
Part Two of a failed parking startup's postmortem: a new perspective - chrishoog
http://chrishoog.com/the-helloparking-postmortem-a-look-back-and-a-new-perspective/
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jtbigwoo
One of the toughest things for younger people and engineers to understand is
how crazy complicated most businesses are these days. Growing up and going to
school, everything is explained in a few sentences. Insurance is a bunch of
people pooling their money to deal with risk. Logistics is the process of
getting something or someone from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

So a couple smart young men thinks, "Let's make AirBnB for <industry>. At a
high enough level of abstraction, it's just matching buyers and sellers." Then
one of two things happen.

(A) They talk to a bunch of people in <industry> and realize that people have
spent decades learning these industries and it's going to be a long slog to
even understand what's going on in <industry>.

(B) They don't talk to anybody and build a simple marketplace in a few months
and get very little traction. Then they either do (A) or go out of business.

A lot of good startup advice these days can be summed up as "talk to
customers." Hopefully all that talking means you're actually learning
something.

~~~
nmcfarl
I agree with talking to your customers, however one thing you wish to avoid is
talking _too_ much with your competitors and other "industry people".

Some industries are broken because all of the players have the same mindset.
If they can keep things this way they can keep new competitors from being a
large threat and their old customers paying too much for substandard product.
You still need to innovate even if your competitors say it can't be done.

Balancing knowledge acquisition with a desire to change things can be
difficult thing.

~~~
jtbigwoo
Good point. If the first step is learning, the next step has to be asking,
"Why is it this way?" and "What's inessential?"

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swamp40
Here in Chicago, SpotHero is taking off like crazy.

What do you think they have done differently to be so wildly successful in the
same space?

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brandnewlow
SpotHero spent A LONG time very quietly struggling to line up initial supply,
deals and product. Years. During that time they seem to have figured out that
commercial spots, and making the commercial parking experience 10x better was
the opportunity. Then they went after it.

~~~
chrishoog
You beat me to it!

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user2
"Worst, we rarely got out of the building."

Reading that line made me buy the "Get Out of the Building" t-shirt:
[http://lean-startup-machine.myshopify.com/products/get-out-o...](http://lean-
startup-machine.myshopify.com/products/get-out-of-the-building-t-shirt)

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ar7hur
It's really interesting that the OP came back 2 years later to analyze why
they failed. I think it takes a lot of time to discover the root causes of a
failure (or a success) as opposed to what you think are causes, but are
actually symptoms.

