
Why We Shut Newstilt Down - mchafkin
http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
======
dannyr
"There was a point when I was over in Cambridge with Nathan and the other
developer, and I noticed that the developer wasn’t working on a Sunday... If
your first employee doesn’t love what you do, doesn’t wake up each morning
dying to work on HIS product, you have likely chosen poorly, and that’s
exactly what we did."

I left a company before because I was being pressured to work at least 12
hours a day plus weekends. (I was averaging about 10 hours a day & worked
about 4-6 hours on weekends).

I asked the CEO that he should motivate me. He said that I didn't need to
since I was already getting paid a lot of money. I gave my two-weeks notice
the next day.

It's possible that you hired the person you want for your company but you were
not motivating him enough to work long hours.

~~~
Swizec
Maybe I'm just too European. But everybody deserves a day off once a week.

Developers (anyone really) that are too tired to think are useless to a
company. Let people get their rest and their time spent working will be much
more productive.

Isn't there a book about this? Myth of the man month or something like that?

~~~
pbiggar
It's not that you demand every working moment of your employees time, it's
that you need it.

One of the things you're quickly taught is that you do everything you can to
ensure the success of your startup. You need employees with the same
priorities and intrinsic motivation as you have, or else you're less likely to
succeed.

~~~
pbiggar
I think I've given the wrong impression here. Everyone is disagreeing, and
probably rightly for how I've phrased it, so let me try again.

I'm not saying that I believe our employee was lazy because he refused to work
Sundays. I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup
thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.

I recall a talk from an early Googler, who worked 100 hour weeks for the first
five years. Startups need dedication, not because of some kind of culture, or
because some exec says so, but because everything is constantly falling apart
and it always needs work. You could surely do them differently (perhaps a low-
stress startup), but that is another animal altogether.

So the point is you need someone intrinsically motivated to make the startup
succeed. Anyone else is the wrong fit.

~~~
bjonathan
I dont understand you are complaining that your EMPLOYEE isnt doing 100hours
weeks when at the same time you, the CO-FOUNDER, were in "honeymoon for most
of May" [1] ???? WTF!

[1][http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999](http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999)

~~~
hkuo
Of all the things pointed out in the article, this is the one single thing
that I could not see a reasonable defense to, and he didn't even mention this
as one of the problems!

When a launch is imminent and you are a CO-FOUNDER, and you take a vacation,
this is grossly irresponsible. The whole "life happens" comment he uses as a
minor defense to it, well....guess what? Work is a part of life too! We juggle
work, home, family, friends, hobbies, etc etc all the time, and it's up to us
to be responsible on deciding which gets priority at any given time. While one
aspect is more important to each of us, there will always be times when
something trumps it, regardless of category. And well, a launch of your
business compared to going on a honeymoon? Yes, absolutely that trumps it!

A honeymoon can be postponed. I've had many friends that postponed it an
entire year! Sorry, I simply cannot find justification for this single act
alone.

------
riffer
_And finally, they didn’t expect a cent back, telling us to give all the money
back to our later investors. Not once in my whole time at YC did I believe
that they valued their investment more than they valued us, and they were OK
with us closing down. YC is a class act._

Personally I find this to be one of the best endorsements of YC that I've
read. How people treat you when things don't work out is really, really
important.

------
efsavage
"I noticed that the developer wasn’t working on a Sunday"

There are many obvious reasons why this company failed, and I'm surprised that
YC gave them any money, but that statement jumped out as a huge red flag of
"bad founder". If you think you _need_ 80+ hour weeks, or _need_ to work 6
days a week, never mind 7, you are already failing. Not only are you burning
your people out, you're setting a bad example and demonstrating that your
business is not viable.

Your people should be working normal hours from day 1. Save the extra hours
for emergencies, or big (big as in couple times a year at most) releases or
deadlines. If they want to tinker from home or spend a Saturday morning
writing an email with ideas, that's when you know you've engaged them, but
buying into the "we run on midnight oil" story of startups is just plain not
smart.

