
30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release) - timruffles
http://truffles.me.uk/exambuff-open-sourced-startup
======
jdietrich
Essentially none of those 30kloc were part of the actual product, just set
dressing. You could easily launch the same basic product without writing a
single line of code, just handling everything through e-mail attachments and a
paypal button. I don't believe that the user experience would be significantly
worse for it.

In the middle of the article, the OP lists various mistakes he made, but I
think he's basically wrong on all counts. His essential mistake IMO was
launching too late. In six months of work, he gained no insight whatsoever
into the market. He could have learned just as much with a handwritten flier
on the college notice board - "Your mock exam reviewed by a postgrad, £10.
Email foo@bar.com".

For the technically-inclined, coding is the perfect form of procrastination.
It can absorb a near-infinite amount of time and feels quite productive, but
it's usually a distraction. Steve Blank's most important message is that in an
early stage startup, your job is to learn about the market. Anything which
doesn't connect you with your customers is wasted effort.

~~~
suking
Not understanding your (potential) customers is often mistake #1. We spent 2
months talking to potential customers before writing a line of code and now
have 1,000+ in a fairly small niche.

~~~
timruffles
Have you got a blog? Always interested to read about the process.

~~~
suking
Maybe one day, too busy now and I don't really enjoy writing. Have some good
stories though. I'd probably start with "How I turned a $60 bottle of scotch
into $2mm".

~~~
EwanG
Yes, I think many of us would like to hear that one even if it's followed by
the usual punchline:

1) Start with $4mm

2) Drink $60 worth of scotch

3) End up with $2mm

:-)

~~~
suking
not even close: how a $60 bottle of scotch got me an intro to someone who in
turn invested 2mm. there, my first blog post is live.

------
pgroves
The market wasn't there but I disagree that that means he should have started
with little or no product.

I forget who said it, but the best advice I've heard from a V.C. is that one
of the biggest mistakes they see is founders going overboard trying to avoid
making the mistakes their last startup made.

That said, I had an experience at a startup that did what the author now
considers "the right way." We went out and sold before we had a product built.
We figured out the pitch that the customers wanted to hear and had all of our
best leads ready to go. But then it took more like a 12 to 18 months to build
the thing, not the 3 to 6 we were promising. Unless you've built something
exactly like the current product before, there are always technical problems
you don't anticipate, and they always get solved the same way: add more
engineering time.

Your earliest/best sales leads are a precious resource. Do not look like a
dumbass in front of them. The second batch is not as easy to find as the first
or they would have been in the first batch.

------
DanielBMarkham
Great article. I don't think we can repeat this enough:

Hard work != value. Clever code != value. Writing something hackers think is
cool != value.

Sometimes I think the hardest part of startups is re-aligning our value system
from what we've learned in school and society into something that's actually
useful for startups.

~~~
speckledjim
I'd add "writing it in a new popular language" != value. The amount of time
reinventing the wheel in hip new languages is truly staggering.

~~~
dorkitude
While it can of course get annoying, hipness should not be discarded so
easily.

I'd argue that the hipness of a language/tech stack is actually an important
business consideration today, if only due to the short supply of good startup
dev talent. Good developers have their pick of jobs right now. For instance,
most of the PHP badasses I know are regularly turning down PHP work in favor
of working with something newer.

After all, the smartest people like to learn more than anything else.

------
pnathan
Someone called Humourisok posted this, but it is dead for some reason. I
thought it was a good idea, so repost:

\----

Humourisok 20 minutes ago | link [dead]

from the tech point of view you have an open platform to share and annotate
scanned docs. Sort of "web 2.0 Sharepoint". The niche that I see for such a
service is legal. Lawyers can receive, annotate and remark on clients drafts
for proposals, contracts etc. So it's something like Scribd+ or Docstoc+, for
closed network of service provider & his/her clients, where a lot of paperwork
is required. Legal services seems like the case. \----

~~~
socillion
That would be HN's version of hellbanning.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619641> (and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620156> particularly) discusses it.

well phrased description from that article:

"A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not
himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the
community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the
community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing
the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever
gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and
leave."

If you visit this user's page at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Humourisok> you can see that their
first 3 comments had negative karma, after which the hellban was applied. I
_think_ it is automatically triggered if you reach a certain negative
cumulative karma.

~~~
econgeeker
I was hellbanned in the past and i was not trolling. I had over 1,000 karma
earned in 6 months. My average karma per post was well over 6.

I was not trolling. My posts were not getting voted down, despite often taking
unpopular positions.

I was, however, taking a position that one of the moderators of this site
disagreed with, and (without realizing it) wrote a response making an argument
in response to a post from one of the Y combinator people.

I was hellbanned for disagreeing with the politburo. It was pure censorship
because pg, et. al, cannot tolerate people who disagree with them on a
political topic. Ironically, I was taking the pro-startup, pro-capitalist
position.

Since people are aware of hellbanning, they should be aware that it is used to
silence people for disagreement, not just against trolls.

