We did\u00a0not understand the need to scale and the resources required<\/strong>. Mainly, we ignored scalability. Of course our startup failed.<\/p>\nThought we knew the customer<\/strong>. We created a product that we ourselves wanted as travelers and assumed that there would be plenty of others like us that would want the same. I don’t think the product concept is bad even today, but we didn’t explore the product market fit<\/em>\u00a0adequately. This also links back to the narrow niche, the urgency to scale, and resources for doing so. We should have examined the possible customer segments and identified if there were products more easily scalable to a broader segment. “But that’s not what we want<\/em> to do”, is a common phrase when a business is very focused on its product idea and not willing to see whether it really fits the market in a way that can work for the business.<\/p>\nIn other words, we were not willing to pivot in our search for a business model.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nPerfecting & perfecting a 1.0 release<\/strong>. Our first product, an iPhone app that provided a guided tour of a prominent historic & cultural attraction in a major city, took almost a year to produce. As the actual developer of that app I can testify that it could have been completed in less than 2 months<\/strong>. I wanted to get a good enough<\/em> app out on the market and improve it with incremental development while we continued pushing out other products. This was not the kind of app that was going to sell thousands or hundreds of copies in the first few months. Instead, we tweaked the design, the content, and functionality for months. My business partner, who was supposed to be focused on content, couldn’t restrain himself from adjusting every aspect of the design even though we had a professional graphic designer working with us. I ended up having to mediate conflicts with the designer (who was also my spouse). There was a need to create the perfect app, perhaps even the best iPhone travel app ever designed. Really, did we need to do that? In a bootstrapped startup did we need to spend all our resources in this manner? \u00a0We were too focused on perfecting the launch release rather than getting it out into the hands of customers, listening to customers and evolving the business strategy. The argument for the extensive 1.0 release ran like this, “If it’s not great, then people won’t buy anything else from us. I wouldn’t.” How did we come to that conclusion? Potential customers didn’t tell us that. It was an assumption without validation.<\/p>\nAdmittedly, during the year of developing this product I didn’t work on it full-time, but about 80% of the time. Had to pay the bills with freelance work, plus I had a newborn child. And one month I stopped work completely on the product in order to earn an additional income; that was when the product was 5 months behind schedule. My spouse encouraged me to abandon it completely, but I wanted to finish at least this initial app.<\/p>\n
A 50\/50 partnership leads to no clear decision-making<\/strong>.\u00a0We needed a CEO to make decisions, but probably neither of us would have worked for the other. The company would have dissolved within a week. Maybe that would have been the real test of the partnership and how well we would have worked together. But someone needed to guide the business, make decisions, and keep things moving ahead. A startup with 50\/50 decision making does not work.<\/p>\nUltimately, the money ran out<\/strong>. We had made the decision early on to bootstrap this startup and not seek external funding. (No one would have given us funding anyway with this business model.) In the last few months I had prepared spreadsheets with financial projections that would be needed to sustain the business and estimated the volume of sales required to meet those finances. After our first product launched (with sales far under expectations) we immediately moved into developing the next product. We did recognize the need to get multiple products on the market but we just didn’t examine if we had the right product or not.<\/p>\nJust before the end I invited my business partner to discuss a new strategy for the business, a pivot (if you will, though I didn’t call it that). After more than a year and a half of devoting the majority of my time to this business I had no more money left to put in. For me to continue I needed funding. We needed a strategy to continue and that meant a serious rethinking of our business and how we moved forward, particularly how we continued to finance the operation. Rather than rethinking the business my partner suggested that I take a job, save money and come back to work with him once I had a savings. The next week I took another job.<\/p>\n
I learned a lot from that experience. A lot was my fault in not assertively pursuing strategies that I knew would be better for the company, but would those have survived the 50\/50 decision-making? \u00a0Unfortunately, this startup ruined a friendship. My former business partner is still hard at work pursuing the same business. Maybe it’s working for him, but in hindsight, it’s clear that the strategy we employed could only support one person with a very modest residual income. That isn’t a startup, it’s a hobby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Perhaps we learn more when things go wrong….this post also could be titled, How to keep your startup from turning into a hobby. I learned a tremendous amount in 2010 – 2011 \u00a0about iOS development, but I learned even more about what to avoid the next time I form a startup. Towards the beginning of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}