

Failed to delight. Post-mortem of Delight IO - thomaspun
https://medium.com/founder-stories/4de7ef031c3a

======
SeoxyS
There are an alarming amount of typos and grammatical errors in this article.
It detracts a lot from the content, and (sadly) hurts the credibility of the
story.

A few writing tips:

1\. When done writing, read the article aloud to yourself. This will help you
catch a lot of errors which might easily be missed after having looked at a
wall of text for an hour.

2\. Always, _always_ , have a friend proof read the article.

3\. Sleep on it. When you're done writing, put it aside for a day or two, and
re-read it when your mind is 100% fresh and you've forgotten the details.

~~~
thomaspun
Thanks for the tips, Kenneth! Would you be interested in helping me review my
future posts?

Yes I'm just starting to blog and I do want to get better by practicing.
English is my second language although I've used it for all of my professional
life.

~~~
loopdoend
Try wordy.com. Even though I'm a native English speaker I use them to review
my blog posts. Their pricing is reasonable for an on-demand editor and you can
pick your editorial team.

------
RyJones
I like this trend of discussing failure bluntly. So many of the startups I've
ridden to the end just sort of faded away - get called into a room and laid
off, founders lie to the pliant Seattle tech press about how great things are,
company fades away, nothing learned.

------
alexshye
Enjoyed the write-up Thomas -- thanks for opening up about what happened, and
look forward to part 2.

I added this to a list of startup postmortems I've been keeping notes on:
[http://www.soulmix.com/remix/363](http://www.soulmix.com/remix/363)

(I should probably disclose that I building Soulmix also :)

~~~
thomaspun
Thanks Alex. Glad you enjoyed it.

------
null_ptr
Your product sounds very invasive. I assume production apps could still
include your analytics code and screencap my screen, tap my microphone, and
spy on me with my phone's cameras. Your features page claims _" Record audio
and video from front facing camera and play back along with the screen
recording."_ What measures do you take to make sure users know when their
actions are recorded?

~~~
tylerlh
I had some experience working with this technology after it was acquired by
another company. IMO, if you weren't making users aware there was no way Apple
was letting you through.

------
sgt101
The thing about the company not failing, but you failing... The best bit of
advice I ever got was "don't beat yourself up, there's a line of folks who
will do that for you if you let them, don't do their job for them."

Remember, sometimes when an airplane crashes the wings come off before it
hit's the ground. The wings failed! Of course, the fact that the bonehead
flying it has put _4 the structural load on the wings that they were designed
to support_ might* be what caused that to happen - but "stupid wings, if only
we had made them out of concrete"...

Don't beat yourself up, learn, suck it up, move on.

------
noelwelsh
"Customers pay for information, not raw data" is the key take-away for me. I
think customers pay even more readily for action, particularly marketers as
they are often incapable of implementing actions (i.e. programming). See
companies like Intercom.io and Customer.io that are cleaning up because they
let marketers actually do something with their analytics.

------
jonahx
As a most picayune silver lining, one person, at least, enjoyed the title of
your blog post, and even more so after learning your last name.

------
Sujan
I'm working on a mobile app right now and delight.io was one of the (many)
services in my "try later, when we have a working app prototype" bookmark
folder. Shame I won't be able to try it.

So maybe it's too late now, but I have some "feedback" or thoughts on the
service and its offering.

\- Pricing. Seemed really expensive to me at first, but thinking about it 3
hours of recording are quite much. Still, I never felt that the pricing was
'right'.

\- Code vs. features vs. benefits. Oh great, I can paste some Objective-C to
my app. I as a product manager don't care at all about that, developers do. I
would care about what I can do with the lib, how the interface looks and how
an intergration feels for the user. Can I comment the stream I get to persist
my thoughts I have when watching it? How do I view them?

\- Design and English. Bootstrap and unedited English are fine for a MVP or
personal project. A real offering should have more. This certainly wouldn't
have a been a dealbreaker for me, but still - it makes it much harder to just
try a project.

\- iOS only. I know you had to priotize, but for me this would have been a
problem right now as we are Android first right now.

So I'm still very much interested in using a service like delight.io. A
website that shows me how the recording looks for the user, what I as the
customer see of the recording and how I can use it to gain real insight and
generate change to my app could convince me.

~~~
thomaspun
Thanks for the feedback.

> \- Pricing There are definitely more testing to do. Our original thought was
> that even if you know which funnels preform worst, it will still take you
> hours to try to figure out what went wrong. With Delight, hopefully we could
> give you better hints to save you time and improve the app.

> \- Code vs features vs benefits. You are absolutely right. I should have
> added that as lesson learned as well.

> \- iOS only. Android makes it harder to achieve the ease of integration we
> had for iOS. Besides, we wanted to use the revenue from iOS to fund the
> Android development.

You can consider other alternatives but none of them has Android version.

------
Smirnoff
>> "3\. Price your service to encourage engagement."

This probably should be changed to "Make the price transparent." I read their
pricing based on credits and I still don't get it.

Honestly, I am still baffled by the fact that so many startups build software
for developers/small businesses without selling their software first!!!

Make a prototype, go to customers, sell it, and ask for feedback right then
and there. Ask for what they want, pivot (or add features) before you have
written a single line of code.

~~~
thomaspun
You are right. We should have tried to sell harder before building. Lesson
learned. To be fair thou, we did interview about 10 companies before even
prototyping to get feedback. Two of them ended up paying after we launched.

------
kjackson2012
Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems
in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and
the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?

Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he
quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of
consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?

~~~
thomaspun
To be honest, I don't know if my honesty will hurt me later on. I didn't want
to sugar coat the reason. Startups don't die until founders quit. You always
have a way to make it work if you want.

We had founder issues early on and we parted ways after we shut down the first
product. I then led the company to ship second and third products as a solo
founder. I could have quitted then but stuck on for another two years. I
wasn't ashamed telling people the truth because I know I have given my best.

~~~
RyJones
The lack of sugar coating is exactly what made this interesting reading.

------
midas007
First, folks give up way too easily. It takes time for things to hit even when
everything's dialed-in.

Second, unless an app costs a ton of money to keep going, find a home for it.
There's always some shop that will buy up your "failed" startup. Turning just
it off is like killing a baby. So wantrepreneurs out there: try not to be so
quick to strangle her in the bath water.

------
andrewflnr
I was hoping for an article about the Delight language,
[http://delight.sourceforge.net/](http://delight.sourceforge.net/) . Python-
like syntax, compiles to D.

------
tzakrajs
What awful grammar and spelling. Color me unsurprised.

~~~
twfarland
Agreed. Even the most world-changing idea would only be as strong as its
presentation.

------
lnanek2
Sounds like it was really expensive for a startup that should have been going
for fit and then traction before monetization.