~~~
socillion
Could you share your prior username? I'm hesitant to believe you because every
[dead] comment I've seen so far has been by a user with a net negative karma.

~~~
econgeeker
I mis-spoke. My average karma per post was well over 4, not 6. (memory fail.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nika>

OF course, I know that by doing this, I'm likely to get hellbanned again...

------
pigbucket
Completely missing from your postmortem (from which I learned a lot and for
which I am very grateful) is the fact that the service you offer, to judge
from the demo alone, is frankly not very good. Perhaps your analytics show
that few visitors bothered to look at the demo, so maybe the point is moot,
but I think the demo is awful, and if I wanted to take over this business, I
would completely redo it, or remove it altogether (sometimes it’s better not
to show the product!).

I’m not talking about the implementation, which is great. I’m talking about
the actual advice given in the demo, which you are offering as an example of
the kind of thing students should be willing to pay for. The first comment is,
essentially, use “and” instead of “&.” The second is, in effect, “make this
bit a separate paragraph, and tie it in better.” And so on. The advice is
generic or, when concrete (as in the case of “use and”), banal. There is very
little of it. And there is very little of value in it. And since it’s a bit of
a struggle to read the handwritten text of the sample essay, it’s even harder
to tell if the generic advice is relevant--except in the case of the advice
given for the conclusion, which is so general as to be universally applicable,
which is not to say it is good advice.

I got a sense from your postmortem that you in part want to blame your lack of
success on students not being interested enough in their own studies to pay
for your service. I’ve taught thousands of students, so I know well how few
are willing to write out practice exams, and how few of those are willing to
seek out feedback. But a very small percentage of a very large number can
surely translate to a modestly profitable business (especially, in this case,
if you had plans to expand into the huge American market and into the college
essay review business, which is what my crummy site is trying to do). God
knows it’s hard to get students engaged, but the ones who visited your site
were looking for something, and I don’t think they found something worth
paying for.

~~~
timruffles
Interesting. Looking at the demo now you're right: the first bit of feedback
on screen is trite, and the rest is a bit wishy-washy.

I had a look at the analytics, and most people went for more info rather than
the demo. However, those pages are really, really bad and sparse. Should have
worked on those a lot - I remember I was planning to add tutor profiles.

Software myopia again. BTW if anyone wants to look at the analytics let me
know and I'll give them access.

~~~
ivan_ah
I would be interested to hear more about the web analytic.

Also, I am wondering if anyone has tried the "fliers on campus" or "ads on
message board" advertisement campaign for a e-learning or tutoring-related
website. I would like to know how to know what kind of visitors one can expect
from the idea mentioned earlier by jdietrich.

------
teadrinker
I'd argue the main reason it failed was it was a bad idea. Their was no market
for your product no matter how well you made it.

Try not to take away execution lessons when the idea was poor. The execution
was fine and if you'd have used a good idea you'd be doing reasonably well
now.

As an aside, does anyone have links to other startup postmortems?

~~~
timruffles
Could be right there :) Inference from either failure or success is tricky.

That said, I think "not knowing my customer" is still a sound lesson. If you
know your customer, you'll know whether there is or isn't a market.

Re post-mortems, should keep you going:

<http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/>

[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-best-startup-fail-
stor...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-best-startup-fail-stories-of-
all-time-2010-10?op=1)

~~~
asanwal
Another related one which analyzes 32 post-mortems and identifies the 20
recurring reasons for failure

[http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail-
an...](http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail-analyzing-
startup-failure-post-mortem/)

------
ebiester
There's a more fundamental flaw, something that you wouldn't have uncovered by
interviews....

1\. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to
write it for you. <http://www.bestwritingservice.com/> has essays for ten
dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your
essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.

2\. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your
papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go
don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.

