
NewsLabs (YC W10) folds months after launch, regrets big promises to journalists - ilamont
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999
======
pbiggar
I'm Paul Biggar, one of the founders.

There's a lot of speculation and reading between the lines going on here.
There is really no information to go off, and jumping to conclusions based on
that email is a little unfair. (By contrast, the journalists to whom that
email was addressed had tons of context.)

I'm in the middle of writing a "what went wrong" piece, which I'll link to
here, but I'll ask you guys to hold off judgement until then.

~~~
MediaSquirrel
dude, seriously? honeymoon right after launch = guaranteed fail OR I want a
"lifestyle business." How did you guys pass the PG sniff test???
#YCadmissionFAIL

I don't mean to be a total dick, but when you're doing a startup and OTHER
PEOPLE ARE DEPENDING ON YOU, going on a vacation of any sort right after you
launch is just plain irresponsible.

People like you give the rest of us who are busting our ass and putting
everything on the line to make our companies work a bad name.

~~~
axod
Some things are more important than money, companies, startups etc.

Don't be so quick to pass judgement if you don't know the full story.

~~~
tkieft
It's not the fact that he left the money/business for the honeymoon. It's the
fact that he, presumably, screwed investors, his cofounder, and their
customers by doing so, all people who were relying on him in some manner or
other.

------
_pius
I'm usually very reticent about making snide remarks about a startup as it
deadpools, but in this case I'll make an exception.

As someone who's working in this space (and was not fortunate enough to have
been granted the imprimatur, mentorship, and network of YCombinator), it
pisses me off that this company garnered so much hype and is now giving up so
quickly. It'll now be that much harder to get print journalists to put their
faith in new business models for their work.

From the start, I thought the promises NewsTilt was making were great but it
wasn't at all clear how those promises were going to be fulfilled. On the
strength of YC's reputation, I assumed that there was some "secret sauce" that
differentiated them and made their promises credible. According to this
e-mail, I was wrong. And now, mere months after being given what I'd consider
to be the chance of a lifetime, they're just giving up. Not evolving, not
making changes, just giving up. What a joke.

Have some passion about what you're doing or just don't bother.

~~~
petercooper
_And now, mere months after being given what I'd consider to be the chance of
a lifetime, they're just giving up. Not evolving, not making changes, just
giving up. What a joke._

Companies (or people!) who make bold promises, get the press excited, and then
fail to deliver make it harder for us all to get our stories across.

I usually play down what I'm doing and underpromise, but it seems reaching way
beyond your limits and impressing journalists is the way to go for coverage
(Sam Sethi's exploits that TechCrunch covered so deftly come to mind here,
too.)

~~~
alexro
Exciting the press just for the sake of PR can backfire on YC anytime soon

------
chime
Let me recap:

* One of the two cofounders was on his honeymoon for the month of May, right after launch.

* The other cofounder had difficulty managing everything on his own.

* Cofounder comes back from the honeymoon and decides to leave for good.

* Remaining cofounder doesn't want to run it on his own.

In my past life, I've been both of these guys and frankly, it is hard to blame
either. If the passion somehow died for honeymooning-cofounder, you can't
expect him to give his very best on this startup. On the other hand, if your
cofounder leaves, you have very little incentive to do everything on your own.
Part of working with a cofounder is each person doing what the other most
probably dislikes (usually biz vs. tech). What's the fun if you have to get
better pricing AND write efficient code? Most people like one or the other.

I think the take-away from this and my own life examples is to start small,
not try to get too much publicity early on, work on finishing the product
before making promises, and most importantly, be honest to yourself and your
cofounder.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Wow. Maybe it's because I've never been either of those guys, but I have
trouble rustling up as much compassion as you seem to.

One of the two co-founders schedules a launch right before his honeymoon? Who
does that?

And, after just a couple months, the passion dies? What kind of commitment
does that show?

I agree with your take-away, though. Don't try to get hype, until you actually
have something solid to hype.

~~~
chime
> One of the two co-founders schedules a launch right before his honeymoon?
> Who does that?

