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Re:Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300... by tim333 on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @04:52AM (#6994672)
Thanks for the write up - It's always better to learn from other people mistakes. I think however you and the most of the other posters miss the most basic problem because they mostly seem not to have tried the site and that is that, to me at any rate, it seems the product is not very good. It seems to be basically a 40 question form with questions like "People in the team know the weaknesses and strengths of other team members." that you mark from 1-10 and is not customizable. Personally I hate that stuff - you spend ages filling the thing out and then when you find the average response is say 7 what do you do then? There's not obvious action. If you had a form with a question saying say "what do you thinks the biggest problem with your team?" and people were able to say anonymously that say "there were four founders without the right experience and only one dev really working" then that would at least be useful. I think before worrying about the market etc you should have tested your system on real teams to see if it actually helped them much. This could have been done with zero or little tech - say either a paper questionnaire or just write your questions in an email and have people email their answers back to you. The fact that 200 people tried the product and none bought does imply a product problem but it if you define your product as trying something to fix team management problems then I think the issue is not that there is no demand for that but that your product does not work in that regard. If it was me and I could code a bit, rather than scrap the thing I think I might try changing it to see if it could be made to work at the team improving level. You could say cut it to say five 0-10 type questions and five "what's the biggest problem?" type questions and then try that with a couple of real teams and see if they found it helpful.
Re:Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300... by sergioschuler on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @08:32AM (#6994952)
Your evaluation certainly have merits and a lot of it we confirmed when speaking to clients later. Just one thing to make clear: I have 5+ years of team management/leadership development and I used a similar tool I created and evolved (in paper form) to improve a loooot of teams. So the tool works - BUT you are correct, it is a pain to apply and you probably need consultancy to get out of the team management hole if you are not a skilled manager.