosevelt waiting to emerge, and that's ok. I feel that HN tries to be very supportive, but inadvertently sets expectations too high, and then we see the depressed founders who keep banging their heads against a wall. Kudos to the team for trying and to the author for writing it up.
  - nosuchthing 12y ago
    Is it okay to say cynicism kills? No one is claiming everyone can do anything they want. Kudos to anyone who exerts effort in their great attempts and ambitions, rather than sit off to the side and make nonconstructive remarks about the failures of others.
coldcode 12y ago
Been there. Screwed up like that. Lessons for next time are usually the best thing to come out of failure.
diziet 12y ago
FYI, this is from 2013: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/rip-sonar/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/rip-sonar/
varunjuice 12y ago
Thanks for writing this. I'm no veteran of startups but I did have the privilege in a previous role of seeing near failure up close, working very hard to ensure we grazed the graveyard, and are now (my former team that is) growing steadily. The items you highlight are common across almost all startups, so the lessons I draw are meaningful across the board. 1/ Design startups for speed. There is no way in hell you will get rid of false positives. You need to make sure you survive enough till you hit a true positive. This does NOT mean writing more code faster. In fact, this means do NOT write any code if you can avoid it. Learn though extremely cheap means even if the means only return 10% of the signal of a working product. If people don't absolutely fall in love with the prototype, it's not going to work. 2/ Don't be blinded by big names. Big name customers love to stay in the know about what is going on. They also have inflated self worth. Go after the small guys, and start using that to beat the drum around the big guys. In a past role when I was selling, I was walked out of the building by a VP who called in to get rid of me. 2 years later they called me because smaller competitors had better products than they did. 3/ Engagement with a small feature matters a LOT - I agree with your take that deepening engagement for almost all companies prior to growth is a bad idea. It is relatively easier to find a "feature" 1 user likes, and then scale it out to other users, than deepen engagement with that user.
icedchai 12y ago
So what was the plan for actually making money? Was there any revenue at all?
- kra34 12y ago
  You can't ask that kind of question here anymore
allworknoplay 12y ago
This is a great writeup that tracks pretty much everything I know about successful startups. I started my career doing M&A for mid-sized tech companies (and saw a lot of varied outcomes), then got technical and have now been a software engineer for several startups, two of my own. You've got to manage your time exceedingly carefully when all that matters to 95% of people is your growth trajectory. Most potential customers and partners are nothing more than leeches; always identify and go after the low-hanging fruit; never listen to people that want you to burn like crazy to accomplish something crazy. He's right that companies are bought, not sold -- my old boss used to say "run your company like you're going to own it forever, or else you will." Above all, be honest with yourself about all aspects of your business, product, and team.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Excellent writeup. My favorite part is the suggestion to get your top three priorities and then throw out two and three. No startup can survive trying to be three things at once.
trhway 12y ago
"ambient social networking"... was Color doing it too?
idlewords 12y ago
It's ridiculous to give positive business advice in a post-mortem. If you think you've learned valuable lessons on how to succeed, demonstrate that by succeeding. Otherwise just tell the detailed story of what happened without the inspirational drivel.
- allendoerfer 12y ago
  Everybody on Hackernews knows how Google or Facebook were started. But when their stories are told, they are often focused on the one deal that succeeded, ignoring the 100 cases were the company almost died. It is inspirational and helpful to know what to do. It is even more helpful to know what not to do and which mistakes to avoid. You gain time to figure out other problems on your own.
gyardley 12y ago
"Companies don’t get sold, they get bought." I'm sorry that the author's company did something screwy with a daily deals company and it didn't work out, but this is extremely bad advice. For all but the most dramatic successes, companies are absolutely sold and not bought. Small strategic acquisition? Talent acquisition? Technology acquisition? Asset sale? None of those will happen if you don't know the potential acquirers and take the appropriate actions - usually backchannel mentions with a simultaneous PR push. If your startup's failing, and you don't have a plan to sell, you'll run it into the ground and you get nothing. With a plan to sell, sometimes you still get nothing, but sometimes you'll get a cushy landing, and sometimes you'll get rich. The author's company didn't go wrong by trying to sell, it went wrong by getting wedded to a single company who wasn't really interested (nine months? come on) and by dramatically changing what they were doing instead of focusing on building a shiny happy narrative that could attract other acquirers.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  Very interesting reply - have you got any more in-depth references/suggestions about this kind of situation?
  - gyardley 12y ago
    This SXSW presentation by Geoff Lewis is spot-on: http://www.slideshare.net/justGlew/the-terminal-plan-how-to-sell-a-startup-geoff-lewis-presentation-sxsw-2013 http://www.slideshare.net/justGlew/the-terminal-plan-how-to-... I'm also a fan of Basil Peters' Early Exits book. I don't agree that you need an 'exit coach' or an 'M&A advisor' to do this stuff, though, which is what he's been emphasizing on his website. http://www.early-exits.com/ http://www.early-exits.com/
    - danmaz74 12y ago
      Thanks a lot Greg - unfortunately, this could come in handy real soon for my hashtagify.me project!
- novaleaf 12y ago
bontoJR 12y ago
One of the best posts I ever read about Startups and failures. I personally have an history about it, I never found interesting to share what I have faced in the last 3-4 years trying to bootstrap an Hi-Tech business in Switzerland. With your post, you gave me the inspiration to write about it, I will definitely share what I passed so, maybe, I can avoid the same thing to someone else. I am not ashamed about failures, I failed so much time in my life, but on the other hand I succeeded in some other case when it was completely unexpected. Only people that try can fail, who doesn't try can only live in the world full "what if I had try...". I hope you can find a new, successful project and apply what you learned! Edit: Typo
lordnacho 12y ago
What did the investors think about the possibility of a juggernaut entering the space? If FB decided to let people know when their friends (or FoFs, or group members) were near, that could easily eat the whole space.