Life. Nobody knows what happens next. I have no idea how/what/why this
transpired but it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine that the
wedding/honeymoon was planned well-in-advance. And the success of the startup
was a last-second thing. Sure, the honeymoon could have been postponed but
then again, maybe he wasn't certain about the startup, the other cofounder, or
his life in general. Truth is, nobody knows other than the guys themselves.
That's why I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Because I've been there. And
because if you are in a position where you have to choose between commitments
you've already made and dreams you wish to pursue, you have to say "no" to
someone.

Maybe the passion did not die. Maybe there were other reasons that the
founders do not want to share. Maybe it was personality issues, financial
issues, or even health. Who knows? The reason I am giving them the benefit of
the doubt is that they came out clean and apologized. That is action and it
was direct, honest, and to the point.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Definite props for the act of apologizing; less so for the reason sounding so
shallow.

Sure, weddings are planned well in advance. Product launches should be, too.

Maybe there were other reasons. Shit happens. But, when shit happens so fast
as to lead you to shut down two months after launching, we're deep into the
"failing to plan is planning to fail" category.

------
talbina
Does YC see a problem with founders being the technical developers?

When I saw their bio when this was announced a few months back, I did scratch
my head a little. One was a PhD in computer science, the other was a
researcher at ARM.

None had a media background.

I just wish people stop thinking that journalism is a technology problem.It
doesn't matter how good your platform is. This hacker culture of thinking
everything can be solved with guru developer skills needs to stop.

Here are some qoutes from that letter:

"If I could rewind and start again then I believe the pitch for NewsLabs
should have been simpler and much more realistic: we will build you a
technology platform and strive to work hard for you as programmers... but we
cannot magically generate you an online brand or guarantee traffic."

"It seemed like we had the right parts (your writing and our technology)..."

This is why Mark MacLeod, in a recent post on his blog startupcfo.ca, said
that one of the traits for a successful founder is domain knowledge:

"Lets look at domain knowledge first. This is not about having studied or
otherwise artificially gotten to “know” the industry. This is about coming
from that industry, having lived it, knowing the players and knowing the pain
firsthand. There is no substitute for this. You can’t fake it. You either come
from the space or you don’t."

~~~
ErrantX
> None had a media background.

With utter honesty; this was my biggest concern with the whole thing. I
believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and
they were "redirected" onto this idea.

~~~
qeorge
_I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and
they were "redirected" onto this idea._

Interesting you say that, given how well the idea matched the first RFS. [1]

For better or for worse, I got the same impression about NowMov.

[1] <http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html>

------
ErrantX
Paul was kind enough to include me in a prelaunch mailing list of journalists
where he discussed his vision.

At the time I have to confess I was not convinced Newstilt was the right
product at the right time. It was an interesting vision (in a nutshell: to
have journalists establish their own brands and syndicate content more
directly to publishers/websites) but I did forsee traction trouble:

\- Firstly because I felt journalists would have difficulty "getting" the new
concept EDIT: by this I mean there was far too little content coming into
Newstilt, I'm guessing because the writers didn't see instant returns and
therefore gave up. As the email says Techcrunch took dedication and
unfortunately for Newstilt they needed dedicated writers aiming for the same
vision, hard to find.

\- But mostly because publishers and websites would be resistive and negative
about this concept (or simply uninterested).

I actually think it is a good model. A few years ago myself and others tried
to form a similar style collective for UK tech magazines. It was a _very_ hard
to sell and ultimately failed because it was so radically difference.

I suspect one of the major problems was that it is such a different approach
to media that it put many people off.

I've come to the conclusion that, for this sort of thing to work, it has to be
built by journalists with both the contacts and the ability to placate both of
the above problems.

(also, taking a honey moon in the first few months of a startup is never going
to end well!).

Good luck Paul and Nathan - I really was rooting for you and it sucks that
such a cool model never got off the ground.

~~~
dman
If its a good idea, then it will find its champion and its moment in the sun
... eventually.

~~~
ErrantX
Yes, it will.

Something like it is on my back burner still (after 3 years - which in my mind
makes it a great idea).

