I like this trend of discussing failure bluntly. So many of the startups I've ridden to the end just sort of faded away - get called into a room and laid off, founders lie to the pliant Seattle tech press about how great things are, company fades away, nothing learned.
There are an alarming amount of typos and grammatical errors in this article. It detracts a lot from the content, and (sadly) hurts the credibility of the story.
A few writing tips:
1. When done writing, read the article aloud to yourself. This will help you catch a lot of errors which might easily be missed after having looked at a wall of text for an hour.
2. Always, always, have a friend proof read the article.
3. Sleep on it. When you're done writing, put it aside for a day or two, and re-read it when your mind is 100% fresh and you've forgotten the details.
I know what you are saying, but as a new blogger, I understand how it can be difficult to get stuff out. If I had to choose, I'd rather more people write their stories, even if the writing quality isn't that good. In general, I can pick up what bloggers are trying to say, and over time, they tend to get better.
Thanks for the tips, Kenneth! Would you be interested in helping me review my future posts?
Yes I'm just starting to blog and I do want to get better by practicing. English is my second language although I've used it for all of my professional life.
Try wordy.com. Even though I'm a native English speaker I use them to review my blog posts. Their pricing is reasonable for an on-demand editor and you can pick your editorial team.
Your product sounds very invasive. I assume production apps could still include your analytics code and screencap my screen, tap my microphone, and spy on me with my phone's cameras. Your features page claims "Record audio and video from front facing camera and play back along with the screen recording." What measures do you take to make sure users know when their actions are recorded?
I had some experience working with this technology after it was acquired by another company. IMO, if you weren't making users aware there was no way Apple was letting you through.
>> "3. Price your service to encourage engagement."
This probably should be changed to "Make the price transparent." I read their pricing based on credits and I still don't get it.
Honestly, I am still baffled by the fact that so many startups build software for developers/small businesses without selling their software first!!!
Make a prototype, go to customers, sell it, and ask for feedback right then and there. Ask for what they want, pivot (or add features) before you have written a single line of code.
You are right.
We should have tried to sell harder before building. Lesson learned.
To be fair thou, we did interview about 10 companies before even prototyping to get feedback. Two of them ended up paying after we launched.
"Customers pay for information, not raw data" is the key take-away for me. I think customers pay even more readily for action, particularly marketers as they are often incapable of implementing actions (i.e. programming). See companies like Intercom.io and Customer.io that are cleaning up because they let marketers actually do something with their analytics.
Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?
Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?
To be honest, I don't know if my honesty will hurt me later on. I didn't want to sugar coat the reason. Startups don't die until founders quit. You always have a way to make it work if you want.
We had founder issues early on and we parted ways after we shut down the first product. I then led the company to ship second and third products as a solo founder. I could have quitted then but stuck on for another two years. I wasn't ashamed telling people the truth because I know I have given my best.
> Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?
Maybe it's a January (new year and all that) thing?
> Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?
It won't hurt his chances at all. Startups fail, VCs know this.
As an example, I was in YC W10 with Thomas' batch, and failed/quit my startup over 3 years ago. I found no problem raising money again: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/circleci-raises-1-5m-from-e.... I suspect it will be easier for Thomas since he has more personal relationships with investors than I did when I started to raise 18 months ago.
The thing about the company not failing, but you failing... The best bit of advice I ever got was "don't beat yourself up, there's a line of folks who will do that for you if you let them, don't do their job for them."
Remember, sometimes when an airplane crashes the wings come off before it hit's the ground. The wings failed! Of course, the fact that the bonehead flying it has put 4 the structural load on the wings that they were designed to support might* be what caused that to happen - but "stupid wings, if only we had made them out of concrete"...
Don't beat yourself up, learn, suck it up, move on.
First, folks give up way too easily. It takes time for things to hit even when everything's dialed-in.
Second, unless an app costs a ton of money to keep going, find a home for it. There's always some shop that will buy up your "failed" startup. Turning just it off is like killing a baby. So wantrepreneurs out there: try not to be so quick to strangle her in the bath water.
I'm working on a mobile app right now and delight.io was one of the (many) services in my "try later, when we have a working app prototype" bookmark folder. Shame I won't be able to try it.
So maybe it's too late now, but I have some "feedback" or thoughts on the service and its offering.
- Pricing. Seemed really expensive to me at first, but thinking about it 3 hours of recording are quite much. Still, I never felt that the pricing was 'right'.
- Code vs. features vs. benefits. Oh great, I can paste some Objective-C to my app. I as a product manager don't care at all about that, developers do. I would care about what I can do with the lib, how the interface looks and how an intergration feels for the user. Can I comment the stream I get to persist my thoughts I have when watching it? How do I view them?
- Design and English. Bootstrap and unedited English are fine for a MVP or personal project. A real offering should have more. This certainly wouldn't have a been a dealbreaker for me, but still - it makes it much harder to just try a project.
