
Reboot. Relaunch. Redesign. Pivot. Sunset. Shutter. The Knack, a web app, story. - anthony_franco
http://blog.studiofellow.com/2011/09/21/reboot-relaunch-redesign-pivot-sunset-shutter-the-knack-a-web-app-story/
======
spolsky
Success does not come from Getting Real, or from Lean Startups, or from any
other business book. It doesn't come from sitting in your room reading Inc.
Magazine or Joel on Software. It doesn't come from great typography or
presentations worthy of Steve Jobs.

I'll bet if you look at your server logs, you'll see that this post on Hacker
News got you more traffic than you've had since you launched. I would guess
you got about 35,000 humans listening to your story tonight.

Get it? It's a story. It's about the story.

Sitting around the campfire telling stories.

You can reboot, relaunch, pivot, A-B test, Go Lean and Get Real in your room
until the end of time but until you have a story to tell you're not
interesting and if you're not interesting nobody will pay attention: not poor
teachers, not rich teachers, not anybody.

OK, congratulations, you have now learned one thing about business. If you'd
like to learn another couple of thousand send me an email and come work for me
in New York; it looks like you're a pretty decent product designer and
programmer.

~~~
staunch
This is not an example of someone following the advice of the smart people and
failing. This is someone _not_ following advice and making most of the common
mistakes people warn about.

He's a _sole founder_ , working _part-time_ , in _Colorado_ , on a problem _he
doesn't have_ , in _enterprise software_ , for _schools_ , with _no
distribution plan_ , _no team_ , no _domain expertise_ , in a _niche market_ ,
and giving up after _1 year_.

Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck
against himself.

~~~
studiofellow
A couple of your points are narrow-minded. I have to live in the bay area,
work on a team, and work on it full time to build a viable business? Come on,
there are other paths to success.

Your points about domain expertise, and working on a problem I don't have are
right on. I learned the hard way it's way harder to build software to meet
someone else's needs. (Even though 3 immediate family members are teachers,
including my wife.)

~~~
prawn
"Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck
against himself."

------
onan_barbarian
At first, this seems to be the bog-standard "I built something that people
_said_ they want, but then they didn't buy it" post-mortem. However, dig
deeper and you will be delighted by gems like these:

"This is a farce. Talking about tech and being on the Twitter make teachers
look good to administrators and to the public. They can add “Technology
Committee Member” to their resumes and congratulate themselves for being
innovative. But using tech to do work requires a small minimum of effort and
change, and any amount of these is too much for teachers."

"I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent
having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both
online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has
warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement."

I applaud this subtle rhetorical device. The author understands that this
readers may well be distracted by feelings of sympathy. So, he has carefully
filled his post with nuggets like these so that we can focus on the substance
of his post, rather than mawkish sentiments like: "How sad that a nice person
can work hard for a year on a startup and not succeed".

~~~
nsfmc
The conflict that's weirdest for me is that he internally conflates mindshare,
educational reform, etc with him earning cash money. It's as if he believed
there was a direct correlation between his rising income and teachers'
decreasing entitlement.

And now that he hasn't earned any significant cash, he can claim that
teachers/education have a warped sense of value... right.

------
steve8918
I really don't like the part where the author rags on teachers.

"I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent
having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both
online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has
warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement."

Sorry, but why the heck should a teacher have to pay for their own classroom?
If I were forced to pay for my keyboard at work, or my monitor, should I not
be pissed? Teachers, especially ones that are starting out, are dirt poor, and
for some reason they need to spend money on their classroom? Nonsense.

As sense of entitlement? How about a sense of what's fair. I didn't like the
attitude at all.

"I feel for them. I really do. But they’re still terrible customers."

Or, in other words "Teachers refused to pay for my product, so they suck."

I would say the author was guilty of a cliched mistake that many startups
make: he built a solution for a problem that no one was interested in, or at
least interested enough to pay for.

~~~
mnutt
I don't think he resents them as much as he just realizes that he had mistaken
assumptions. He heard that teachers often pay for their own supplies, but what
he didn't know was that teachers _hate_ doing it.

~~~
studiofellow
Exactly.

~~~
studiofellow
Sorry, still learning the HN ground rules. No more one word comments.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Sorry but one word comments are the only way no to indicate assent quickly, if
you upvote it's useless except as an indicator the commenter and even then
they don't know it was you who upvoted. FWIW I think that your comment was
fine, showed that you agreed.

The "ground rules" were set and worked on an earlier version. Your comment
added information that was unavailable to us.

~~~
studiofellow
Thanks for the clarification. Appreciate it.

