People answer polls on FB (which publishes your answer with your name) with whatever the person they want their friends to think they are would say. No-one wants to appear a cheapskate. That's why everyone said they would pay, regardless of what they really thought. An anonymous poll might have gotten more accurate results.
I used to work in the higher ed vertical. They have about the longest sales cycles imaginable because so much of every decision is committee led (speaking at the campus level; department sales are a different story). You also can never expect them to just make a decision. If you are selling to the entire campus, you need salespeople who understand the process to work you through it.
My advice to startups in that vertical: make it a department SaaS sale. You avoid central IT and it's committee process hell. If you really want the whole campus, start with a few departments, make them happy, then work your way up.
I'd argue the main reason it failed was it was a bad idea. Their was no market for your product no matter how well you made it.
Try not to take away execution lessons when the idea was poor. The execution was fine and if you'd have used a good idea you'd be doing reasonably well now.
As an aside, does anyone have links to other startup postmortems?
Nice writeup! I agree with you - I love reading post-mortems. Success stories are worthless (too much survivor bias) but post-mortems really tell me something.
I wouldn't say it was a total failure. You learned something, and you can always reuse code (such as the 700 lines for credit card payments) for other projects.
from the tech point of view you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs. Sort of "web 2.0 Sharepoint".
The niche that I see for such a service is legal. Lawyers can receive, annotate and remark on clients drafts for proposals, contracts etc.
So it's something like Scribd+ or Docstoc+, for closed network of service provider & his/her clients, where a lot of paperwork is required. Legal services seems like the case.
I would argue that the majority of your target demographic doesn't have the inclination to put disposable income into this.
Most of the time, when I needed help, I'd find someone who could help me for free.
Maybe it's different in the UK and other non-US places, but here, IME, there is no large-scale culture of hiring tutors.
People typically hire tutors when they are out of their depth.
Just my thoughts and experiences. I wish you the best next time!
Here's an idea: in the USA, university student-athletes are typically supported by an army of tutors, perhaps the athletic dept. would be interested in something like this to streamline review of student writing.
Though as you note, I'm not seeing a lot here that wouldn't work just as well over email, perhaps backed with a simple issue-tracking system of some sort.
Edit: "You" in the prior paragraph is addressing Mr. Ruffles.
It's sad no one ever paid for the service, but if not don't talk to customers or potential customers (people who pay, not "users" i.e. in the sense of people that do not pay), you'll never know what they want. Generally, it's only when people part with cash that you know you are providing value.
However, major kudos for releasing the code and design docs so others can try some tangent, along with the post-mortem so others can avoid similar pitfalls. That's seriously cool and not something I often see people do for projects they invested so much in. Thanks.
Someone called Humourisok posted this, but it is dead for some reason. I thought it was a good idea, so repost:
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Humourisok 20 minutes ago | link [dead]
from the tech point of view you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs. Sort of "web 2.0 Sharepoint". The niche that I see for such a service is legal. Lawyers can receive, annotate and remark on clients drafts for proposals, contracts etc. So it's something like Scribd+ or Docstoc+, for closed network of service provider & his/her clients, where a lot of paperwork is required. Legal services seems like the case.
----
I probably thought about 3 ways he could use the tech and apply it to another problem. He should not quit, he should pivot his startup. I think there is something here. I for one, will download, install and play with the app.
"you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs."
I'd run with that!
Is anyone else running with that?
I mean sure you can annotate in acrobat reader (since Acrobat Reader 9), and sure you can use Flash paper + FLEX like Adobe connect and cozimo.com. But if just received a PDF as an email and I want to send back some comments/ suggest corrections what would I use?
Is there a web app for that?
The problem is, these all have his original problem - clients who take years to decide anything.
B2B is difficult for startups, unless they already have good industry connections. On the other hand, consumers and small businesses are a little stingy.
Well, but it wasn't B2B. He had asked his own school for that relationship so they could market it for him locally - but the service itself is decentralized and in no way depended on that relationship. (It was probably a mistake to wait for them, but hindsight's always 20/20, particularly from the sidelines.)
"A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave."
If you visit this user's page at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Humourisok you can see that their first 3 comments had negative karma, after which the hellban was applied.
I think it is automatically triggered if you reach a certain negative cumulative karma.
I was hellbanned in the past and i was not trolling. I had over 1,000 karma earned in 6 months. My average karma per post was well over 6.
I was not trolling. My posts were not getting voted down, despite often taking unpopular positions.
I was, however, taking a position that one of the moderators of this site disagreed with, and (without realizing it) wrote a response making an argument in response to a post from one of the Y combinator people.