- iOS only. I know you had to priotize, but for me this would have been a problem right now as we are Android first right now.
So I'm still very much interested in using a service like delight.io. A website that shows me how the recording looks for the user, what I as the customer see of the recording and how I can use it to gain real insight and generate change to my app could convince me.
> - Pricing
There are definitely more testing to do. Our original thought was that even if you know which funnels preform worst, it will still take you hours to try to figure out what went wrong. With Delight, hopefully we could give you better hints to save you time and improve the app.
> - Code vs features vs benefits.
You are absolutely right. I should have added that as lesson learned as well.
> - iOS only.
Android makes it harder to achieve the ease of integration we had for iOS. Besides, we wanted to use the revenue from iOS to fund the Android development.
You can consider other alternatives but none of them has Android version.
38 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 96.3 ms ] threadA few writing tips:
1. When done writing, read the article aloud to yourself. This will help you catch a lot of errors which might easily be missed after having looked at a wall of text for an hour.
2. Always, always, have a friend proof read the article.
3. Sleep on it. When you're done writing, put it aside for a day or two, and re-read it when your mind is 100% fresh and you've forgotten the details.
> There are an alarming amount of typos and grammatical errors ...
Errors are countable. Should be:
There is an alarming number of typos and grammatical errors ...
Living in china, I'm asked to correct a lot of grammars.
There are many cars. There is much pain.
http://www.edufind.com/english/grammar/nouns3.php
There are many errors. There is an alarming number of them. There is too much debate. But not enough tipos.
Yes I'm just starting to blog and I do want to get better by practicing. English is my second language although I've used it for all of my professional life.
You can't go cheaper than Fiverr though, some gigs offering 2500 words proofreading for $5.
I added this to a list of startup postmortems I've been keeping notes on: http://www.soulmix.com/remix/363
(I should probably disclose that I building Soulmix also :)
This probably should be changed to "Make the price transparent." I read their pricing based on credits and I still don't get it.
Honestly, I am still baffled by the fact that so many startups build software for developers/small businesses without selling their software first!!!
Make a prototype, go to customers, sell it, and ask for feedback right then and there. Ask for what they want, pivot (or add features) before you have written a single line of code.
Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?
We had founder issues early on and we parted ways after we shut down the first product. I then led the company to ship second and third products as a solo founder. I could have quitted then but stuck on for another two years. I wasn't ashamed telling people the truth because I know I have given my best.
Maybe it's a January (new year and all that) thing?
It won't hurt his chances at all. Startups fail, VCs know this.
As an example, I was in YC W10 with Thomas' batch, and failed/quit my startup over 3 years ago. I found no problem raising money again: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/circleci-raises-1-5m-from-e.... I suspect it will be easier for Thomas since he has more personal relationships with investors than I did when I started to raise 18 months ago.
Remember, sometimes when an airplane crashes the wings come off before it hit's the ground. The wings failed! Of course, the fact that the bonehead flying it has put 4 the structural load on the wings that they were designed to support might* be what caused that to happen - but "stupid wings, if only we had made them out of concrete"...
Don't beat yourself up, learn, suck it up, move on.
Second, unless an app costs a ton of money to keep going, find a home for it. There's always some shop that will buy up your "failed" startup. Turning just it off is like killing a baby. So wantrepreneurs out there: try not to be so quick to strangle her in the bath water.
So maybe it's too late now, but I have some "feedback" or thoughts on the service and its offering.
- Pricing. Seemed really expensive to me at first, but thinking about it 3 hours of recording are quite much. Still, I never felt that the pricing was 'right'.
- Code vs. features vs. benefits. Oh great, I can paste some Objective-C to my app. I as a product manager don't care at all about that, developers do. I would care about what I can do with the lib, how the interface looks and how an intergration feels for the user. Can I comment the stream I get to persist my thoughts I have when watching it? How do I view them?
- Design and English. Bootstrap and unedited English are fine for a MVP or personal project. A real offering should have more. This certainly wouldn't have a been a dealbreaker for me, but still - it makes it much harder to just try a project.
- iOS only. I know you had to priotize, but for me this would have been a problem right now as we are Android first right now.
So I'm still very much interested in using a service like delight.io. A website that shows me how the recording looks for the user, what I as the customer see of the recording and how I can use it to gain real insight and generate change to my app could convince me.
> - Pricing There are definitely more testing to do. Our original thought was that even if you know which funnels preform worst, it will still take you hours to try to figure out what went wrong. With Delight, hopefully we could give you better hints to save you time and improve the app.
> - Code vs features vs benefits. You are absolutely right. I should have added that as lesson learned as well.
> - iOS only. Android makes it harder to achieve the ease of integration we had for iOS. Besides, we wanted to use the revenue from iOS to fund the Android development.
You can consider other alternatives but none of them has Android version.