~~~
projectileboy
Couldn't agree more strongly. _Of course_ in a startup you'll occasionally put
in extra hours (I once spent 60 hours straight writing copy for a deadline),
but if you think this should be the norm, then what the hell are you supposed
to do when there's a _real_ emergency??

Smart dudes who go four-wheeling in the mud only turn on the four-wheel-drive
when they get stuck.

------
wccrawford
2 other points he didn't grasp:

1) I had no idea NewsTilt existed. I make my living on the internet. I should
have known about it.

2) The name suggests to me that they will put a slant on the news. I like
unbiased news, and most other people at least pretend to. Also, 'tilt' is
slang for 'fail'. That doesn't come to mind immediately from the name, but the
association with the word is there subconsciously.

~~~
pbiggar
The major problem is 1). We did not do well at publicizing either ourselves or
our journalists.

People brought up 2) a lot, but I don't feel it was as bug a problem as almost
anything else I put in the post. Our major competitor was called "true/slant",
and it did they little harm (but then they built their brand around that, so
it's a little different).

~~~
brandnewlow
I have several friends who were writing for True/Slant when you guys launched.
They all were aware and wanted you guys to drop dead as they had already
gambled with this other j-startup and now there was a second one casting doubt
on their original choice.

Of course 5 months later, both projects are dead and gone under less than
ideal circumstances.

I actually was invited to and attended a planning meeting for True/Slant's
Chicago people. They asked me to be there so I could explain how they could
use Windy Citizen to promote their stuff. They seemed like good people, but I
suspect their content was too earnest to really make a go of it. They had the
same problem you did:

Without naked women, it's pretty hard to build eyeballs on the web.

------
il
"Getting traffic is really really difficult. We completely underestimated how
difficult it would be, largely because I’d never had a problem with it in the
past."

For anyone else building a startup without a concrete plan to get traffic,
remember this post. Getting traffic will ALWAYS take more time and money than
you think. The "if we build it they will come" mentality is a recipe for
failure.

~~~
dabent
This a thousand times. I understand that not all traffic is created equally,
but there's no value in no traffic. Technology problems can be surmounted.
Solving the traffic problem is hard.

------
bobds
Pretty thorough post-mortem.

 _"we weren’t intrinsically motivated by news and journalism"_

This stands out among the numerous issues the company had. If you aren't
passionate about something but still want to do it, make sure it's very easy
and won't take up too much of your time. That wasn't the case with NewsTilt.

~~~
flyosity
They built a product that they didn't use. His entire post-mortem could have
been that one sentence and it still would've taught a ton of entrepreneurs a
great lesson.

------
albertsun
Did either of the founders have experience in the news industry before
starting the company? From a brief search, it doesn't look like it. And from
the way he's writing about journalists it sure doesn't sound like it either.

I'd say that that doomed the company from the start.

Doing a journalism startup just doesn't seem like a good idea if you have no
understanding or experience of how doing journalism works.

~~~
pbiggar
Neither of us did, no. Actually, we didn't start a journalism startup, we were
doing a Disqus clone for newspapers. We migrated to the NewsTilt idea after
Sequoia told us they'd never fund something relying on newspapers for success.

I see why you would think needing journalism experience is important. Of all
the errors we made, I don't find that to be a significant one, hence not
really mentioning it in the retrospective. I personally still believe that
journalism is too set in its ways to save itself, and that it's white knight
will come from outside it.