~~~
gabrielroth
Re your point one: This service wasn't for help with what an American would
call term papers. It was for help with _exams_ , which you have to write
yourself (unless you hire someone to impersonate you, which I'm sure is not
unheard of in big classes but is certainly riskier).

~~~
ebiester
You're right, I misread that. At that point, why not just go to the professor
or TA during office hours? Maybe other Universities work differently, but each
class had office hours where I went to school, and most students didn't take
advantage of that. And who writes out example exam questions anyway?

So yes, I stand corrected, Customer development would have uncovered those
problems.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _And who writes out example exam questions anyway?_

As a maths/physics student (though I did various other courses too) I pored
over past papers, in part as an indicator of the papers to come (though they
always caught one out) and in part for practice at recapitulating proofs and
writing answers under time pressure. I certainly didn't spend the course
working toward the exam but it would be silly not to attempt past papers on a
course that has run unchanged for previous years.

Most of our papers had example answers with them though.

------
SoftwareMaven
There are a lot of times that it doesn't make sense to write any code before
selling the product, but there are also times it does. The whole decision
comes down to "Can I convince somebody this will work?"

The less likely your product is to be implementable, the more likely you will
need code up front: 140 character mini blogs? Sure, fake it with photoshop.
Real, Turing complete AI? You better have a prototype because nobody will
believe you can do it.

Most startups tend to lean towards the former, but don't get sucked into that
mentality if you lean towards the later. You'll be wasting your time.

~~~
ams6110
I think it's not all or nothing. Write _just enough_ code to be able to make a
credible pitch. In some cases this might be little more than HTML/Photoshop.
Or you might need a bit of a backend but it can be mostly mocked up or support
only a few contrived scenarios that you'll be using in your pitch.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Absolutely! Way to put it better and more succinctly than I did.

------
babul
It's sad no one _ever_ paid for the service, but if not don't talk to
customers or potential customers (people who pay, not "users" i.e. in the
sense of people that do not pay), you'll never know what they want. Generally,
it's only when people part with cash that you know you are providing value.

However, major kudos for releasing the code and design docs so others can try
some tangent, along with the post-mortem so others can avoid similar pitfalls.
That's seriously cool and not something I often see people do for projects
they invested so much in. Thanks.

------
ctdonath
FWIW: I had a student cheat by using a paid answer service during a final exam
(in class but done online, easy to abuse a website when I'mnott looking). I
figure it cost him over $300 to buy the answers (obviously not his writing
style and proficiency); still failed the class.

Make sure assisting on those "practice" exams aren't real ones.

------
Vivtek
Nice writeup! I agree with you - I love reading post-mortems. Success stories
are worthless (too much survivor bias) but post-mortems really tell me
something.

------
pnathan
Hi Tim,

I would argue that the majority of your target demographic doesn't have the
inclination to put disposable income into this.

Most of the time, when I needed help, I'd find someone who could help me for
free.

Maybe it's different in the UK and other non-US places, but here, IME, there
is no large-scale culture of hiring tutors. People typically hire tutors when
they are out of their depth.

Just my thoughts and experiences. I wish you the best next time!

~~~
ams6110
Here's an idea: in the USA, university student-athletes are typically
supported by an army of tutors, perhaps the athletic dept. would be interested
in something like this to streamline review of student writing.

Though as you note, I'm not seeing a lot here that wouldn't work just as well
over email, perhaps backed with a simple issue-tracking system of some sort.

Edit: "You" in the prior paragraph is addressing Mr. Ruffles.

------
wiredfool
Sales cycles can be a real problem, especially if the average sales cycle is
greater than your runway.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I used to work in the higher ed vertical. They have about the longest sales
cycles imaginable because so much of every decision is committee led (speaking
at the campus level; department sales are a different story). You also can
never expect them to just make a decision. If you are selling to the entire
campus, you need salespeople who understand the process to work you through
it.

My advice to startups in that vertical: make it a department SaaS sale. You
avoid central IT and it's committee process hell. If you really want the whole
campus, start with a few departments, make them happy, then work your way up.

------
dusklight
Personally I think the main problem was lack of commitment in customer
discovery and how much were you paying the PHD students? Why weren't they
motivated enough to help you advertise? In the US, most graduate students
assist professors in teaching classes, so they would have direct contact with
the people who would want your services the most.

What was your motivation for your startup? Did you just want to make a buck,
or did you really care about helping students do better in their exams? Do you
think the decisions you made would have been different if you had different
motivations?

------
dholowiski
Interesting thought about phd students being a potentially untapped resource
for startups. Anyone want to launch phdturk? The domain name is available (for
now anyway)

------
hristov
I think he just misjudged how most students study. In law school almost all of
my exams were essays. The fact is that most people did not study by writing
practice essays.

To answer an essay question well you need to be able to do two main things:
know the information the question asks for, and present that information in
writing. For me and everyone I studied with the first part was crucial and the
second not that important. Everyone trusts their own writing skills to write a
proper answer once they have all the info.

So when people study, they concentrate on memorizing the information, not on
writing the answer. People just assume that come exam time you will be able to
write the answer.

Of course it would be very nice to be able to write a bunch of practice
answers, but usually there is not enough time to study, you always feel like
you do not remember all the info that you are supposed to remember, so you
spend most time trying to remember more things.

