
Why didn't you launch in 2013? - mijustin
http://justinjackson.ca/why-didnt-you-launch-in-2013/
======
neilk
I'm doing everything solo. Not by choice, but I moved to a different city,
away from my usual network. Haven't found the right people yet.

Distractions from contracts (inevitable if I want to pay rent)

I'm working with technology that's new to me.

Also, it was a lot harder than I thought. My prototype was banged out in about
72 hours; I assumed the product would be a few months at most.

~~~
mijustin
Have you started building an audience? (ie. connecting with people that would
be users of your product?)

~~~
melling
Justin, your audience is here. Your products are "shovels for the gold
miners", or simply motivation. I've listened to your podcast and mostly enjoy
it. However, what you're selling, and what your advice caters to, doesn't
really go far enough with people who sell other types of products, other than
the "shovel sellers."

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/product-
people/id5853909...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/product-
people/id585390927)

Maybe you could dig deeper and go beyond the "motivational" stuff? Of course,
I do like a weekly dose of motivation.

~~~
neilk
Oh yeah, I'm aware this guy is just here to sell his $10/month network of
entrepreneurs. To be honest, it's not hard to find other solopreneurs
struggling - I already connect with people this way for regular check-ins, and
for much of 2013 I even set up a regular Google Hangout to do that.

But it is at best a minor help, at worst a distraction. It doesn't come
_close_ to replacing a cofounder who will force you to talk through important
issues, who will dive deep with you into the product.

I answered the question because it was worth crafting an answer, for me.

~~~
mijustin
There have always been communities and clubs for entrepreneurs + tech folks
(Rotary, Chamber, Homebrew Computer Club).

I wanted to recreate that feeling I get when I'm hanging out at a conference
(in the hallway, after sessions) with other attendees. Being able to talk to
smart people, exchange ideas and tips, on a regular basis is super helpful.

~~~
neilk
Fair enough but that doesn't really correlate with willingness to spend
$10/month on some site that doesn't already have a reputation.

These sorts of things need some nucleus to form around, some other reason for
being there that attracts smart and creative do-ers, and that will repel
wannabes and service providers (lawyers, accountants, etc). Often I find the
best "networking" happens at events which are completely unrelated to anything
businessy.

~~~
mijustin
Yup, I agree.

The "nucleus" of our group were smart people I'd met through my podcast
(Product People). We only let 5-10 people in at a time, and the monthly cost
itself keeps most trolls away. ;)

The group has a great diversity: everyone from people building their first
thing, to folks that have already built big (million+ in sales) businesses.

Clearly, choosing a group to belong to is a pretty personal choice. Our group
isn't going to appeal to everyone. ;)

(And correction: it's actually $20/month! There are other active + healthy
communities that are $34-$100/month out there as well)

------
OnyeaboAduba
Alot of delays, some of them my fault . This is alot harder than I thought it
would be and I knew it would be hard coming into it . Someone told me this
would be the hardest thing Ive ever done in my life , which is saying
something considering my life. Hope to be up by February of next year. This
was a really good post btw alot of helpful info Thanks

~~~
mijustin
You're welcome.

What was the hardest part for you?

~~~
OnyeaboAduba
Im learning how to code and contracting a developer to build the product at
the same time. This coupled with being a "singlish" founder and all the things
that come with that have been the hardest

------
cookiecaper
Cool article. I'll take his prompt.

So I kinda-sorta launched in 2013. Not the big project I hoped to launch, but
an unrelated side project that distracted me from the big project. Should
still have serious profit potential, but I made certain assumptions about the
support infrastructure that panned out to be incorrect despite early evidence
contrariwise. I'm now working to recover from that, and developing more robust
stratagems that technically I probably should've handled earlier. It's a
bummer because it's going to make things take longer to get off the ground
than I would've liked, but we are launched and accepting payments. It's just
that no one has chosen to disburse that payment yet. ;)

~~~
mijustin
OP here. I'd love to see what you launched. Could you post a link?

------
brickcap
2013 is not over :) . I am still aiming to release my V1 before 31 dec.

