My startup, if you could call it that, died after 3 odd years. It never really got off the ground. It was a start up because Alaric and I called it that. It was in fact two friends who grew apart, because we couldn’t fuse our common dream to the disintegrating reality.
The numbers:
$60,000 spent on mainly on paychecks that couldn’t deliver us living wages; the money dangled hope in front of us, shining a weak light so that we felt like there was an open path forward for our partnership. We were wrong.
2 investors. They were friends. Ex-friends. Old colleagues from times when I really gave a damn about work and tried hard to be a company man. They respected my old ambitions and past accomplishments enough to hand over serious sums without seeing a penny returned.
3 different apps, each trying to lasso a unicorn. I was trying to do it my way, based on passion and the pretense of vision, so I ignored the basic fundamentals of product market fit. I ignored the signs and believed that with enough hype -- if only people gave us a chance and used the products -- users will fall in love the vision. No one cares about the vision. They care about what’s in front of them.
20 articles.1 video. 1 press release. Leftovers of agony and pain and frustration and hammers to my brain. Marketing.
15 Peet’s gift cards. at $5 each, they’re still worth something. We handed them out to people in hopes they would review our app.
Hundreds of blog posts and tweets. I hoped to catch a spark to light the magic of social media. Our hundreds of thousands of followers never appeared. We didn’t try hard enough. Not really worth it.
The startup ended when Alaric didn’t want to work any more. We could have continued to push features and attracted users, or at the very least, investors. There was some interest from investors after the release of our 3rd app. To be honest with myself, the investors were just kicking the tires. They were never really serious. We had fundamental flaws. Ultimately, they didn’t believe in the team – no one knew who Alaric was, and I was unproven. I had some cache that wore out after the first app flopped. I was just a curiosity.
And I certainly felt like I spent most of my time babysitting Alaric’s feelings. He never bought into any of the stuff he didn’t understand. He didn’t see the value of polish and detail. He didn’t see the point of refining the user experience. He wanted to do the bare minimum, throw a lot of press at it, and see if it sticks. We never agreed on what minimum was in MVP. And we doomed ourselves from the very beginning.
Alaric would shut himself off for days with no communication in the last few months. I knew it was over. I continued to take meetings, but I couldn’t see a way forward until a couple of guys approached us about working for them. They were young aristocratic British twentysomethings who had licensed out the Polaroid brand, and they wanted to build an app under that umbrella. They got money from investors, they had the pedigree I never had, but they knew nothing when it comes to tech.
It was a lifeline for Alaric and a failure for me. I knew that working for them meant long hours for a scant paycheck. And while there was a slight chance of an acquisition, it would be years away. Plus, working for bros from business school who saw tech as a means to a lifestyle didn’t appeal to me. I saw that Alaric saw this as his last chance to make some money before his energy was spent as a programmer. So I took a consulting fee payout and saw Alaric off.
I hate that time. The startup ate away all the goodwill I had built up over a decade of work. Failure isn’t success, it’s failure. I was too slow to quit. And too egotistical to think I would fizzle out. Except that’s what I did.
I was angry with the game for a long time. The investors and their affirmative no’s. My reluctant partner. The general poor quality of our products. But I realized that it was all my failure. I didn’t convince enough people. I relied on products, partners, press – anyone but myself – to tell that story. If I could have told the story well, everything else would have followed.