~~~
rwhitman
I once worked on a multi million $ ecommerce platform startup where none of
the founders had experience with ecommerce or retail at all. The story is
familiar - they blew resources on building the MVP product assuming they knew
all they needed and did a huge successful launch with big name sellers seeding
the marketplace. But the numbers dropped off and the sellers became more
difficult to retain. They learned some hard hard lessons with a $1m product
build that fell flat on its face - for primarily reasons that were completely
obvious to anyone in retail. The team was distributed across continents and
they couldn't iterate very fast at all. They wasted the rest of their cycles
and investor cash fixing these problems until they went broke and collapsed.
It is sadly a pretty common scenario

Much of what you cite as an error is the direct result of not having
understood journalism out the gate. It sounds like you spent a lot of your
early resources trying to understand journalists and the news reader audience
- after you built the product. Had you known more about the field when you
began, how many of your core problems would have been solved in the design
phase?

~~~
jasonlotito
On the flip side, my two partners and I started up an e-commerce platform and
did fairly well. Started on less than a quarter-million in 2003, and we
switched ideas the first several months from one commerce idea to another. We
had no idea what we were doing, learning while we went along. It required my
partners saying "yes" to customers, me saying "no" to my partners, and a lot
of back and forth. But it worked, and was a REALLY good system and service.

Unfortunately, it all went downhill 4 years later when backstabbing wenches
pull the rug out from beneath us.

------
steveklabnik
Thank you for the intensely personal and heartfelt postmortem. It seems like
everyone else in this thread is knocking you guys, but I'm glad to be able to
learn from your failures.

I was sad to see you guys fold. I really liked your idea.

------
xentronium
1\. It's okay to fail; if you never fail, you probably never try.

2\. If I were you, I'd probably try to resolve the problems instead of closing
the project. Things like facebook login not working on subdomains should not
be show-stoppers, really. Find a workaround, I dunno, proxy login or anything.

3\. Early releases are good, but you have to provide minimum viable product.

4\. I didn't know a thing about newstilt till today which means you had some
marketing problems.

5\. Don't listen to the guys counting other people's money :) There's always
some risk involved in startups, every investor knows that.

6\. Probably you had to do some better research before launch. This way you'd
know all about your readers.

7\. As a developer I'm not with ya on those "should work at sunday" parts.

My 2 c.

------
robertg
I stopped reading after this...

"None of these problems should have been unassailable, which leads us to why
NewsLabs failed as a company:

    
    
         * Nathan and I had major communication problems,
         * we weren’t intrinsically motivated by news and journalism,
         * making a new product required changes we could not make,
         * our motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above.
    

Overall, the most important of these are that Nathan and I had difficulty
communicating in a way which would allow us save the company, and that this
really drained out motivation."

Maybe you should figure this shit out before you take someone's hard earned
money.

~~~
pbiggar
> Maybe you should figure this shit out before you take someone's hard earned
> money.

If we could have anticipated our mistakes, we wouldn't have made them.

~~~
dannyr
Paul,

I'm curious. How long have you known each other before you became cofounders?

~~~
pbiggar
Not terribly well. We had met on two occasions before, and had very much
clicked on both a personal and technical level. But obviously that's not
enough to survive the stressful environment that is a web startup.

------
mikeklaas
So, they decided to shut down after only two months, and if I understand
correctly, during the first month (May) one of the co-founders was almost
completely in absentia, according to
[http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999](http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999)
?

------
CapitalistCartr
My law of girlfriends and employers: You learn more about them when you leave
than at any other time. This speaks highly of YC.

------
JesseAldridge
"Motivation" is mentioned several times.

Reminds me of that quote, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but the
overcoming of it."

Maybe you could say, "Success does not come from motivation, but from
overcoming the lack of it."

------
brandnewlow
This is a great, insanely useful, honest, and detailed autopsy on a startup.
Thank you for writing it, Paul. You've done a lot of people a valuable service
in sharing this information and your experiences.

I have to admit, a small piece of me is dancing a little jig, not at their
demise, but because they ran into the same walls and hurdles I ran when I
started WindyCitizen two years ago. I can't tell you how cathartic it is to
read all this stuff. So much truth here.

