How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code
I’ve been reading HN for a long time now and love the way the community shares thoughts with each other. I haven’t done anything extraordinary or extremely successful, but I want to chip in to the community with this experience that I find pretty interesting.
A year ago, I moved to San Francisco from rural Missouri hoping to join the start-up world. At the same time, I met a friend, Zac, who also just moved to the bay area around that time but had left his job to pursue something more interesting. We decided to become partners and start hacking stuff together.
Since we were new to the city and we didn’t know any one, we decided to build a mobile app that lets people use their phone to read the profiles of others nearby. It was supposed to help people “break the ice” and meet new people. This was our first startup. We coded the product in a week and pushed the product live.
Once live, we got like 5 users, since no one really knew about it. To promote this product, we decided to target events, since we thought that events is where people would like to meet each other. We locked ourselves in a room and asked this question over and over: “What is something valuable we can provide to event organizers so that they can promote our product?”
Zac finally came up with an idea. He proposed that we could build a kiosk where attendees can type in their name, and a name badge would instantly print. Then the attendees would be integrated into our mobile app as well. At first, it sounded insanely dumb (what would my mom think if I told her that I moved 2000 miles away from home to print paper name badges?), and I laughed really hard. But after thinking about it, it seemed “cool”, and we gave it a try.
In a day of work, we wrote the software in 300 lines of code and tested it. We ordered a label printer from Dymo and hooked them up to a Dell Mini 10v netbook. After that was done, we contacted an event organizer, convinced him that our system wasn’t going to fail, and asked if we could print name badges for him.
The event organizer let us try out our system, and that night turned out to be amazing. People thought it was the coolest thing ever to type their name in a laptop and instantly have a name badge print out. At the end of the night, we handed out lots of cards and got lots of people to try our mobile app. It was the first time in my life that there was “buzz” around something I created.
We continued to hit events and print name badges. We bought more printers and lots and lots of labels. We bought a huge travel suitcase to hold everything, and we carried it everywhere to print name badges for events.
The experience was amazing. Not only did we get a lot of people to try our mobile app, but all the attendees thought it was the “coolest” gadget ever. I guess we essentially “engineered” our way into these $600 technology events for free. Many event organizers gave us the front-seats sponsor booth, without charging us a dollar. Some gave us free advertising banners at their events. Most importantly, everyone walked around with our logo on their shirt. We shook all their hands as they walked into the door. Advertising can’t get any better than that. We quickly got our mobile app into the hands of our users, and talked to more than 500+ directly.
Unfortunately, after a month passed, we realized that our initial mobile app wasn’t working. People didn’t want the product. They didn’t want to read profiles about people around them. The mobile app wasn’t useful.
Here’s the weird thing about start-ups: things just happen. Although our mobile app failed miserably, our little name badge printing system became insanely popular. Event organizers were begging us to print badges for them every time they had an event. They were referring us to their friends, and we were hitting events literally every day with our name badge printer. To cater for each event, we forked our original software (which was completely hard coded and not we...
117 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadYes, you started with 300 lines of code... But then you modified it several times for different conferences, and enhanced it a lot when you really become popular. Only after that did you sell it.
i mean, its still a good story. but the tl;dr title isn't accurate.
Towards the very end we rewrote everything, made it configurable, integrated all past features, and made a UI designer for designing labels (instead of hardcoding the layouts) and then we sold.
``We didn't really have anything to sell until "we rewrote everything [and] made it configurable".
Would you say you could have sold without a rewrite? Did you try and sell before that and fail when the buyer started their due diligence?
The story is interesting and useful and stands up on its own without having to resort to "in only 300 lines!!!".
I get tired of everything ;)
Are linkbait BS titles the cancer that is killing /HN?
Granted, HN used to be above romanticizing the past... :-)
What's the solution to that, I almost daren't mention it, could it be a dig like toolbar that wraps the story (I'm assuming you mean external articles). Perhaps better would be a personal list (like Reddit) of recently viewed posts.
Alternatively one could have a sort of moderation view for trusted users so that pages like /new would give the story link with a first paragraph and up/flag/down buttons for fast rating. That way standard users time on pages like /new or /noobstories wouldn't need to be spent on spam so much.
Not that spam appears to be a huge problem here but as things grow optimisations become more important IMO.
Notice how it's a self post? It's not some grand ploy to get more pageviews for a blog. What's bullshit is that half of the comments section is being taken up by this contentless debate. That's the actual poison on HN.
When you have to turn away interested, paying customers, it's time to increase your rates and leverage that relationship to sell them more products and services.
I keep remembering that in my little community a business that just sold for >$100 million started out making steak fingers and selling them to restaurants.
Steak fingers.
$100 million.
nothing is impossible.
Also, the watermarks don't show up in Firefox; I almost assumed I needed to know the "secret codes" to get an invite.
:)
Maybe they are using MySQL? http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html#1_14
Can't exactly remember what it was about but I think some banks or other banking applications are acting like there is a 31st or 30th February for some kind of calculation. (Rather off-topic but if I ever 'share' this with the whole world, it seemed like now is the time!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention
And there you have it, at least for one small corner of the software world.
As an event organizer, I felt like you guys were doing for free what I normally had to pay someone to do - manning the front door. It was very valuable, having you there and putting your logo on our badges felt like 100% win-win. Good luck with view.io
Or is there a hidden scalable app in there for sending out people to do conference name tags in exchange for advertising in front of certain audiences?
