When you hear '90% of startups fail', failing usually means they wane.
It's like flying a kite (by someone bad at it). You can run with your kite and make it 'fly' but then you get tired and it falls to the ground. It can be a hundred reasons, it is either a bad/defective kite, it may not be windy enough, or you have to run faster for it to fly.
...and diagnosing the right problem is really hard. Then coming up with the "right"/"better" solution is even harder. Lastly, chances are it was a combination of reasons, and you had to fix more than a few to keep the kite going.
I knew I had heard the names before (I live in Seattle), and I have nothing but nice things to say about this team. It seems they shut down their other venture at the same time:
https://spokely.com/ (there is cert issure your browser will rightly complain about)
The write up does not address anything interesting. It doesn't even say why the company failed. Not enough users? Not enough revenue? Failures of technology? Not worth reading.
Even if you don't publish, please do write these up for yourself.
Just sit down and fill up a document with "next time I would do Y instead of X". You can also explain why, or what experience inspired the lesson. But definitely write them down. Keep the document handy. Over the next few months you'll keep having retroactive facepalm moments; you might as well get something out of them.
Right now it feels like you will never forget the whole crazy ride. But next time or the time after you'll read through a lessons-learned document and be very glad you have it.
Thanks for that advice. Was thinking of writing a weekly column, or a small book about mistakes I wouldn't repeat in my next venture. Like you said, it would make it easier to remember the lessons over time - completely agree.
The problem here wasn't the premise really. I mean from a premise standpoint (when it launched) Twitter seemed pretty silly. They got over it by simply adapting from status updates to brain dumps and then it really took off.
The problem here was planning.
No one seems to have sat down there and thought it through with: What are we doing? How do we do it? Do we have the means? Do we have the capability? Are we going about this the right way?
"The landing page didn’t work in IE. It was buggy." Did no one open up the page in IE before launch? See what I mean about planning. It's unfortunate because these guys seemed to have cared about their product.
...chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."
Follow up question: Could it be the exact opposite of what you're saying that did us in? Could it be that we spent TOO much time planning, and not enough time actually DOING (which leads to learning?)
I saw that talk and yes, there could have been too much planning.
There's a big difference between correct planning and too much planning and I wish I could point out the big glaring wall that divides the two. The honest answer is that I don't know until I've walked in your shoes.
Most startups always go with :
Idea > Platform > Tinkering > Launch
Between Idea and Tinkering is a feedback loop with improvements. But most importantly, there has to be someone outside the loop to tell you when too much planning is going on. When you're in it, you don't see it.
The folks I see doing best are the ones with a clear vision who iterate as frequently as possible, testing their assumptions in order of risk. The right amount of planning is the smallest amount to let them learn frequently.
This is really interesting. I would love to see what my Co-Founder Chris would say about this. He was a perennial planner, scores through the roof on conscientiousness.
The most interesting question you ask is: "Are we going about this the right way"
That's a question we asked ourselves...A LOT. We never quite found the answer.
I wish you guys the best of luck for what you have in store for the next time. And I do seriously mean that.
I'm still looking for something like what you had in mind, and also what your users seem to be requesting the most. It's an interesting idea and one day, if you do become successful, please be the anti-Facebook that we're all hoping for.
How cool would it be if I could recommend a new friend for you to go skiing or golfing with, based on how much overlap you had in common (Friends, Schools, Hobbies, etc). Pretty cool, right?
Doesn't sound cool to me. The most interesting relationships I have are the ones where there is not a huge overlap. They are more interesting.
Really? I lose interest with those I have nothing in common with. For me, there is nothing quite as exhilarating like meeting someone whom you feel is wired the same way you are, whether they are a friend or romantic partner.
I was a Meeteor user, albeit an inactive one -- I don't remember receiving emails engaging me or asking me to come back, so I forgot about it over time. That said, I signed up in the first place because this is indeed a pain point for me and many others I know. At the time, I had just moved to a new city and was having a hard time making friends (basically, I didn't have the balls to attend classes, meetups, etc. by myself) so I saw products like Meeteor as providing a great solution. Even now, I would love to expand my circle of girlfriends but in an industry filled with men, it's been hard to find like-minded females who happen to share similar interests.
I actually relate to you - but when meeting a stranger online, I'd rather have inroads to use to introduce myself than have none and say "we have nothing in common, but would love to chat."