I was hellbanned for disagreeing with the politburo. It was pure censorship because pg, et. al, cannot tolerate people who disagree with them on a political topic. Ironically, I was taking the pro-startup, pro-capitalist position.
Since people are aware of hellbanning, they should be aware that it is used to silence people for disagreement, not just against trolls.
Could you share your prior username? I'm hesitant to believe you because every [dead] comment I've seen so far has been by a user with a net negative karma.
Word processors already support annotation and change tracking quite well. In the legal community are there still frequent dealings with scanned images (i.e. not the actual doc files)? If so would something like this be more practical than using the word processor functions?
On a moment's thought I'm guessing that perhaps yes, there might be a need for this, as responses to discovery might be in the form of boxes of paper rather than digital files, for the very purpose of making shared review and analysis more difficult.
Great article. I don't think we can repeat this enough:
Hard work != value. Clever code != value. Writing something hackers think is cool != value.
Sometimes I think the hardest part of startups is re-aligning our value system from what we've learned in school and society into something that's actually useful for startups.
Very true. I've been thinking that although I started coding to make a business (tho I used to write QBasic games when I was 10 too), I developed a coder's value system.
I can't seem to keep in mind that code is a means to an end!
Creating new languages doesn't create any value. It's not solving a problem. It's just solving the same problem that has already been solved countless times before.
While it can of course get annoying, hipness should not be discarded so easily.
I'd argue that the hipness of a language/tech stack is actually an important business consideration today, if only due to the short supply of good startup dev talent. Good developers have their pick of jobs right now. For instance, most of the PHP badasses I know are regularly turning down PHP work in favor of working with something newer.
After all, the smartest people like to learn more than anything else.
Sure, although I'd still maintain there's a large amount of people who masturbate over the hippest new language features, without actually creating anything of worth.
The smartest people get things done. Even if it's using some arcane rubbished old technology.
There are a lot of times that it doesn't make sense to write any code before selling the product, but there are also times it does. The whole decision comes down to "Can I convince somebody this will work?"
The less likely your product is to be implementable, the more likely you will need code up front: 140 character mini blogs? Sure, fake it with photoshop. Real, Turing complete AI? You better have a prototype because nobody will believe you can do it.
Most startups tend to lean towards the former, but don't get sucked into that mentality if you lean towards the later. You'll be wasting your time.
I think it's not all or nothing. Write just enough code to be able to make a credible pitch. In some cases this might be little more than HTML/Photoshop. Or you might need a bit of a backend but it can be mostly mocked up or support only a few contrived scenarios that you'll be using in your pitch.
Interesting thought about phd students being a potentially untapped resource for startups. Anyone want to launch phdturk? The domain name is available (for now anyway)
Dang great story. I've been working on a few projects here and there. The first one was too big a project and I called it quits after 2 months because 1) I did it for learning purposes and 2) it was too big to complete and launch in regards to other competitors. But 3 years is a long time to spend on a project. There are definitely lessons to be learned here and as long as you don't lose hope, you will eventually find something that works. Your mention of testing if people would actually buy your service/product w/o writing the code behind it is a great idea, much like what I read in the 4 Hour Work Week. Definitely something entrepreneurs should apply if possible in order to reduce the amount of time potentially spent on doomed projects or projects that need to pivot.
There's a more fundamental flaw, something that you wouldn't have uncovered by interviews....
1. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to write it for you. http://www.bestwritingservice.com/ has essays for ten dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.
2. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.
Re your point one: This service wasn't for help with what an American would call term papers. It was for help with exams, which you have to write yourself (unless you hire someone to impersonate you, which I'm sure is not unheard of in big classes but is certainly riskier).
You're right, I misread that. At that point, why not just go to the professor or TA during office hours? Maybe other Universities work differently, but each class had office hours where I went to school, and most students didn't take advantage of that. And who writes out example exam questions anyway?
So yes, I stand corrected, Customer development would have uncovered those problems.
Personally I had my best exam results when I did exactly that, I wrote as much as I could for each historical exam question. I would research from book, lecture notes etc.
However, I wouldn't pay for this service when my lecturers and teaching assistants would do this for free and as they were the ones setting the exams I would prefer their advice than that of an unknown person.
>And who writes out example exam questions anyway?
As a maths/physics student (though I did various other courses too) I pored over past papers, in part as an indicator of the papers to come (though they always caught one out) and in part for practice at recapitulating proofs and writing answers under time pressure. I certainly didn't spend the course working toward the exam but it would be silly not to attempt past papers on a course that has run unchanged for previous years.