180 points by joshfraser 12y ago

Sonar, for me, is an example of a feature rather than a product to base a company off of. Certainly set ideas in motion as to what one could do with location, etc., but I suspect this particular story will be told a few times over the next few years.

themoonbus 12y ago
I think the problem with these sorts of "connect with people near you" apps is they do a poor job of providing you with a context within which to connect. If you meet someone at a networking event, or at a bar, there is inherently some common ground or common expectation. Something like Sonar is context-agnostic: I could be running late to something, hanging out with people I already know, at work, etc. It might be a nice idea in theory to think you are bringing people together, but the real question is do those people want to be brought together at that time in the way you are bringing them together?
- jmspring 12y ago
  The Facebook feature "friends nearby" is still around. I know a couple of people that used it for all of about a month then stopped. You are right in that context is key.
shawnreilly 12y ago
I agree; I think the concept has potential, but it was never executed properly. So it's still kind of vague in terms of what the value might be. I also agree with the comment about context. Hit the nail on the head. Without context, it just becomes useless noise, no longer any value.

searine 12y ago

What a cluster fuck of a product.

wehadfun 12y ago

They could have pivoted this into a way for companies to send instant coupons to people that happened to be close.

joshrotenberg 12y ago
I was thinking a 180 pivot: tell me when people I dont't want to see are nearby so I can bail.

themoonbus 12y ago

I don't know much about the product itself, but this was one of the better postmortems I've read. Well organized.

boomshucka 12y ago

It is too easy to assume this didn't work because of these mistakes. I'd guess it didn't work because it's a stupid idea in the first place. So, it's hard to really see if these are "lessons" or just noise.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
Everything is a stupid idea unless it works. No one can tell the stupid ideas from the smart ones until after the fact. Facebook and Twitter: both stupid ideas that now have dominant market positions. The iPhone was "too late, too expensive, too lame" to take off when it was first released, at least in the opinion of some professional pundits. These lessons or observations are all OK, although I'd say that figuring out what people are willing to use or pay for is and always will be a huge unsolved problem. Sometimes you build something for a market that turns out not to be there. There are two types of technology: ones that everyone wants and no one knows how to do (think SpaceX) and ones that everyone knows how to do but nobody knows anyone wants (think Facebook). Everything in the social media/mobile space is a lot more like the second kind. There's not rocket science. It's all HTML and CSS and .js and nosql and whatnot. But knowing what people are willing to buy into, out of all the infinite things we could do with those parts, is a mystery.
- derefr 12y ago
  > Facebook and Twitter: both stupid ideas that now have dominant market positions. No, they weren't. They were tasteless ideas. Pundits hate tasteless ideas (because their job is predicated on [being perceived as] having better taste than you), but regular people don't mind them. Some of the best ideas are tasteless. The entirety of the casual games industry (a $3bn market) is built on tasteless ideas. McDonalds' food is (both literally and figuratively) tasteless. Walmart's curation is tasteless. Summer Hollywood blockbusters are tasteless. Casinos are the most tasteless places on earth. But none of them are stupid—they all make complete sense, economically. They align with people's incentives; it's clear exactly why they make money, and it would be easy to imagine their business models working out if they were pitched to you. A stupid idea, on the other hand, is the opposite of something like a McDonalds or a Walmart: something that might be tasteful, might sound great in some abstract/idealistic sense, but is very obviously not aligned with anyone's incentives, and so has no valid route to adoption. Pets.com was a stupid idea. People didn't want to put in the effort to order household consumables over the internet in 1999. Ordering something over the internet in 1999 entailed an amount of effort about equal to buying it from a mail-order catalogue—and nobody was selling pet food that way, either. The logistics didn't, and couldn't, work out, without a whole lot of supply-chain scale borrowed from other lines of business, ala Amazon. And remember, pet food is perishable. If the only things you can think to say about an idea are reasons it won't work—and you can't think of even one cynical/self-serving reason people might use it anyway—then it's a stupid idea. If it would be great, if not for [some huge list of flaws], but there's at least one person out there in the world that none of those flaws will matter to? Then it's not stupid; it's a disruptive idea, and the next version will probably iron a lot of those flaws out and become a pretty great idea.