~~~
mijustin
Nice! Do you have a landing page up we could look at?

~~~
brickcap
Thank you. Here it is

[http://www.wrinq.com/](http://www.wrinq.com/)

It is not much at all just a description of what wrinq is going to be. But I
am making progress every day.

~~~
mijustin
This looks interesting. Are you going to launch with private messaging, and
then move to private audio/video calls?

Quick recommendation: I'd recommend an email signup form. I (personally) would
be interested in knowing when you launch.

~~~
brickcap
Yes. I will launch with private messaging. The reason for this is that
websockets are supported in all the web browsers where as web rtc is only
supported in two.

I am also planning to build chrome and Firefox apps to support native like
experience on desktop and hopefully (when it works) on mobile.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will put up an email collection form today.

------
johnmurch
The 2 things that stuck out for me in 2013 is

1) Carving out time and sticking with it - not rescheduling it for someone
else, totally agree you need to lock your self down for making it a priority
and finishing an idea

2) Which you mentioned is underestimating the time - 3 weeks was really 3
months for you. For me, I totally do this and work hard semi-launch something,
test it and before I know 2 months have passed. Need to iterate faster and go
hard.

Great stuff - super excited for 2014 and JFDI :)

------
angersock
Because we ran out of runway while bootstrapping, and the stress finally took
out the founders (in rather dramatic fashion).

It's not all lollipops and blowjobs out there--sometimes you just get dealt a
bad hand.

EDIT: Which isn't to say I hadn't tried before and wouldn't try again. It's
just very easy in this bubble for people to ignore the visceral truth that
_starting a company is hard_ and that success is far from guaranteed.

------
Brajeshwar
JFDI[1] is also the name of and Incubator out of Singapore, run by Meng Weng
Wong[2]. Meng is the founder of Pobox.com

1\. [http://jfdi.asia/](http://jfdi.asia/)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Weng_Wong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Weng_Wong)

------
ZanderEarth32
I, both, launched and didn't launch a few a projects in 2013. The main
difference between the one that launched versus the few that didn't was I
couldn't either validate the idea or concept to myself, even though there
might have been a market for it.

------
krapp
>Your idea was too big

Way, way more complicated than I anticipated. Also serially getting disgusted
and starting everything over every few months hasn't helped. And getting
distracted for weeks on end by ancillary projects. And deciding I needed to
write my own framework.

------
bsirkia
It's not too late!! We're students and right now is productivity time :)

------
hncomment
Honestly, the answer is internet addiction.

------
mindcrime
We actually "launched" as a _company_ [1] way before 2013, but now that I
think about it, 2013 was significant for us in that we only really had a
product "for sale" this year. We announced[2] LA (Limited Availability) of two
of our products in 2013. We had hoped to close our first deal in 2013, but
barring a miracle in the next week, that isn't going to happen. But going in
2014, things are looking very encouraging.

So, given that, I'd say that the following points from TFA resonated with me:

 _Your idea was too big_

What we're working on is big, and as a result, it's taken what feels like
forever just to get to this point. In hindsight, we might could have
decomposed things a bit more, and done more to look for a way to get traction
with a subset of the overall vision. And that's an adjustment that we are
actually still looking into making. In 2014, we'll probably launch a SaaS
version of our Information Discovery Platform, tailed for use as a "sales
intelligence" tool, and targeted at sales teams. We've gotten some very
positive feedback on this idea from a number of sales teams, so we're pretty
excited about that. Had we decided to go this route sooner, we might be a lot
better off now. But, hindsight is 20/20.

 _You didn’t build an audience_

We only started _really_ "working" social-media with an eye towards
specifically trying to grow our audience, in 2013. I mean, we had a blog and a
Twitter account and a Facebook page and the gamut all along... but last year
we started taking it seriously. What I have come to realize is that growing an
audience is a lot of work, but it _is_ somewhat predictable. There are things,
that if you do those things, will result in more Twitter followers, more
mailing list signups, etc. We haven't dived full-bore into "growth hacking"
but are definitely seeing the importance of these ideas.

The other thing we hope to do in 2014 is more marketing efforts, including:
presenting at user-groups and Meetups that relate to what we do, hosting
Google Hangout sessions, and/or Twitter "live chats" on topics related to our
domain, still more "content marketing" via our blog, and maybe even writing
and publishing a book (or two).

 _You tried doing it alone_

Did that for the first year I was working on Fogbeam, but we've grown in fits
and starts. IMO, you should invite people to join you when the time is right,
and not _just_ to say you "aren't a solo founder". We have three members on
the founding team now, and a fourth person we're talking to about joining up
to do sales. It's taken time, but we've been patient and looked for good fits.

[1]: [http://www.fogbeam.com](http://www.fogbeam.com)

[2]:
[http://fogbeam.com/news.html#press_release_08282013](http://fogbeam.com/news.html#press_release_08282013)