~~~
timruffles
It's a good point. What's interesting is that the academics I surveyed think
students do need help with writing and expression. However, if students don't
think so, as you point out, no perceived need to meet and therefore no
sales...

------
dusklight
Uh so you wrote that bad code isn't a factor ..

imagine if it had taken you 2 weeks to write the code instead of 6 months and
you spent the rest of the 2 years on customer discovery instead, imagine if
you were able to make significant feature changes to your product in a few
days based on what you found out about what your customers wanted .. do you
think you would have been more successful?

The fact that you used lines of code as a metric for how much work you put in,
and the fact that you think 30k is a lot of code .. and you used php/flex .. I
don't want to rain on your parade but there are MUCH MUCH better coders out
there, who can do stuff much much faster. I don't necessarily recommend the
following languages overall but you might want to check out ruby or python and
see what is possible in just a few days.

------
iiilx
Dang great story. I've been working on a few projects here and there. The
first one was too big a project and I called it quits after 2 months because
1) I did it for learning purposes and 2) it was too big to complete and launch
in regards to other competitors. But 3 years is a long time to spend on a
project. There are definitely lessons to be learned here and as long as you
don't lose hope, you will eventually find something that works. Your mention
of testing if people would actually buy your service/product w/o writing the
code behind it is a great idea, much like what I read in the 4 Hour Work Week.
Definitely something entrepreneurs should apply if possible in order to reduce
the amount of time potentially spent on doomed projects or projects that need
to pivot.

------
kmfrk
Failed or not, this will still be very valuable on your resumé, when or if you
apply to other companies.

------
mdpm
First: a time / value mismatch; students don't want to spend more time doing
something, then waiting before they get feedback, and your PhD students are
taking longer to crit, annotate, explain their reasoning etc. through an
interface than they would take vocally. In fact, a paid telephonic [ VOIPic? -
Ed. ] mentorship service would probably do better.

Second: you didn't understand the _market_ , not just your customers. The
market is _everyone_ you have to deal with, not just those that buy the bread.

Third: I'd place PG's #5 (Obstinacy) covers both your 'knowing how to code'
problem, and the fixated / obliviousness.

Knowing how to do something is just knowledge. Knowing why, when, and when not
to is wisdom. In the end, it sounds like you're glad that you could afford the
lessons.

------
denysonique
Maybe if you made the app free to use and have introduced a karma system ,
such as the one on StackOverflow, it would maybe make your (ad)venture more
successful.

Personally the Flex UI puts me off -- the first impression after clicking the
demo button. (The site frontpage looks ok)

I agree that a simple text annotation version would be much better and
appealing. (its easier to upload a .doc or .pdf of your work, than scanning
it, people who prefer to handwrite are less likely to use any online services
than those who prefer doing stuff on their computer when possible

------
christonog
I wouldn't say it was a total failure. You learned something, and you can
always reuse code (such as the 700 lines for credit card payments) for other
projects.

------
amadoru
Failure is a lesson learned. Now you know a few things that don't work so next
time you'll know to be cautious about 'em. All the best!

------
pbhjpbhj
From the article:

> _Please take the code (30k lines, PHP/Flex), design & docs and make a go of
> the business._

Could the OP please give a more formal license statement, even if it's just on
this page?

Also, as others have said/hinted the execution looks (after a brief glance) to
be pretty hot. The design is certainly crisp and clean and the screencaps look
well laid out. Pivoting seems a good option.

~~~
timruffles
Sure - in the repo I've specified the MIT license for the code, and CC license
for the docs etc. That said, I'm very happy to give you whatever license you'd
like - just let me know.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Nope that's cool, thanks.

------
bricestacey
Another idea is to market to teachers. Scan in homework, grade/annotate on the
computer, and send results to student and parents. Then, teachers wouldn't
have to lug all that paper around, parents are involved in the feedback loop,
9 month sales window, doesn't require institutional commitments (any teacher
could use it).

~~~
ams6110
_I_ would pay for that! The amount of paper that my kids bring home from
school every day is staggering. If I could go online and see scans of all
their work (along with all the school newsletters, PTO flyers, lunch menus,
etc.) that would be wonderful.