pea 12y ago

That was one of the best and most honest things I've read re realities of startups. Props and gl

mgkimsal 12y ago

"The decoupling of responsibility from control created ambiguity and confusion, tension and frustration for all parties." Blindingly obvious to some, and will never been seen by others. Being responsible for something you have no control over is probably the worst position to be in in any aspect of work/life.

petersouth 12y ago

Something I didn't understand is that if Sonar had millions of downloads is that just due to hype and marketing or did the users just plateau? Did they have a thing that nobody really wanted with alot of churn or dedicated users with slow growth at end?

pkaye 12y ago
The goal for these kind of companies is to package something together for a big guy to acquire before it all tumbles down. Sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn't.
shawnreilly 12y ago
My own personal opinion; The concept of Ambient Social Discovery should have been approached with more sensitivity towards the Users privacy. Lots of people were kind of creeped out by the concept; it was just too personal. Because of this, people were less likely to give it a try. I believe this placed the Ambient Social Discovery space into somewhat of a fringe Service, where technologists and early adopters were willing to give it a try because it's cool from a Technology standpoint, but your average Users wouldn't try it out unless their Friends had used it (aka it had caught real Traction, chicken and the egg). So this kind of put Sonar (and others) in a bad position because not only do they have the regular challenges that every Startup faces, they also had to deal with a negative perception of the concept in general (which was forward thinking at the time). I believe this greatly influenced the growth rate and adoption of many Ambient Social Discovery Apps/Services. Disclaimer: I bootstapped a competitor to Sonar, Highlight, and Glancee during this time period, but we never made it to Launch (problems with execution). My opinions above are based on all the (exhaustive) customer validation work that was performed.

willholloway 12y ago

I've been watching Ken Burns documentaries on American presidents while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional prototype for a hardware product I'm building. I find a lot of wisdom and courage in the biographies of people who have done great things. Teddy Roosevelt and his father suffered from bouts of depression, and the remedy they found was constant movement. They had a saying they would repeat, "Get action, be sane". Keep moving. It's the striving that counts more than the results. You've probably heard this one before but its fitting upon the death of a dream: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat" - Teddy Roosevelt So I raise a glass to Sonar, and all the (wo)men in the arena, whether they find victory or defeat. And in the final counting it's not a defeat, it's a strategic retreat. They will fall back, consolidate their position and go once more into the breach.

kzhahou 12y ago
I don't know man, I'm not a fan of inspiration by once-in-a-generation leaders. Not everyone's a Roosevelt waiting to emerge, and that's ok. I feel that HN tries to be very supportive, but inadvertently sets expectations too high, and then we see the depressed founders who keep banging their heads against a wall. Kudos to the team for trying and to the author for writing it up.
- nosuchthing 12y ago
  Is it okay to say cynicism kills? No one is claiming everyone can do anything they want. Kudos to anyone who exerts effort in their great attempts and ambitions, rather than sit off to the side and make nonconstructive remarks about the failures of others.

coldcode 12y ago

Been there. Screwed up like that. Lessons for next time are usually the best thing to come out of failure.

diziet 12y ago

FYI, this is from 2013: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/rip-sonar/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/rip-sonar/

varunjuice 12y ago

Thanks for writing this. I'm no veteran of startups but I did have the privilege in a previous role of seeing near failure up close, working very hard to ensure we grazed the graveyard, and are now (my former team that is) growing steadily. The items you highlight are common across almost all startups, so the lessons I draw are meaningful across the board. 1/ Design startups for speed. There is no way in hell you will get rid of false positives. You need to make sure you survive enough till you hit a true positive. This does NOT mean writing more code faster. In fact, this means do NOT write any code if you can avoid it. Learn though extremely cheap means even if the means only return 10% of the signal of a working product. If people don't absolutely fall in love with the prototype, it's not going to work. 2/ Don't be blinded by big names. Big name customers love to stay in the know about what is going on. They also have inflated self worth. Go after the small guys, and start using that to beat the drum around the big guys. In a past role when I was selling, I was walked out of the building by a VP who called in to get rid of me. 2 years later they called me because smaller competitors had better products than they did. 3/ Engagement with a small feature matters a LOT - I agree with your take that deepening engagement for almost all companies prior to growth is a bad idea. It is relatively easier to find a "feature" 1 user likes, and then scale it out to other users, than deepen engagement with that user.

