I was wondering whether to hold off on saying the same thing :) He built for a niche which is heavily saturated, had no clear USP, no marketing, seems to have had no customer feedback and spent 8 months of his life doing it before he realised there wasn't a penny in it.
He still doesn't really seem to realise he needs to let go now. Move on. It's not a success.
Pity as the guy's obviously got talent. It's one of these things of keep trying as he's obviously almost there. Just with a different business idea. And something that other hackers won't have done 100 times before. And he needs to massively shorten his time to getting a product in front of customers.
I think this is the biggest risk for any entrepreneur, to fail to recognize when an idea won't fly.
I've been guilty of this myself at times and I think the reason why this happens is based in having invested X in a project already. If X is already in it then you're going to do that little bit more to see if you can get it to work that way. So, now it's X+a little bit more, and so on.
The longer you 'hang in there' the harder it gets to throw it out.
So, the conclusion of this is: Do your thinking before you invest significant resources in to a project. Test the waters while you can still walk away. Then find something that gets traction, preferably without you pushing it.
That's true, but seeing how (other) people fail is actually one of the best schools there is. At least you will not need to repeat the mistakes that you know about.
This is true, but in those cases there is the perfectly respectable "N mistakes I made" format. The thing that rankles me is positive advice (you must do A and B in order to succeed at X) given by people who have just failed spectacularly at X.
Excellent point, we should be hearing more from the winners.
Still, I've been part of a couple of failed projects before I set out on my own and I'm pretty sure that I would have fared a lot worse if not for my prior experience. That saved me a ton of time and money.
I still found plenty of 'original' mistakes to make though :)
I agree that there's little value in giving advice on how to fail, but that's not what I did here. I only described what I have done so far. I was very careful about not making this post prescriptive in any way. It's descriptive only.
The bitter-sweet part is that the author does not realise yet that he has failed
Don't be too dismissive; he is honest, writes well, and at least has the "business sense" to make an honest public resignation to fate. A calculated show of weakness is strength, specially in a commercial entity.
Yes, that is the real lesson here. Your project can be dead long before you realize it so the only way to find out is to have a soundboard of critical people around you.
You have too much emotional bonding with your project at that stage to see clearly.
The problem is that plenty of people will isolate themselves from criticism and actively reaffirm their connections with people that tell them what they want to hear (if only because they don't want to lose their friendship).
Giving up on ideas that don't fly is probably an integral part of every successful entrepreneur.
Just like successful VCs will turn down almost all of the 'maybes' in order to be able to concentrate on the winners. Why go after the high hanging fruits first ? It simply makes no business sense.
I do not see anything useful in reading about failing again and again. There are infinite number of mistakes so it will not help you if you know some fraction of them.
Agree! I think this is yet another article that is spreading the fallacy that a "one man startup" is bound for failure.
This person (although intelligent) is not being nearly self-reflective enough in realizing his actual faults... e.g. he didn't release early, he didn't test the market, basically, he turned his business into a "science fair project."
I think the root cause of this bad outcome for him is his failure to truly understand his own limitations and finding a way to get leverage to compensate for it (e.g. hiring a salesman). THIS DOES NOT MEAN that just by getting a co-founder, all of this would have been solved! No! It just means that you need to understand the basics of business!
If you can't do it on your own, you need to outsource the sales my man. Sign up with an affiliate network and let the pyramid schemers take care of it. Offer them something like 50% on all sign ups; you can afford to pay a big finder's fee because a CMS is something that people don't give up quickly once they start using it.
I would strongly urge you NOT to give it up and focus on the sales side of things, you're done coding for now.
I believe OP has hope. Sounds like he has tons of local businesses who need what he has to offer but don't realize it. Therein lies his problem. I may be a little naive, but after reading his post, I still don't know what he has and why anyone would need it. I know what a blog is, but I'm not really sure what a CMS-Content Management System is. Why would a local small business need a "CMS"? Why would they want to blog? If I'm not clear, you can bet his local prospects aren't, either.
This has the makings of an excellent local lifestyle business which would be 90% product and 10% service. OP's ace in the hole is himself. I know that small businesses who would use his product would still like to see his smiling face once a month and be able to call him as needed. This is a huge plus!
My advice to OP would be to temporarily forget about the software, the technology, and the jargon. Instead, become a trusted sympathetic advisor to his prospects. Learn about their situations and understand the pain they have but don't even realize. Meet them on their turf and speak their language. And most of all, solve their problems and help their profitability. Nothing else matters.
What I have just described is all the sales and marketing you need to know. You had passion for the product when you had to, now is the time to have passion for your customers.
Thank you all for you posts. I want to make it clear that I'm not making any absolute statement about anything. I just wanted to share my experience.
I know that I did a poor job of market research from the onset and that there's a long list of things I should have/should not have done to make this work. I do appreciate your opinions.
After stage one there is one necessary step that the author has missed: to calculate whether this idea will bring any money (or at least cover the costs). It is painful to invest 8 months of one's life into something that wouldn't have produced any returns in the first place.
It is painful to invest 8 months of one's life into something that wouldn't have produced any returns in the first place.
Painful, yes. A waste of time, I don't think so.
Although I would never recommend building something without understanding the business model, all is not lost. OP probably learned more valuable lessons (and technology) in that 8 months than he would have in a job or at school. Now is the time to put that education to work. Not doing that would make it a waste of time.
Exactly. It's so easy to jump in and code, without taking a good hard look at the feasibility of the business model, since hackers tend to look at the tech side before all else.
Spending a few days or weeks on the business model can save months of sacrifice, especially when building a product that is saturated with competition.
If I were told to write an article with that headline, the first sale would have marked the end of Phase #1. I'm not sure that I can fit everything else you need to do into only 5 phases left, but relabeling the first sale stage 0 is just cheesy.