Of course you'd need to figure out how to make it easy for the teacher to
scan/upload of stacks of different sized, often folded/wrinkled paper.

~~~
bricestacey
Actually figuring out how to scan papers would be the hardest part. I think it
would require an affiliate deal with a document scanner company. Or perhaps
they're cheap enough that you could give away document scanners for a year's
subscription (say $120 a year plus a free $60 doc scanner).

------
robjohnson
Thanks for providing so much detail into the inner-workings of your venture.
Most people wouldn't have the guts to put themselves out there like that. If
you think about wealth in terms of 'prevention of loss,' you've just made
everyone on this forum quite a bit wealthier.

~~~
timruffles
NP! It was a little scary, but it's been a very positive experience. I've got
a lot from reading people's comments here, and it's crystallised a lot of the
thinking in the article.

I hope you're right re prevention of loss, that'd be fantastic!

------
rglover
The only thing about this that irks me is not writing code until you have
interested users. Wouldn't it be odd to say "oh, my product? It's coming, and
it's awesome, but I haven't coded it yet." I'm all for the fake it till you
make it but perhaps a bit too much here.

------
drewcrawford
How do you create a poll ad on Facebook? I thought you had to get a sales rep
and drop $25k to do that...

~~~
timruffles
Not sure why, but they removed the feature a while back -
[http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/04/facebook-quietly-pulls-
poll...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/04/facebook-quietly-pulls-polls).

It was really slick when I used it, though it did get small samples (100 max I
believe) and perhaps people just clicked randomly to get rid of it.

~~~
Major_Grooves
I think you can do polls again. Go to your wall and click to post an update.
The last option after "video" is "question".

~~~
lojack
That doesn't allow you to target the demographic (undergrad students).

------
mgl
Lessons learned, experience gained, time to move on and start another project
- All the best!

------
shapeshed
good to see some honesty in the often over-hyped world of startups

------
vaksel
that's why it's important to stick to the minimum viable product philosophy.

if you can do everything manually and just forward emails...do that until you
it gets big enough to require automation

------
danberger
Thanks for sharing your story dude. I'm sure it wasn't easy.

------
denysonique
Why haven't you used Rails for this project? I can see on GitHub that you know
Rails. I believe that using it you would have developed the app faster.

~~~
denysonique
I asked a question, why are you down-voting it?

~~~
mgkimsal
I'm not much of a fan of downvoting, but I suspect it was downvoted because
trying to make this in to a "Rails rocks!" thread is pointless. That may not
have been your intent, but it would have gone that way.

"I believe that using it you would have developed the app faster."

"Faster" than what? Using a fairly well-established PHP MVC framework with a
large community and presumable decent PHP knowledge under his belt? Just
because he knew Rails doesn't mean he doesn't know how to be productive in
PHP. I'd also further add that Rails in 2008 is a far cry from where it is
today. Hosting for PHP was a far better story than Rails in 2008, just to
point to one facet.

There was nothing in the OP story that pointed to the tech choice having been
a factor in the demise of the project. In fact, the whole point is that
focusing on tech at the expense of finding paying customers is a surefire
recipe for failure.

Bringing up the tech is not useful, which is probably the reason for the
downvote.

------
pixcavator
The problem with how seasonal this is seems exaggerated. Just rename it
hwbuff.

------
hezekiah
You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up
was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue
at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side
consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses.

You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the
first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that have raised a
million dollars and don't have that much revenue.

Don't forget advertising. Sure you need lots of hits to make good revenue, but
I know guys living off only ads for their apps. They also offer paid versions,
but these tend to be a minority of the revenue. Don't underestimate what
adsense/admob plus some social media exposure can get you.

You probably don't realize how successful you are already. That leads me to
believe that if you stick to it, you're going to be quite successful. It may
take 20 years, but eventually you're going to get some traction.

It's not the idea. It's not really even execution. It's persistence. If you
keep trying your startup long enough, you'll eventually make enough to live.
Maybe not be rich, maybe not make as much as you could have in a big corp
(TM), but you'll survive, and you'll be your own boss.

My family has been doing startups for literally generations. I'm not rich, and
neither are they, but we've survived. We did it by being persistent.

Stick with it, and I know you'll succeed. Don't give up.

~~~
adrianbye
this can be dangerous thinking.

sticking with a project that has no momentum for a long time can be a huge
waste of time. better to focus on finding momentum as quick as possible either
in the current project or abandon and find new one. there's a lot of
interesting things to do in the world

~~~
chipsy
Agreed. Better to go out and find the zeitgeist than to wait for it to come to
you. For a first failure without mentorship I would actually consider this a
pretty fast one. :)

------
Hisoka
WHen I first visit your landing page, and stared at it for 5 minutes.. I still
didn't understand what the site is about. I kept asking myself HUH? Huh? I
still dunno what it's about.