One way it could work is for a site (or a collaboration of sites) like Tech
Crunch to create a network for aspiring tech writers - and go from there.

------
credo
pg has said (<http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>) that "Not having a
cofounder is a real problem" and that finding a co-founder should be the
"first priority" for any single founder and that this is "more important than
anything else". This is a fairly common meme in the startup world.

Newslab looks like a great example of how that meme gets it wrong. Many other
things are far more important than finding a co-founder

In this case, it looks like one co-founder goes on a honeymoon and decides to
drop out. Then the other co-founder decides that he doesn't have the passion
to run it on his own. So the whole company collapses. I'm assuming that a more
passionate person who didn't believe in the co-founder meme would have shown
more perseverance.

~~~
pg
Actually this case isn't a counterexample. Paul wasn't someone Nathan
recruited; more the opposite.

~~~
chegra
What I have found in terms of co-founders is that people will join when you
have traction.

At least in my circle, people aren't risk takers and wouldn't stop their own
personal project to work on someone else project.

With so many people having problems finding co-founders, I would suggest they
implement something and get some traction. After, find a co-founder who now
you can offer less equity since they weren't there to share the initial risk
then approach investors.

~~~
thaumaturgy
YES! Oh man, I want to thank you for saying that.

I would _love_ to find a co-founder. I've bootstrapped a successful business,
it's going quite well, and I've been doing it for 2.5 years now. I've simply
refused to give up at every step of the way -- even though I've often wanted
to. And if I have my way, this business is going to get quite big.

But, I'm not running the sort of thing that YC would be interested in, and my
sporadic efforts locally to drum up support have accomplished little.

~~~
percept
Have you considered asking HN?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Yes, but I'm following the same pattern that everyone does when they start
getting in their own way: there's a laundry list of stuff I want to get in
order before I start shopping on sites like HN.

However, skmurphy contacted me privately yesterday as a result of the comment,
which was awesome. :-)

------
brandnewlow
TheAwl has a solid little write-up about this:
[http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/another-journalism-changing-
st...](http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/another-journalism-changing-startup-
bites-the-dust)

"It is very difficult to get readers regularly returning to any site; it takes
a blend of pumping out the content and getting linked by high-profile sites
both in and out of its immediate topic — and a not-insignificant amount of
luck — in order to do so. Internet behaviors can be very entrenched things!"

------
gojomo
There must be some backstory -- out of money, irreconcilable founder
differences, etc. -- which will only come out if the principals want it to.
Without that, speculating on their "boredom" or "impatience" or "seriousness"
is unfair.

------
brandnewlow
That's it? They lasted 2 months? Did they get bored?

~~~
dannyr
I'm curious to know how long they worked on the product before YC.

~~~
brandnewlow
In their Reddit AMA I think they said they originally were going to sell a
white label Disqus commenting system to newspapers as their product, only to
find out that building it would be easy, but selling it would be extremely
hard. So they decided to go with the True/Slant/Examiner/Associated
Content/Demand Media model of getting a whole bunch of people publishing in
one place to pool their collective Google juice.

My sense, from comments made here and there is that they hadn't really been
working on the site itself all that long when it launched. Some of the
features they said were on the way seemed pretty core to me (letting writers
sell their work directly, for example).

~~~
ErrantX
I think this is right; in the early stages (post YC funding) when they were
doing a QA mailing list wwith some journalists they were just building the
product.

(in fairness it appeared very fast and iterated really well from what I
saw/heard)

------
barkingcat
I think one problem they had early on is that technology is not the answer to
an editorial and writing problem.

Many people on the newslabs lists questioned their experience in journalistic
and publishing oriented endeavours - the founders' answers to quality and
editorial concerns weren't very convincing - and always came back to
technology. Ideas like building mass-comment moderation systems, crowdsourced
editing, etc - don't work if the people moderating don't have literary taste.

But it was a good try - and I hope that other people tackling this problem
space would think about some of the questions raised by the newslabs
contributors.

------
Pent
Seems like they wanted to build a brand overnight and then give up when it
didn't happen. I've never even heard of them, personally. Is there more to the
story than what was in the post?

------
jasonlbaptiste
I still think the offering of: we handle technology+monetization for
journalists/online publishers is a very valuable proposition.