Most of our papers had example answers with them though.
>Please take the code (30k lines, PHP/Flex), design & docs and make a go of the business.
Could the OP please give a more formal license statement, even if it's just on this page?
Also, as others have said/hinted the execution looks (after a brief glance) to be pretty hot. The design is certainly crisp and clean and the screencaps look well laid out. Pivoting seems a good option.
Sure - in the repo I've specified the MIT license for the code, and CC license for the docs etc. That said, I'm very happy to give you whatever license you'd like - just let me know.
The market wasn't there but I disagree that that means he should have started with little or no product.
I forget who said it, but the best advice I've heard from a V.C. is that one of the biggest mistakes they see is founders going overboard trying to avoid making the mistakes their last startup made.
That said, I had an experience at a startup that did what the author now considers "the right way." We went out and sold before we had a product built. We figured out the pitch that the customers wanted to hear and had all of our best leads ready to go. But then it took more like a 12 to 18 months to build the thing, not the 3 to 6 we were promising. Unless you've built something exactly like the current product before, there are always technical problems you don't anticipate, and they always get solved the same way: add more engineering time.
Your earliest/best sales leads are a precious resource. Do not look like a dumbass in front of them. The second batch is not as easy to find as the first or they would have been in the first batch.
imagine if it had taken you 2 weeks to write the code instead of 6 months and you spent the rest of the 2 years on customer discovery instead, imagine if you were able to make significant feature changes to your product in a few days based on what you found out about what your customers wanted .. do you think you would have been more successful?
The fact that you used lines of code as a metric for how much work you put in, and the fact that you think 30k is a lot of code .. and you used php/flex .. I don't want to rain on your parade but there are MUCH MUCH better coders out there, who can do stuff much much faster. I don't necessarily recommend the following languages overall but you might want to check out ruby or python and see what is possible in just a few days.
Personally I think the main problem was lack of commitment in customer discovery and how much were you paying the PHD students? Why weren't they motivated enough to help you advertise? In the US, most graduate students assist professors in teaching classes, so they would have direct contact with the people who would want your services the most.
What was your motivation for your startup? Did you just want to make a buck, or did you really care about helping students do better in their exams? Do you think the decisions you made would have been different if you had different motivations?
101 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadIt was really slick when I used it, though it did get small samples (100 max I believe) and perhaps people just clicked randomly to get rid of it.
My advice to startups in that vertical: make it a department SaaS sale. You avoid central IT and it's committee process hell. If you really want the whole campus, start with a few departments, make them happy, then work your way up.
Try not to take away execution lessons when the idea was poor. The execution was fine and if you'd have used a good idea you'd be doing reasonably well now.
As an aside, does anyone have links to other startup postmortems?
That said, I think "not knowing my customer" is still a sound lesson. If you know your customer, you'll know whether there is or isn't a market.
Re post-mortems, should keep you going:
http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-best-startup-fail-stor...
http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail-an...
if you can do everything manually and just forward emails...do that until you it gets big enough to require automation
I would argue that the majority of your target demographic doesn't have the inclination to put disposable income into this.
Most of the time, when I needed help, I'd find someone who could help me for free.
Maybe it's different in the UK and other non-US places, but here, IME, there is no large-scale culture of hiring tutors. People typically hire tutors when they are out of their depth.
Just my thoughts and experiences. I wish you the best next time!
Though as you note, I'm not seeing a lot here that wouldn't work just as well over email, perhaps backed with a simple issue-tracking system of some sort.
Edit: "You" in the prior paragraph is addressing Mr. Ruffles.
However, major kudos for releasing the code and design docs so others can try some tangent, along with the post-mortem so others can avoid similar pitfalls. That's seriously cool and not something I often see people do for projects they invested so much in. Thanks.
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Humourisok 20 minutes ago | link [dead]
from the tech point of view you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs. Sort of "web 2.0 Sharepoint". The niche that I see for such a service is legal. Lawyers can receive, annotate and remark on clients drafts for proposals, contracts etc. So it's something like Scribd+ or Docstoc+, for closed network of service provider & his/her clients, where a lot of paperwork is required. Legal services seems like the case. ----
Is anyone else running with that?
I mean sure you can annotate in acrobat reader (since Acrobat Reader 9), and sure you can use Flash paper + FLEX like Adobe connect and cozimo.com. But if just received a PDF as an email and I want to send back some comments/ suggest corrections what would I use? Is there a web app for that?