~~~
shubb
Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products?

I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite
with API integration? If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a
suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a
collection of products with strange names?

(hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)

~~~
mindcrime
_Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products?_

Sure, it's all based on our overall branding theory. The company name is
"Fogbeam Labs" and the logo is a lighthouse, and our (current) slogan is "Cut
through the information fog". So everything is based on ideas around light,
illumination, and helping people see what is currently unseen. Given that,
Quoddy, Heceta, Neddick and Hatteras are all named after famous lighthouses.

At one time we debated using a model where those names _would_ be more like
"internal names" and would be the name of the Open Source project, and then
using a different name for the "branded" commercial release. Something like
the way Red Hat use "Fedora" for their upstream distro and "RHEL" for their
branded release, or "Wildfly" for the upstream JBoss and "JBOSS EAP" for the
branded release of that.

But when we sat down to think about doing that, we kept coming back up with
scenarios like

"Quoddy" -> "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever"

or

"Hatteras" -> "Fogbeam Business Event Engine"

and nobody on our team liked "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" and the ilk.

So we decided just to use the "base" names, and tag "Enterprise" onto the end
to discriminate between the underlying OSS project and the commercially
supported releases.

"Quoddy" -> "Quoddy Enterprise"

etc.

Is it perfect? Probably not, but we're running with it for now. If it doesn't
seem to be working, we may revisit it.

As an aside, I did learn one important lesson during all this... at one time,
I was trying to be too cute with using lighthouse related terms, and we had a
project named "Screwpile". A little later, one of our advisors pointed out
that "it makes sense if you know what screwpile means[1], but nobody does, and
if you don't, it just sounds ugly, almost vulgar even". And then I realized
just how bad that was. We yanked that and renamed it "Fogcutter" instead. :-)

 _I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite
with API integration?_

I try to shy away from using the term "groupware" because it has existing
connotations that don't necessarily apply to what we're doing. I'd probably
say a "suite of knowledge management tools" over saying "groupware", but we
are kind on the boundaries of the existing terminology to some extent, so
we're still iterating on the terminology to use in our messaging.

But basically, we have - in Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" (kinda
like Jive or Yammer), but with much better support for integrating with other
enterprise applications and knowledge sources, and using semantic integration
to fully unite knowledge and information across disparate sources, so we can
provide relevant context at the user's fingertips when they are examining any
given event, task, or piece of content.

Neddick, on the other hand, is like "Reddit for the Enterprise". It's link
sharing, social news, and that sort of thing, but - again - tailored more to
be useful as a tool within an organization.

 _If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk
about the suite and it 's capabilities, rather than a collection of products
with strange names?_

That's another place where we're still exploring what's going to make the most
sense. Are people going to want to hear about (and buy) the entire suite, or
are significant numbers of people going to want one piece, or the other, but
not both? We don't know the answer to that yet, so it's all still in a state
of flux. Ideally, as we learn more about how people react to this, the
messaging and branding will become more clear.

 _(hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)_

It is, and thanks!

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-
pile_lighthouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse)