icedchai 12y ago

So what was the plan for actually making money? Was there any revenue at all?

kra34 12y ago
You can't ask that kind of question here anymore

allworknoplay 12y ago

This is a great writeup that tracks pretty much everything I know about successful startups. I started my career doing M&A for mid-sized tech companies (and saw a lot of varied outcomes), then got technical and have now been a software engineer for several startups, two of my own. You've got to manage your time exceedingly carefully when all that matters to 95% of people is your growth trajectory. Most potential customers and partners are nothing more than leeches; always identify and go after the low-hanging fruit; never listen to people that want you to burn like crazy to accomplish something crazy. He's right that companies are bought, not sold -- my old boss used to say "run your company like you're going to own it forever, or else you will." Above all, be honest with yourself about all aspects of your business, product, and team.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Excellent writeup. My favorite part is the suggestion to get your top three priorities and then throw out two and three. No startup can survive trying to be three things at once.

trhway 12y ago

"ambient social networking"... was Color doing it too?

idlewords 12y ago

It's ridiculous to give positive business advice in a post-mortem. If you think you've learned valuable lessons on how to succeed, demonstrate that by succeeding. Otherwise just tell the detailed story of what happened without the inspirational drivel.

allendoerfer 12y ago
Everybody on Hackernews knows how Google or Facebook were started. But when their stories are told, they are often focused on the one deal that succeeded, ignoring the 100 cases were the company almost died. It is inspirational and helpful to know what to do. It is even more helpful to know what not to do and which mistakes to avoid. You gain time to figure out other problems on your own.

gyardley 12y ago

"Companies don’t get sold, they get bought." I'm sorry that the author's company did something screwy with a daily deals company and it didn't work out, but this is extremely bad advice. For all but the most dramatic successes, companies are absolutely sold and not bought. Small strategic acquisition? Talent acquisition? Technology acquisition? Asset sale? None of those will happen if you don't know the potential acquirers and take the appropriate actions - usually backchannel mentions with a simultaneous PR push. If your startup's failing, and you don't have a plan to sell, you'll run it into the ground and you get nothing. With a plan to sell, sometimes you still get nothing, but sometimes you'll get a cushy landing, and sometimes you'll get rich. The author's company didn't go wrong by trying to sell, it went wrong by getting wedded to a single company who wasn't really interested (nine months? come on) and by dramatically changing what they were doing instead of focusing on building a shiny happy narrative that could attract other acquirers.

danmaz74 12y ago
Very interesting reply - have you got any more in-depth references/suggestions about this kind of situation?
- gyardley 12y ago
  This SXSW presentation by Geoff Lewis is spot-on: http://www.slideshare.net/justGlew/the-terminal-plan-how-to-sell-a-startup-geoff-lewis-presentation-sxsw-2013 http://www.slideshare.net/justGlew/the-terminal-plan-how-to-... I'm also a fan of Basil Peters' Early Exits book. I don't agree that you need an 'exit coach' or an 'M&A advisor' to do this stuff, though, which is what he's been emphasizing on his website. http://www.early-exits.com/ http://www.early-exits.com/
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    Thanks a lot Greg - unfortunately, this could come in handy real soon for my hashtagify.me project!
novaleaf 12y ago

bontoJR 12y ago

One of the best posts I ever read about Startups and failures. I personally have an history about it, I never found interesting to share what I have faced in the last 3-4 years trying to bootstrap an Hi-Tech business in Switzerland. With your post, you gave me the inspiration to write about it, I will definitely share what I passed so, maybe, I can avoid the same thing to someone else. I am not ashamed about failures, I failed so much time in my life, but on the other hand I succeeded in some other case when it was completely unexpected. Only people that try can fail, who doesn't try can only live in the world full "what if I had try...". I hope you can find a new, successful project and apply what you learned! Edit: Typo

lordnacho 12y ago

What did the investors think about the possibility of a juggernaut entering the space? If FB decided to let people know when their friends (or FoFs, or group members) were near, that could easily eat the whole space.