Not trying to be douchy, but am I the only one that doesn't understand why there are so many people trying to redefine social networking and the next big photo sharing app?
Not douchy at all - I sometimes very much feel the same way you do. The vision, as I saw it in 2008, was this:
Social Networkin 1.0 was about connecting with people online, that you had already met in real life. (You added a friend on Facebook, because you already knew them).
The next evolution of Social Networking was about people discovery. IT was about leveraging all that data we had online about ourselves, and our friend graph, to connect with new people based on our needs. Need to connect with someone at Amazon? Need to find a date for next week? Need a new cycling buddy?
Chances are that your new professional contact/date/cycling partner are just a friend away. Manufacturing the serendipity to make you connect with them is what we envisioned.
It's really powerful if you think about it - life comes down to relationships (and I don't mean that in a pure network-y sense).
It's also extremely monetizeable. Dating websites and LinkedIn make their money off of being the gatekeeprs to new relationships. If you can build the platform that is used for all of those contexts - you have the next big thing. (And Facebook just rolled out their attempt at this, which is stumbling with problems of identity and intent, but they'll figure it out hopefully)
Social networking is just an inane buzzword for "communications tool". It's not a solved problem so it's not unreasonable that people are trying to solve it.
The "meeting people" problem is asymmetrical. You have a bunch of people who want to meet new people. Unfortunately the type of people they want to meet already know so many people they are not looking to meet new people. Lots of people want to meet Katy Perry; She's probably a bit tired of people wanting to talk to her. How did you go about addressing this issue?
I met Phil at a chance encounter at Think Coffee in NYC and Mark Cuban happened to be there. In an awkward situation in which everyone was trying to impress Cuban, Phil came off as a genuine and nice guy. Good luck to you on the next thing.
Thanks for the kind words. It was great meeting you!
That was a lot fun - don't get to do that often in your life. Learned a lot from Mark that day, his composure and fluidity in conversation (holding court against three overly eager entrepreneurs) was unbelievable.
Stats were horrible, and happy to share them (vanity metrics, and not):
8,000 Registered Users (Growth was horrible)
+1M people in our database total (after importing friends/connections)
Peak Engagement:
30% MAU
10% WAU
Around 0.5% DAU (I think, this last one I'm less sure about)
Our SXSW Service was the most successful, but still not good enough
:
Signed up 3% of conference goers (As much as Glancee, Highlight signed up 5% of SXSW)
25% of our SXSW users logged in 3 or more times
20% of our users reached out to their matches.
I'll keep thinking through what other stats I can share.
I am absolutely enthralled with genuine analysis and numbers. All too often when talking with startup founders, you get this fake show of "everything is great" or them trying to sell you. Makes attempts at genuine discussion hard.
It is interesting where you get some of these genuine reflections and numbers. You see them a lot on post mortems, but every now and then you will hit up a meetup or conference where it happens. Example: Attended the conference of world affairs at CU Boulder last year. It was the end of the day in a relatively empty auditorium. Both Tom Preston-Werner and Eric Wilhelm were giving some great insight into early business operations successes/failures.
Philco , thanx for the info, I am 3 years after I had to close down shop of my startup, and my biggest regret now looking back is not to have stopped sooner ... its a very difficult decision to let go of something that you have invested so much time/effort/money in ... good luck , this experience will help you a lot for the next projects
When working on new concepts of human interactions, may be we need to rely more on social science than technology.
Having a ton of information on people, may not be enough to predict with whom they want to hangout.
I wonder if big companies like Google and Facebook, used focus group and social science before launching g+ and “Graph Search”. I hope they did.
Heh. But seriously - post mortems are less like funerals and more like an autopsy. We're not "dancing on the grave" we're trying to "learn the cause of death" so we all (especially you) can live longer in the future.
I think branding an idea as '2.0' was your first mistake. Pretty much meeteor was ambitious to innovate a new feature to social networking, but since that ideology is more in my opinion a 'soft' science, I think funding would have been difficult to make it sustainable.
Here's a lesson, (learned personally BTW).
When you hear '90% of startups fail', failing usually means they wane.
It's like flying a kite (by someone bad at it). You can run with your kite and make it 'fly' but then you get tired and it falls to the ground. It can be a hundred reasons, it is either a bad/defective kite, it may not be windy enough, or you have to run faster for it to fly.