As I’ve mentioned previously (see “New Job“), in January I left my job as a highly paid and undermotivated investment professional and struck out on my own. For the next two months, I worked hard bringing my idea to life; I maintained a disciplined approach, waking up at 6:00 every morning and sticking to a schedule of distraction-free work time. I was probably 100-200% more productive working for myself than I had been in the last two years at my old job; I got way more done in way less time. And in the end, the project was a total, complete failure. Here’s why.
The Idea
I’ve been in the energy finance industry for over four years, and during that time I worked really hard, especially at the beginning. But it was pretty clear even from the beginning that no one really believed in what we were doing; we were doing it primarily because there was a lucrative market for it. Unlike most people, I really did believe we provided a valuable service for the market (and I believe in financial services generally; I believe that financial participants lubricate commodity markets by sending accurate pricing signals and absorbing risk, which smooths out price changes that can cause potentially disastrous market shocks); I just didn’t care. This wasn’t a problem that, on its face, really affected me.
What I really wanted to work on — and work hard on — was a problem that I believed in. Thing is, as a middle class white guy, my life is actually pretty great and I just don’t have that many problems. Sure, there’s all sorts of societal issues I believe in — gender / marriage / racial equality, promoting women in STEM fields, etc. — but these all have experts already working tirelessly on the problem, and I’m both not an expert and also, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson (~19:30 in that video), just one man. . If only there were, I dunno, like a list of problems or inconveniences that people face, and I could pick something off and solve it.
So I set off to create what was, effectively, a bug tracking system — but instead of for software, it’s for problems in the meat world.
Barriers
There’s a huge and obvious barrier, which is that a typical bug tracking system has people on the other end actually fixing the bugs. There’s another, complimentary barrier, which is that probably 98% of the bugs that exist already have a real solution. (For example, if your lifebug is “I have trouble coming up with ideas for what to eat for dinner,” you should check out Random Restaurant Generator, which I just found by googling “random food.”)
That’s not a huge deal, a platform to address existing solutions is actually really useful, and the more existing solutions there are, the smaller the first problem is. The real problem is that this whole idea relies on having an experienced and self-moderating user base that will resolve bugs, mark duplicates, close off-topic stuff, etc. In short, this idea suffers from network effects; it gets exponentially more valuable the more active users it has. In this way, it’s like reddit or the Q&A platform Stack Exchange.
I know that all of these barriers can be overcome, so I did what people advised me to do and went off to make a demo. It wasn’t feature-complete, and it didn’t look great, but it worked OK and it’d store your data and you could discuss things and there was a basic workflow and yadda yadda. You can find the demo here, by the way; I recommend you check out the demo release notes, which are basically my apology to anyone attempting to use it.
The point is, it works, so I’m ready to show this to people who can help me solve the bigger user acquisition problem and get funding or whatever, which I more generally call “the business side of things.” About two weeks ago, I sat down to look into the business side of things, and that’s where the trouble started.
The Trouble
The business aspect can, to me, be broken into two parts:
- Getting funding: I need this so that I can hire developers to fix the thousands of UX issues in that demo, a designer to make it look good, customer acquisition, marketing, etc.
- Building the user base: I need this for my product to be useful.
Here’s what I know about either of those things:
So I did a little research and looked into accelerators and incubators and the like that might be able to push me forward.
They all want you to explain your idea; as Y Combinator suggests, the best way to do this is to be straightforward and short. Remember that awesome idea I had about 500 words ago? “A bug reporting platform for the meat world.” Simple. Short. But my idea had since morphed into something a bit more vague. I was no longer modeling it as a bug reporting platform; it had become a Q&A site, with two modes of operation, and basically no scope: “A Q&A platform matching problems with solutions, but some of those problems don’t have solutions, and interested users could, like… solve those? It’s like a Stack Exchange site, but instead of being targeted, it’s really broad, but like… broad in a very specific way that I can’t quite explain.” Great pitch, brah.
Another issue was that almost no one I looked at would help a single-founder company, and if they would, they’d do so only reluctantly. They also wanted things like “revenue projections” and “monetization strategies” and “customer acquisition plans,” and I had a huge whitespace in my brain where that knowledge should be. I was reading all these success stories and watching videos about companies that are getting funded by the likes of Techstars and Y Combinator, and basically every one of them is about a team that started out as middle school BFFs, and they’ve built like a hundred things together, and even though most of them were dumb, the point is they’ve been doing this forever. Meanwhile, I’m some asshole working out of his apartment in Virginia who’s never done this before and, not only has he not really researched his idea, he doesn’t even know how to. I clearly need a partner who knows this stuff.
So I called a friend of mine (incidentally, someone I’ve known since middle school); he’s literally my only in in the startup community, and I told him my idea, with my crappy pitch and all. And after telling me my pitch is stupid, he goes, “I sort of get where you’re going with this; have you ever heard of Quirky?” and I’m like, “Oh that looks… pretty similar to what I was sort of imagining.” It’s different, but not that different: having a place where people can submit problems that don’t yet have a solution and get those problems fixed. And they have people on the other end to fix those problems! They’re beating me.
OK, so maybe I could work on my pitch and maybe my idea was sufficiently different from what’s out there. Let’s look at customer acquisition. My model was pretty similar to Stack Exchange, so how did those guys get off the ground? SE was founded by Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. You may not know either of these people or their blogs, but you should know that when they started Stack Overflow (the precursor to and still most popular site in the Stack Exchange universe), they had literally thousands of followers and something like 40 combined years of software development experience. Meanwhile, Aaron Swartz was a key reddit founder; check out his wikipedia page, and you’ll see immediately that this guy had significant experience in the industry and the community. I, on the other hand, had a blog with 3 followers (one of whom I think is probably a robot?) and no experience in the industry.
So there was already a probably-better version of my idea out there that already had funding, my pitch was terrible, and I didn’t have the relevant experience to make any of this work. Time to close up shop and get a real job.
Lessons
The key difference between people who’ve been successful in the past and me is that these people are contributing members of the communities they’re interested in. They have years of experience in software and web development and keep up to date with the latest and greatest technologies; they’re active in the startup community, they’re reading Hacker News and TechCrunch; they have jobs in the industry. They’re constantly working on side projects.
My startup friend knows about Quirky because he’s keeping up with who’s getting funding, and he has friends and networks built in the community that I just don’t have. Meanwhile, Spolsky, Atwood, and Swartz have been well-respected members of their respective communities with thousands of followers, so when they announce, “Hey we have this cool idea but it needs users,” they get them.
This is not to diminish the amount of work (and luck) that still goes into building a business; it’s just to say that these guys all started with a leg up that I don’t have. And the best way to get that leg up is to become a productive member of those communities, which is why I’m about to start looking for jobs in web development in areas with a strong startup culture.
Regrets
On the plus side, I have no regrets. I learned more about modern web development building Squeaky Wheel than I did in my 4+ years of doing in-house stuff at my old job. I knew going into this that it was extremely unlikely that my idea would be successful, and I’m not giving up on it entirely — in fact, this failure spawned several new ideas, related and unrelated. Coming out of this, I know exactly what I want to do, where I want to be, and I have about 4 years worth of fun side project ideas to work on while I gain real experience. I’m more excited about my future now that I’ve ever been.