You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a tiny marketing budget). You've now ditched the product people wanted, presumably selling it for a pittance, and went right back to a similar mobile app to the one you couldn't convince anyone to use, despite excellent marketing savvy.
It sounds like you guys are a great team, and I bet you'll make many great products in the years to come. I hope you'll also figure out that when the market speaks that loudly, it's a good idea to listen. I had the same problem for many years; it took me three years, from the time we first wrote the code, to realize that Virtualmin could be a great business.
Some things are more important than commercial success, and taking the exit door when presented with a base hit or standup double, especially when it's a product your heart's not in, doesn't sound like that bad of a choice to me. I'm in a very similar situation atm.
It may have started with a mobile app, and he found some tangential success with printing name badges at conferences. But nowhere in your response addresses that maybe the OP didn't want to print name badges for a living. He sold his company which he wasn't truly passionate about which enabled him to do something he was passionate about. Sounds like a success story to me.
Not everyone's motivations are the same, and when that's the case we end up with criticisms that aren't focused on the essence of what is being told.
My point is merely that I don't think they really learned all the lessons they could have learned from these experiences. I'm almost certain they undervalued their label printing business, for instance. Certainly they should have started charging for the service earlier.
And, I also think that they're maybe underestimating the value of listening when the market speaks.
But, by all means, people should work on stuff they love. There's no way a small, bootstrapped, startup can possibly weather the hardships in the beginning, when money is tight, rewards are few, and everything takes longer than expected, without having a real passion for the work they're doing.
That said it's always hard to criticize success. It's like these guys just did a gymnastics routine and got a 9.5 and then we harp that they should have gotten a 10, while we sit here gobbling popcorn from the couch. :)
It would have been just as valid to stick with the idea people begged for/made money and add features that made you happy. Wouldn't it have been valuable to test/market View to thousands of customers with the need they were trying to solve?
I haven't suggested they should have stuck with label printing or that they should have sold it and started something new; my advice applies no matter what path they chose. I suggested that I don't think they learned the lessons that the market was willing to teach them.
In my wizened old age, I think back on similar situations in my own life, where I missed the signs and missed opportunities that would have had very low costs and very high pay outs. This is one of them for this team.
Since everyone wants me to have actually made recommendations for what they should have done (rather than what lessons they should have learned, which is all I covered to start with):
1. When you have a business that takes off on a run like this, and you know you're going to cash out and run; raise your prices. Raise them a lot. Double them. If volume doesn't drop, double them again. Rinse and repeat until you have found the point at which customers stop coming to you. Conferences are huge cash cows. They have money; if you solve one of their problems in a cool, social, way, they will pay for it. So, OP should have started charging earlier and more (a lot more).
2. Learn from failure. It sounds to me like they're back on the same sort of project as the one they couldn't convince people to like to start with. If they're passionate about social mobile apps, that's fine. But, you have to be willing to listen when the market says "We do not want this."
And, let's add a bonus third point:
3. Leverage past successes to enable future successes. As you note, it sounds like View could have been launched as a cool feature of the label business, getting it into the hands of all of those CEOs and investors that passed through their system. It started as a marketing ploy, and it would have been an effective one for the new product...I don't know that it makes the new product any more awesome or wanted by people, but it is still a valid avenue for marketing the product to thought leaders.
That's nobody's fault but their own. That's one of my primary points about them not really learning a valuable lesson. If they were booked solid by prime conferences at those prices, and people were calling them from all over the country, I'd suggest they were undervaluing their service by at least an order of magnitude.
I believe they should have begun charging sooner and much more than they were, especially if they didn't particularly love the project. When I started hating my previous company and the work I was doing, I doubled my prices. It didn't hurt sales, and I put more money in the bank for my next venture.
I think my intent is being misunderstood quite a bit. I tried to clarify in another response, but it seems like people think this is an either/or thing; that they had to keep working on the label business to be living according to the Gospel of SwellJoe. And, that's not what I mean, at all. I mean that if you're going to build/run a business to bootstrap another business, you should charge enough to make it worth the effort you put into it. They built something that people really wanted, and then grudgingly started charging a tiny bit of money for it (when I'm doing stuff I don't love, I won't even leave the house for less than $500; seriously, when I was doing contract IT work, I billed $125/hour with a four hour minimum), and flipped it for probably much less than they could have.
I'm not suggesting they should have stuck with the label printing business forever, just that they did not capitalize on the label printing business on anywhere near the scale they could have, and probably in the same time period.
It's much different from something like contract IT where nobody knows how to bring the network back up and they can't do any work while it's down.
So, I don't think they gave up something successful to pursue something less successful. Rather, they decided to continue to work on something about which they are passionate.
http://imhello.posterous.com/
The View app does look amazing - seems to basically be local advertising/information signage on your phone, as Philip K Dick predicted/feared, but (hopefully) more useful than typical ads (can you find ways to keep it that way?)
Suggestions: the example messages are great, but show them a little longer, maybe proportional to their length (I couldn't quite read some of them); and maybe somehow make your tag more concrete and specific (maybe 'what you need to know about where you are' - danger signs, like your "tow zone" one sum it up). Maybe something about "signs"?