Example: Working with journalists is tough because almost all of them
overvalue their work to an extreme degree, especially older ones who wrote for
print. Longtime print journalists were paid solid salaries to fill space in
between ads in their papers. They figured if the paper's circulation was X,
that a good portion of X was reading their stuff. In fact, it's quite possible
no one was reading their stuff and their value wasn't in producing good
journalism so much as it was in being able to write something vaguely coherent
reliably and safely to fill up space between ads.

Try explaining THAT to an old hand print journalist. Those are fighting words.

But young journalists today understand this. They know that you're only as
good as your audience so they're out building them. Check out my friend Tracy
Swartz: <http://twitter.com/tracyswartz> She covers transit for the Chicago
Tribune's commuter paper and is a rock solid reporter. I respect her work very
much, but moreso I respect how aggressive she is in building a real following
and brand around her work so that no matter where she goes after this job,
she's got an audience to take with her. Older journalists don't get that. They
were used to thinking the audience just magically appeared when they committed
an act of journalism.

Anyhow, reading that stuff was like having a weight lifted off my shoulders.
Thanks.

Background: My original idea (fresh out of journalism school) was to do a
Huffington Post for Chicago. I was doing it solo and sans funding however. I
was able to sign up about 20 writers, and they were the good hungry ones who
want to stir stuff up, but as a solo founder I wasn't able to recruit writers,
direct them, edit their stuff, post the stories (we went with Drupal and the
posting ui is really terrible so our writers would e-mail me their stories),
promote the stories to get eyeballs on them, then find advertisers and sell
ads to them....etc etc

It just was a no-go. So after 8 months of that, I replaced our front page with
a Digg knock-off and invited our readers and bloggers to start sharing and
voting for their favorite local stories. Traffic slowly picked up to where we
were hitting 100k uniques/month, I found someone to work on ad sales, and we
eventually reached a shaky ramen profitability as a local Digg-clone with
often-spotty tech.

Through this all though, a handful of our writers kept blogging and over the
last year we have a few who've managed to build small but regular audiences
for their stuff.

Two years later, we're starting to recruit writers and bloggers again and its
fun to watch.

It took 24 months longer than I expected and there's still lots to happen, but
Windy Citizen is definitely a worthwhile read for a certain segment of Chicago
due to the ingenuity of our writers and community members.

Anywho, I'm sorry to hear NewsTilt didn't work out but thank you for your
honesty and candor in sharing this. Cheers.

~~~
8ig8
For convenience, here's the Windy Citizen link: <http://www.windycitizen.com/>

Edit: Fixed site name.

------
marknutter
I can see 37 signals writing a big fat "told ya so" post about this soon.

------
gurraman
So I guess that this is the best coverage these guys have had so far as I'd
never heard about the site before.

I know nothing about the history, but what about a little patience?

------
hugh3
Article could have used a bit more explanation of what newstilt was, given
that (a) I'd never heard of it and (b) it's been shut down so I can't look at
it.

------
waxman
Thanks for writing this detailed postmortem!

The entire story, though, can really be distilled into one idea: expectation
settings.

You always want to under-promise and over-deliver, but it sounds like, in
multiple domains, the Newstilt team did just the opposite. They promised a lot
to their writers, to their investors, to each other. This happened in both
obvious and subtle ways.

What's the problem with the wrong expectation settings?

Where to begin... First of all, it is human nature to raise expectations.
You're afraid investors won't invest, developers won't work for you,
journalists won't contribute to your site, your co-founder won't carry on: so
you raise expectations.

The critical dynamic that screws everything up, though, IMHO, is that
_inflated expectations attract the wrong types of people_. That's the killer.

Paul provided many examples of this. Over-promising to journalists attracted
the wrong types of journalists; over-promising to users attracted the wrong
types of users; over-promising to potential employees attracted the wrong
hire.

If there's one lesson to takeaway from Paul's story it's: under-promise and
over-deliver.

Start simply. Don't worry about being too simple. Just be honest, so you
attract the right people at the right time.

------
annajohnson
"Lesson: Deeply care about what you’re working on"

This was one of the lessons-learned that resonated with me. My husband and I
lacked passion for the first startup we co-founded back in the late 1990s and
although we were profitable and did sell the business, I know that had we
cared deeply about it we would have been 100x more successful. When you care
deeply about something you do all the 'little' things that make ALL the
difference.

More generally, I would like to thank Paul for his post. In fact, it may just
be mandatory reading for anyone starting or planning to start a business. Even
if you don't agree with Paul's assessment of NewsTilt's demise, it makes for a
great case study, precisely because it inspires us to think about what went
wrong, what should have been done, etc. In fact the combination of the post
and this thread is precisely the kind of discussion I find so instructive.

------
muhfuhkuh
Online content syndication, aggregation, or publishing schemes tend to see
alot of troubles because the founders make the technology the value
proposition rather than the content, which is relegated to commodity (at best)
status.

I mean, look at how low an opinion brandnewlow (haha) has of veteran
journalists. "Working with journalists is tough because almost all of them
overvalue their work to an extreme degree". Oh, but I'm sure "digg knockoff +
Chicago" is an earth-shattering technology well worth its price in Flooz.

As soon as you realize doing a content play based on writing is very similar
to any other creative industry like movies, TV, or music, the sooner you'll
respect the people who write for a living. They're not just replaceable
crotchety cogs that make your content engine move. They're your sole source of
revenue (if you do make an money at all).

Sincerely, A writer.