~~~
brandnewlow
I totally agree. One of the big problems with that though is its nearly
impossible to bootstrap an audience on the web. That's why Kevin Rose pimping
Digg on Tech TV was such a coup. He had product/market fit AND could drop an
audience on it.

With most publishing startups, you have to survive the whole first year until
Google un-sandboxes your domain and you get legit Google traffic. Until then
you have to find other ways to build numbers, Reddit-baiting, cutting deals
with other publications etc....notice none of these are technical problems?

So you can't really sell publishers on traffic, you've got to offer them
something else. Then at that point, how are you better than Wordpress.com?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Is it impossible to boostrap an audience on the web? I feel like that's where
most successful online publications have come from. Techcrunch came out of
arrington's boredom and Pete Cashmore started mashable in scottland at 19. I
think it's all about baby steps. If your goal is to get 1 million visitors
fast that won't work. It's the first 50k or so.

Technology is the less important than traffic/content/readerbase, but it's
certainly something you do not want to deal with. Wordpress.com is certainly
great, but I wouldn't be running that if I were trying to do something
professional (I would use Wordpress though).

~~~
brandnewlow
That's not exactly bootstrapping though. Those are both examples of organic
growth that happened over YEARS. That's very do-able if you are making content
people actually want to read.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
That's definitely bootstrapping. Arrington and cashmore didn't raise a single
time. Sure their current success took years, but even where they were at 6-12
months afterwards could show they were on the rise.

If you're not making content people don't want to read then you're doomed
regardless. It's like making an app people don't want: push it and fund it all
you want, you're probably fucked.

~~~
brandnewlow
They bootstrapped their business, but not the audience, i.e. they didn't
magically start out with a built-in audience through a deal or prior
celebrity, they had to build that up over time.

~~~
erikpukinskis
To my mind, bootstrapping just means making something from nothing, which is
exactly what they did with their audience.

------
bjplink
Here are some previous posts about NewsLabs that might be interesting reading
in light of this announcement, in case anyone is unfamiliar with what they
were about...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159683>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259603>

------
bosch
I think this serves to remind everyone that you need to have the will to
persevere for your start up to thrive during the first few years when things
aren't going your way. If you're only in it for an instant hit, you're not
building a business properly.

------
petercooper
Perhaps it's just confirmation bias because I'm interested in this space, but
aren't most news startups that rush to market cursed with obscurity or death?

Newsvine is the only interesting and semi-successful one that comes to mind
over the past few years, and the executive team there is crazy experienced and
of great provenance. All the other good news "startups" I know of have had to
grow quite slowly over a long period of time or are heavily leaning on
exposure in fields like politics or tech.

------
ig1
I wrote an analyis of the newslabs model back in March prior to their launch:

[http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/03/journalism-
advertising...](http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/03/journalism-advertising-
business-model.html)

From my analysis I couldn't see the financials working out (obviously that
wasn't the cause of their failure in this case; but I presume the financials
not working didn't help the situation).

------
Groxx
Don't think I've heard of that one. Any great loss?

~~~
riffer
Was a YC W10 company

~~~
brandnewlow
Someone should stick that up in the headline. If we're going to do it for the
good news about YC companies, we should do it for the not so good news, too.

I'm assuming there was something else happening behind the scenes to cause
both founders to jump ship so quickly. They made a very strong (positive!)
impression on me with their rhetoric and claims here as well as over in a
Reddit AMA they did (<http://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/bwrew>). I'm
surprised to hear they fizzled so quickly after all the big talk.

~~~
dpritchett
At least we're allowed to comment on this YC company story. I still can't get
comfortable with the no-comments-allowed YC stories here on HN.

~~~
davidw
Those are just job advertisements, and I still think it's a mistake, as the
comments would be a great place to ask for questions/clarification that might
benefit others and keep the same questions from being repeated in private
email.