------
rpg
I'm with steve8918 on this --- complaining about your customers not liking
tech shows that you missed the point about their technology needs. Like...
what if your school ALREADY has a system and you need to live with it? What if
graphs aren't necessary, or even helpful? I get graphs that show where my kids
grades on a standardized test compare to the scores of other kids in their
cohort. These graphs are both trivial to make, and essentially useless at
conveying information not contained in the raw numbers.

Also, it's CRITICAL to understand the difference between USERS and CUSTOMERS.
If you sell something into schools, the SCHOOL BOARD is your CUSTOMER. The
teachers are your USERS. You'd better make sure you can sell to the CUSTOMERS.

If you think about it, this explains why most school software is so
astoundingly horrible: the CUSTOMERS don't ever have to use it!

My hat's off to anyone who wants to sell to this market --- I sure don't have
the courage or masochism for it.

~~~
studiofellow
What you're describing with users vs customers is pretty standard in
education. My approach was that teachers would be both customer and user.

I probably did confuse the two a bit in my post. To clarify, my point is that
teachers are bad customers, but probably deserving users.

------
AretNCarlsen
In the vein of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", no teacher ever got
fired for storing all of their students' data locally, whether on a personal
PC or a physical gradebook. I have worked with businesses that do not want to
store data in the cloud (Amazon, Salesforce, etc) if the data is at all
confidential. They have a point: the risks of local data storage are serious
but intuitive, whereas the average person has only your word regarding the
safety of the cloud. And teachers, like doctors and bankers, have auditors
that they would have to persuade to accept the new technology.

I would not be surprised if the post mortem reveals that some teachers brought
this app up with their administrators, who responded, "That app would be handy
for you, but if there is theft or corruption of your students' data, how would
we defend ourselves in the ensuing lawsuits? 'The developer seemed reliable?'"

~~~
jcampbell1
I make my living selling software to teachers, and the privacy issue comes up
about 1 in 20 sales. It is an issue, but not a deal breaker. If a teacher has
an online grade book they can share with parents, and it gets results, then
teachers will buy the software.

Irrational lawsuit paranoia is a real problem, but it is not the reason this
product failed.

------
maukdaddy
As someone who worked in Infosec at the 3rd largest district in the nation let
me add something:

\- Most, if not all, schools prohibit teachers from storing student data in
external (non-school based) systems. In fact, our teacher/staff AUP strictly
forbid using systems other than the district-provided systems for anything
involving student information.

------
jdkunesh
You missed your market. Look at your benefits list:

Demonstrates student growth. Reveals teacher effectiveness. Use data to inform
your instruction. Creates beautiful and insightful graphs automatically.
Detailed report card for every student. Organizes documentation for easy
access. Faster and easier to use than any other gradebook.

Teachers already do all this in a way that is approved by their district via
the tools provided for them. And, speaking cynically, they certainly don't
want to reveal their effectiveness nor do they want to adjust lesson plans
according to data.

That said, as a parent, I would want this kind of information about my child
because I could use it to hold my child's teacher accountable. In fact, if I
could share it on Facebook or a Yahoo! group (I'm a member of one for my
daughter's class), it would help the community evaluate their kids and their
instruction.

Call me crazy, but that's my 2 cents.

------
sycr
With a monthly burn of only $150 though, why kill it? The all or nothing
approach seems stubborn to an outsider. Maybe it doesn't generate a full time
income, but you only need 30 users to break even every month. That seems like
an achievable goal.

~~~
studiofellow
This is exactly what I thought when I launched. A year later, 30 users is
looking a lot less realistic.

The $150/mo isn't a big deal. I'd just rather focus my efforts on something
else that is more likely to succeed.

~~~
bdunn
Stack those bricks :-)

------
danmaz74
There are many very good insights in the comments already. I would add that
the website doesn't work hard enough to establish credibility and trust, which
is very important when dealing with a service where reliability is very
important (I guess that you have a lot of manual input to do, and you don't
want to lose your work...).

I'll add that my father (a retired teacher) sold some educational software
that he created himself for years and it was mostly teachers who bought it to
use in the classroom. He didn't make a lot of money (also because you could
download the same software for free from the internet), but some teachers were
definitely willing to pay for something that they valued for their work - at
least here in Italy, but I guess that's also true in the US.

------
tabbyjabby
Your startup failed because teachers hate technology? Your startup failed
because you couldn't make teachers love the technology you were providing. Or
you didn't go to the right people. Maybe you should've gone straight to the
schools.

~~~
studiofellow
My startup failed because I built it for the wrong people. I didn't mention
this in the post, but I did approach schools in my area and offered a free
pilot program. After a couple days of emails and cold calling I couldn't get a
single taker.

