

Exit Interview: The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain - dean
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2682-exit-interview-the-creators-of-no-longer-with-us-products-explain-what-went-wrong

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nfm

      1. Didn't build something people would pay for
      2. Beaten by the competition
      3. Didn't build something people would pay for
      4. Didn't build something people would pay for
      5. ?
      6. Didn't know their users and build the product with them in mind
      7. Didn't build something people would pay for
    

Notice a pattern?

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joshfraser
I'm one of the founders from #7 (EventVue) and we had paying customers from
the beginning. We had people who would pay, just not enough money and not
frequently enough.

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ig1
Why didn't you make the product free for event organizers and generate revenue
from the lead gen of hotel rooms and flights that accompany events ?

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joshfraser
We probably would have tried that if money was the only objection for event
organizers. They had enough other concerns (like giving up access to their
attendee list) that made customer adoption of our product tough.

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ig1
Have you seen what Lanyrd have done in this space ?

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joshfraser
Their challenge is w/o the attendee list from the event organizer, it's tough
to get a meaningful % to participate.

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casca
This is a good read, particularly for HN. As naturally optimistic people, we
all believe that the "9 out of 10 startups fail" statistics apply to everyone
else. This is a good read as perhaps it reminds us that 9 out of 10 means us,
not just those other silly people with their terrible ideas and poor
commercialization strategies. These companies all had super-smart people,
worked really hard, were funded and had as much chance of succeeding as the
rest of us plugging away.

~~~
martincmartin
I wonder whether it's really 9 out of 10, or higher, or lower. I suppose it
depends how you define "fail," maybe something like "made less money for the
liquidity event than I would have working for an established firm all those
years." So the answer could be very different for founders than for employee 1
or employee 25.

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keeptrying
I love how they emphasize that doing a feature well takes a long time. I think
this is somrething you can only understand by starting a company. It's really
hard to do a feature such that it will workin all the cases in the real world.

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Drbble
Everyone who has ever built anything knows this about features. You don’t need
to start a company to learn it.

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keeptrying
Thats not really true. When your working as part of another company there are
abstractions around you created by others that protect you. You dont have to
deal with a lot of stuff because a lot has been abstracted away. In the
startup world, either you pay for the abstraction or you deal with the real
word.

Lots of people say things like "I could code that in a day" but when its for a
startup, that one thing could take a month to do right.

Its completely different when its your own startup. Completely.

