My first startup attempt was a coaching marketplace and community for poker players. My co-founder and I were both successful professional poker players and coaches at the time, but we were young (20ish) and all but clueless about technology. I still think the market opportunity was there, but we hired an agency who outsourced everything, made bad tech choices, took forever, and gave us a fraction of what we originally agreed on. I learned to program myself in order to complete a major component of the site (in flash) which they had just completely botched.
What we ended up with wasn't terrible, but it fell way short of the vision we had, and our marketing efforts fell mostly flat as well. We were able to recruit a few smart people to post and discuss hands here and there, and we wrote a few articles ourselves that showcased the flash hand analysis tool I had built (the best functioning aspect of the site), but we weren't getting any other traffic. There were a few bugs and an assortment of minor ux issues which made the site feel a bit clunky, and people's feedback was pretty unenthusiastic, so all in all we weren't feeling very good about the direction of things. It didn't take very long (maybe six weeks or so) before we threw in the towel.
It wasn't a complete failure--after all, I had learned how to program and discovered that I quite liked it (certainly much more than grinding poker online), and both of us had learned a lot of lessons about business and technology. But there was another lesson that we only discovered with time.
Even after we completely abandoned the site and it went dormant, I would still check google analytics from time to time to see if there was any traffic, and an interesting trend started to emerge: a few of the hand posts and articles we had posted were developing really steady search traffic. One article in particular was generating something like 20 uniques per day.
At that point, we were both just done with the whole endeavor and had no motivation to try to pick it up again, but we realized that if we had kept at it and continued to create more and more quality content, that we probably could have had an seo goldmine on our hands, developed reputations as poker strategy bloggers, and leveraged that into the community we had originally envisioned. Who knows if it would have gone that way, but it seems like there was at least a relatively unobstructed path to success available to us if we had been willing to stick it out and let the long tail kick in.
You have to be stubborn enough to succeed in a world where the majority of people will tell you you're going to fail, you have to ignore all that.
Often times however, you do fail.
Almost anything worth doing is difficult and to an extent risky. You are likely to fail both wasting time, money and other resources. But you are also likely to win big.
Anything that is easy is either already solved, or leads to mediocrity or pays too less.
To succeed at your goal you either need to get lucky or simply persist until you get there. Some can, many can't. Some just get lucky.
No, it does not. Since, statistically, most startups fail, it's is mathematically sound to assume that mostly failure lurks inside failure.
At some point you have to stop and do something else. Even if you've lost money and time, it's wiser to quit and do other stuff, than continue to losing money and time in the same endless sink.
I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know!
It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as a cautionary tail for people that have a startup itch, but don't necessarily have the necessary skills yet. I mean, this really talked about business and technology problems, but even assume they hit lighting in a bottle with the business model and didn't run into the technical issues, does it sounds like they would have been able to capitalize on it? I got a feeling that it was organized in an ad hoc way, and they weren't set up as an llc/s-corp/etc, had equity agreements, or basic contracts (otherwise, how did the one artist change not know they terms of the business, or opt out so quickly?) I feel like they would have ended up in trouble with the IRS, in a lawsuit with each other, or getting screwed by a less than scrupulous VC.
That said, everyone is better off from sharing, and I thank the author for it.
I mean, it's clear to me that their startup failed. But "nowhere near ready to found a startup"? What does that even mean? Where do I get my secret decoder badge of startup readiness exactly?
Reading through it, I saw and empathized with their mistakes--they decided they'd found validation before they really had. They kept it going too long. They ignored the writing on the wall for too long. But aren't those always the tough questions? When should a founder give up versus persevere? It's not a straightforward answer and as a business owner I find it frustrating when I see people (particularly other business owners) suggest it is.
Bottom line though--everyone needs to decide for themselves if they want to go into business for themselves. But are they "ready"? Who the hell knows? There isn't a list of required skills and credentials for this position.
When I was a young kid, I had an idea that I was going to have a plant store (really. I had just learned about splitting African violets) that would have 'low price days' and 'high price days'. I swear. They idea was that people would be so grateful for the low price days that they would go to the high price days to help keep the place in business. This would have been an idiotic company.
You ask when the authors of the blog post should have given up vs persevere? I would say either when the drew up the business plan or after the beta when the found that people didn't like their product and that they couldn't execute on their idea.
I'm unromantic on this point. To me a startup is to make money (as a profitable business or on the exit), not find creative outlet or have a life experience. I'd rather see 20-somethings blow the ~$5K spent on EC2 hosting apps with fundamentally broken business models instead on (AirBnB) trips through Europe or South America and getting a little bit interesting as people first.
It's up to them, but (to avenger123's point) almost nobody is a Jobs, a Zuckerberg, or a Musk. Most startups fail. Plenty of YC class startups fail, and they're the winners of a highly selective process with access to unbelievable connections.
Based on the blog, I get the sense that the founders are in their early twenties. At that age, no one is "ready" for a startup.
I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, etc. were ready to start their company.
At that age, you just do it, since the risks are low.
Unless your parents are wealthy or you have access to a lot of money, at that age its unlikely that a lot of money is on the line. Sure, they "wasted" time on this startup but this is valuable for the next company they will build.
Also, if there was a lot of money involved (and it wasn't their's) its likely that the business would not have gone as far as stakeholders would have wanted validation.
So my point is this: if someone is not a rockstar and they don't already have these skills, they can learn a huge amount by joining small companies in their C or D rounds (ie, corporate-ish) and practice those skills by applying them in a structure where it's likely they have more experience coworkers to learn from. Then they can found a startup when they have the tools and an idea they're passionate about.
If a person can "get addicted to a steady income" then their financial planning sucks or they aren't committed enough. Better off they don't bother and waste time and capital that could go to people that give a damn.
I do wonder (gently) if there's something like cargo-cult avoidance though? "These people didn't do this thing, and they failed, so we have to do it."
That's glib. There is a very, very difficult balancing act between trusting your innermost convictions and learning to doubt said convictions frequently, as an exercise which reinforces the good bits and dispels the nonsense within them. Failure is the most valuable when you fail at something you personally believe in, because you're forced to confront yourself in the failing. Failure because you followed some BS system for doing or creating a thing without using your own thought processes along the way might teach you to stop being such an idiot, but usually it takes many failures of that sort before the message seeps in.
Remember the famous maxim: "I failed a thousand times but each one brought me a step closer to stealing what I needed from Tesla"
I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in your startup) to only find glory and success down the line.
Either way you failed but you should be commended for it.