

Rise and fall of our first startup, Epiclist - theone
https://medium.com/@stanbugaev/1000-days-of-building-our-first-start-up-epiclist-ea0c07a7964b

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danso
A truly epic writeup of the building and closing of a startup...and it's
especially a must-read for anyone hoping to go into the content-
creator/provider route. This is a good line:

> _Observing the user behaviour we have realised that there is no community
> feeling in the app. People simply did not share a common interest to create
> networks with new people they did not know, because everyone had different
> personal goals in mind (from running a marathon to climbing everest to
> mastering guitar or cooking skills). We weren’t able to focus ourselves on
> one direction, let alone focus our users on achieving their dreams._

One of the takeaways is that you can't build a business on such lofty,
farwaway goals (e.g. users "achieving their dreams"), just as it's a bad idea
to live your life with vague dreams ("I want to be the world's most famous
scientist!", "I want to be beautiful and marry a beautiful person")...the
success stories we know about came through having and reaching step-by-step
concrete goals...Facebook's mission may now be to "connect the world", but it
started out as a way to better hookup with Harvard co-eds.

And with content specifically, you're just at a major, if not crippling
disadvantage. Content is not scalable. Either in its creation _or its
consumption_. I love reading great stories once in awhile...but it's not a
daily need. I don't build a habit for it. And Epiclist, being just an app as
opposed to a website, even when I want to discover great stories, there's more
friction to discover those stories via a narrow app like Epiclist than there
is by just opening up Facebook/Twitter/Google.

~~~
detaro
> I love reading great stories once in awhile...but it's not a daily need. I
> don't build a habit for it. And Epiclist, being just an app as opposed to a
> website, even when I want to discover great stories, there's more friction
> to discover those stories via a narrow app like Epiclist than there is by
> just opening up Facebook/Twitter/Google.

This was the first thing I wondered about their product as well, how would you
"passively" consume the content others created? Some kind of integration with
normal content channels (weekly e-mail, matched to personal interests, or the
option to follow individual feeds of others) would be necessary for me to keep
interacting with it. Just another app I might look at every few months and go
"hey, this was cool", browse a bit and forget again.

How to make money from it is a whole other problem, I didn't get from the
article what the plan was for that.

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stanreim
Hey guys, Stan here, co-founder of Epiclist! Thanks for the comments! @detaro,
we have been running a be-weekly newsletter and integrated with social
services. While it has increased retention, it was still hard to maintain it
as you mention as well. Focusing on several cities to curate weekend getaways
was really helpful to boost engagement in this cities, since people could
discover experiences to do a trip within a day or two! I hope that someone can
nail the "weekend getaways", which is a growing market in itself! Let me know
if you have any other questions!

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mgkimsal
> We truly believe in storytelling, but we don’t see a working long-term
> business here.

Lots of thoughts on this one point. Could they not have done some market
analysis beforehand? Given the pace of change over the last decade, when you
see something with lots of competition and still no one having an actual
viable business with profits yet, what drives someone to think they can just
"make it happen" (yes, obviously with a lot of work)?

If it's a "highly competitive market" there should be some profitable company
by now that you can simply copy. There isn't. I sort of suspect there won't be
for a long time - perhaps ever. Or... at least not 'profitable' to the degree
that VC/investors want to see.

Why should storytelling have a business model? We have business models around
'storytelling' in the form of book and music publishing, and they're going
through dramatic changes. Loads more people can self-publish - very few are
profitable, and most aren't really doing it to be profitable in the first
place - they're doing it to express themselves.

One of the few ways to do storytelling on anything other than a very local
scale had to involve those with access to the publishing tools, and therefore
many more 'stories' (music, books, poems, etc) had to fit within the business
model of a publishing middleman. That's model is dying/morphing, and
'storytelling' facilitators may never be the business model that it once was.

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travelhead
Good write up. However, this is just another example of a startup focusing on
raising VC rather than building a profitable business from the start.

The illusion is that all successful startup companies require VC. However, the
reality is the vast majority of businesses will not be funded and require a
profitable business model.

As a community, we need more reinforcement that profit is the life blood of
any company. Profit isn't a bad word people.

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joyrider
A very informative heartfelt write up. Lots of great insights from battle-
hardened entrepreneurs here. Thank you.

~~~
stanreim
thanks @joyrider!

Stan | Epiclist

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tomengland
This was a tough read, honestly anyone going through this for whatever reason,
is definitely in a tough spot. They're taking failure with the full intent of
learning from it, I think they'll bounce back.

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stanreim
thanks, already on the way bouncing back! :)

Stan | Epiclist

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woah
It might be interesting to create some sort of Markov chain startup generator
putting together random sets of social features on RoR. Not to denigrate their
business but that occurred to me.

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_almosnow
The things I'do w/ 200K dollars...

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philburn
And what would those things be?

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_almosnow
I have a couple ideas that haven't took off the ground bc of money. I've also
been very reluctant of taking VC money. But if someone gave me 200K, no
strings attached, I would bet on those things.