B2B is difficult for startups, unless they already have good industry connections. On the other hand, consumers and small businesses are a little stingy.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619641 (and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620156 particularly) discusses it.
well phrased description from that article:
"A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave."
If you visit this user's page at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Humourisok you can see that their first 3 comments had negative karma, after which the hellban was applied. I think it is automatically triggered if you reach a certain negative cumulative karma.
This time it was good.
I was not trolling. My posts were not getting voted down, despite often taking unpopular positions.
I was, however, taking a position that one of the moderators of this site disagreed with, and (without realizing it) wrote a response making an argument in response to a post from one of the Y combinator people.
I was hellbanned for disagreeing with the politburo. It was pure censorship because pg, et. al, cannot tolerate people who disagree with them on a political topic. Ironically, I was taking the pro-startup, pro-capitalist position.
Since people are aware of hellbanning, they should be aware that it is used to silence people for disagreement, not just against trolls.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nika
OF course, I know that by doing this, I'm likely to get hellbanned again...
On a moment's thought I'm guessing that perhaps yes, there might be a need for this, as responses to discovery might be in the form of boxes of paper rather than digital files, for the very purpose of making shared review and analysis more difficult.
Hard work != value. Clever code != value. Writing something hackers think is cool != value.
Sometimes I think the hardest part of startups is re-aligning our value system from what we've learned in school and society into something that's actually useful for startups.
I can't seem to keep in mind that code is a means to an end!
I'd argue that the hipness of a language/tech stack is actually an important business consideration today, if only due to the short supply of good startup dev talent. Good developers have their pick of jobs right now. For instance, most of the PHP badasses I know are regularly turning down PHP work in favor of working with something newer.
After all, the smartest people like to learn more than anything else.
The smartest people get things done. Even if it's using some arcane rubbished old technology.
unless your customers would be hackers (i am telling this to myself, to reassure myself)
The less likely your product is to be implementable, the more likely you will need code up front: 140 character mini blogs? Sure, fake it with photoshop. Real, Turing complete AI? You better have a prototype because nobody will believe you can do it.
Most startups tend to lean towards the former, but don't get sucked into that mentality if you lean towards the later. You'll be wasting your time.
1. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to write it for you. http://www.bestwritingservice.com/ has essays for ten dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.
2. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.
So yes, I stand corrected, Customer development would have uncovered those problems.
However, I wouldn't pay for this service when my lecturers and teaching assistants would do this for free and as they were the ones setting the exams I would prefer their advice than that of an unknown person.
As a maths/physics student (though I did various other courses too) I pored over past papers, in part as an indicator of the papers to come (though they always caught one out) and in part for practice at recapitulating proofs and writing answers under time pressure. I certainly didn't spend the course working toward the exam but it would be silly not to attempt past papers on a course that has run unchanged for previous years.
Most of our papers had example answers with them though.
As such I'm not sure it is too useful to compare the prices.
>Please take the code (30k lines, PHP/Flex), design & docs and make a go of the business.
Could the OP please give a more formal license statement, even if it's just on this page?
Also, as others have said/hinted the execution looks (after a brief glance) to be pretty hot. The design is certainly crisp and clean and the screencaps look well laid out. Pivoting seems a good option.
I forget who said it, but the best advice I've heard from a V.C. is that one of the biggest mistakes they see is founders going overboard trying to avoid making the mistakes their last startup made.
That said, I had an experience at a startup that did what the author now considers "the right way." We went out and sold before we had a product built. We figured out the pitch that the customers wanted to hear and had all of our best leads ready to go. But then it took more like a 12 to 18 months to build the thing, not the 3 to 6 we were promising. Unless you've built something exactly like the current product before, there are always technical problems you don't anticipate, and they always get solved the same way: add more engineering time.
Your earliest/best sales leads are a precious resource. Do not look like a dumbass in front of them. The second batch is not as easy to find as the first or they would have been in the first batch.
imagine if it had taken you 2 weeks to write the code instead of 6 months and you spent the rest of the 2 years on customer discovery instead, imagine if you were able to make significant feature changes to your product in a few days based on what you found out about what your customers wanted .. do you think you would have been more successful?
The fact that you used lines of code as a metric for how much work you put in, and the fact that you think 30k is a lot of code .. and you used php/flex .. I don't want to rain on your parade but there are MUCH MUCH better coders out there, who can do stuff much much faster. I don't necessarily recommend the following languages overall but you might want to check out ruby or python and see what is possible in just a few days.
What was your motivation for your startup? Did you just want to make a buck, or did you really care about helping students do better in their exams? Do you think the decisions you made would have been different if you had different motivations?