~~~
craigvn
The lesson is that you need to make sure you have a market before wasting time
building a product. Most tech guys get this the wrong way around (but don't
really care cause they like building stuff).

~~~
studiofellow
You're right. Next time around, I'm starting with a landing page and email
list, and I'm only coding if I get a decent level of interest. I spent way too
much time on this without knowing if I was on target.

------
keeptrying
If you read Sean Murphys blog and the posts that he writes in Lean Startup
Circle Google groups, he gives a lot of techniques on how to figure out what a
user means when they say or do some particular thing.

For my particular startup I have a lot of users who say - "I dont think I
would be a potential customer but I really want to be on the site when you
launch". Then I ask them for money right there and then discounted 50% from
waht we will charge when we release and have had a few people actually give us
the money. So we are going to launch this idea on Oct 15.

------
prawn
That's a lot of resentment for a group of people who simply didn't want to
hand over their hard-earned for something you offered them but that they
couldn't justify.

------
knowledgeworker
Nice story. Interesting view on problems and how people define them. Problems
can be defined and constructed by workers as a method of explaining systemic
or personal failures and they become devices to explain other issues relating
to their own motivations and sense of satisfaction in their work. Maybe that's
the trick - working out how solvable and how 'real' the problem is.

------
angryasian
why wouldn't you try to release it for free, and figure out another business
model. I can think of a few off the top of my head. Your only issue should be
to gain users first, as you have an adoption problem or more like how do I
show people the long term benefits of doing something different and new. Its
about educating your users, which is hard by itself. Maybe we didn't ruin the
web, we just weeded out those that are not creative enough to figure out how
to make money from it.

~~~
studiofellow
What business model would you suggest? No business model or creative
monetization strategy is going to change the audience's predisposition against
paying.

I'm a bootstrapper looking to build a profitable business, not someone chasing
an acquisition or an IPO.

Ending up with 1000 users who aren't paying me is no better than where I am
now, is it?

~~~
patio11
Your audience will happily pay for software. See
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com> : over $100k sold to teachers. They even
happily paid for your software: 10 paying users out of a hundred is a pretty
nice conversion rate. Your problem is the denominator there. You need to scale
it up to the point where the numerator becomes meaningful to you.

A related problem is, on watching your presentation, I don't think you solve a
problem teachers actually have. No teacher gets up in the morning and goes
"Dang, but for my crushing lack of simple data tools, I'd be ready for today."

~~~
studiofellow
Honestly, your success throws me for a loop—it's the exact opposite of what
I've encountered. Every teacher I speak with objects to the very idea of
paying for software—without even seeing the app.

In another comment, I wrote this about Bingo Card Creator vs. Knack: _I think
the difference is that he's providing something teachers already use, need,
and look for, as opposed to a "new" kind of software solution. (Online
gradebooks aren't that new, but they still are not in use by the majority of
teachers.)_

I really wonder if the difference is just in what we're selling. If I
understand your product correctly, you offer instructional materials teachers
have been using for a long time: customized cards to play bingo. This is
something teachers are familiar with. As I mentioned in the post, teachers
already buy classroom materials like pencils, letter charts, and decorations.
They've been buying these for years and actually enjoy buying them. Bingo
cards are a familiar need and expense. However teachers do not, generally
speaking, regularly use software, much less pay for it every month. The
concept of paying for an online gradebook is foreign, regardless of what the
software looks like.

If you don't mind, I'll send you an email to follow up. I'd really like to
continue discussing.

~~~
euroclydon
I think the difference between your two products can be expressed much more
simply: When teachers buy BCC, they can go to bed earlier, when they buy
Knack, they've just opened the door to more clerical work.

~~~
studiofellow
Completely agree that is the perception, even if the net effect is less time
spent working. And to be honest, I'm sure in some cases it would cause more
work.

~~~
euroclydon
Do you have any other ideas for small personal educational software? Or do you
know any websites where I can find problems teachers are having that can be
addressed with software?

------
fady
joel: great points. "If you'd like to learn another couple of thousand send me
an email and come work for me in New York; it looks like you're a pretty
decent product designer and programmer." - for some reason i love that you see
his talent and want it. if he were to come to NY and work for you, that would
be a story to tell around a campfire...

------
Hisoka
I feel for you. You have good intentions and want to make something that
actually improves the quality of education, a noble goal... The problem is
that sometimes what people need vs what we want is different. We want to throw
money at gambling, and tabloids, when in actuality we're better off spending
that money on other things that could improve the quality of life.