~~~
brandnewlow
Good points, but I'm being misread in a few places to make your points.

My point wasn't that writers don't have value, but that veteran journalists
have an understanding of their value that doesn't sync up with how their
output is valued in the context of today's media world.

I have an extremely high opinion of veteran journalists. I went into debt so I
could attend graduate journalism school and learn at their feet for a year.

However, my great respect for their skills as researchers and reporters does
not change my belief that they have an overinflated idea of the value of the
actual product they were putting out with those skills. Great content has
limited value unless you have the ability to distribute it to a lot of people.
Great veteran journalists can make wonderful stuff but lack the ability to put
it in front of a lot of people.

Sincerely, A fellow writer. Glad to see more of us on HN.

------
points
"Lesson: If you think you should build it, not buy it, you’re wrong"

That's bad advice IMHO. There is far more value to building than buying - the
amount you learn, and the extra optimization you can put in there.

If you have the luxury of being able to build it yourself, do.

~~~
pbiggar
I suppose to put it another way, you almost certainly do not have the luxury
of being able to build it yourself.

~~~
points
Well, anecdotally, I did. I built a minimum viable product as a 'side
project'. I had money to run it for a year before I needed to monetize. It
worked for me. It means I use 1/10th the number of machines/bandwidth of one
of my competitors.

I agree though, in your circumstance it was probably the wrong approach.

------
peteforde
I tried to get involved in this early on, but I was quickly turned off by the
way the project was being run: it felt like the founders were promising a
vague end goal and trying to make too many groups of people happy.

[http://groups.google.com/group/newslabs-
qa/browse_thread/thr...](http://groups.google.com/group/newslabs-
qa/browse_thread/thread/33881e2ab3d629be)

Kudos for writing all of this down, Paul. Next time, stick to your guns and do
the simplest thing that works!

------
markkat
That's too bad. Thanks for the honest insight, and best of luck on your next
ventures.

------
medianama
You gave up too soon. It take much longer to solve any marketplace (chicken-
egg) problem

------
VladRussian
So, basically an attempt to racket 20% off the money earned by other people
failed. Nice try.

~~~
jacoblyles
80% to the author is a hell of a lot better deal than any traditional
corporation will give.

~~~
albertsun
Yes, but at the traditional corporation it'll be a smaller percentage of a
much bigger pie.

~~~
jacoblyles
No, at a traditional corporation the author draws a fixed salary no matter how
big the pie gets.

~~~
albertsun
Sure, but so far that fixed salary has been a lot more than what a writer
online would be getting if paid as a percentage.

