Ineffective Entrepreneurship: Post-Mortem of Hippo

> The work I was doing for Hippo – designing the product and talking to users – I was able to do much quicker than David was able to build the product (he had a normal developer job).

> I think my particular mistake was probably being too optimistic about how much development work David and A would and could do. I should have been more critical of our development productivity and not given them so much of the benefit of the doubt.

Developers: Don't work for these people. This is why it is so important to donate your time to people who are serious. Do not give your time to backstop someone's else fantasies of doing something "important" or getting rich.

This is full of classic early stage business mistakes.

- Married to the "how": app, app, app, app. It didn't have to be an app. You wanted to use technology to make people happier. There's a lot more technology than apps.

+ talking to users: well done!

+ reaching out to potential customers!: really, well done!

- not following up with customers: face palm. But that's ok, talk to another one and keep in touch!

- not using customer agreements to raise money for product dev: you should have used the banks agreement to a trial to help fund developement. The bank could have sponsored the initial build! You could have raised a little money from people based on that. Gone to an accelerator, it didn't have to YC.

- started a PhD: focus!!!! Argh. Now you're just going to half ass both.

- couldn't develop product faster enough: perhaps you needed a more experienced developer? Maybe you needed different tech. Because you were basically building a business off the back of a favour, you were pretty stuck though. You can't fire a favour.

- 9 months to launch an Alpha: this is too long to wait to get a simple mood tracking app into alpha. It didn't need to be anything more than that at this point. The fancy can come later.

- let's use ML!: NO! You do not have time for the distraction. Unless you're going to use the Hype train to raise funds.

- not useful, technical issues: fix them?

+ apply to YC: good, seeking mentorship is probably a good idea :).

- only apply to YC: all your eggs in one basket is not a good strategy.

- still struggling to articulate the idea: what did you tell the bank? That seemed to work. Mayhaps you're a little dissolusioned? Take a break tbh.

Generally great approaches, I think if you were to try again a few times you'd make it. It's evident that you have some of the right mind set to make it work.

I think you gained a fair amount of CV worthy skills and experience tbh.

This is like me who knows nothing about making music, convincing a bunch of actual musicians to create a band, not pay them, come up with a vague idea for an album and then send them e-mails every other week asking about progress, and then calling myself a failed band leader when they go off and get actual jobs.

One thing that really struck me was this comment:

> Stardom and riches beckoned! I could practically see my face on Wired magazine.

Many years ago I worked with a sports psychologist and one of the things he impressed strongly upon me was that you don't want to get caught up in dreams of the end success. The reason being that your mind can't always clearly tell the difference between the real endpoint where you can kick back and relax and the daydreams of that end point. As a result if you spend too much time dreaming about what it will be like at the end you risk getting disengaged because you've created a situation where your mind might think you have already made it more than you really have.

(Hopefully this paraphrasing gets the idea across)

I have deep respect for this entrepreneur because it is so damn easy to theorize impact/success in one’s brain and masturbate over pure thoughtstuff. It’s a whole different story when the rubber hits the road and so I really appreciate the author sharing their story. The parables to one’s personal life are impeccable.

The “Hippo” irony comes from a story from the incredible Ernesto Sirolli:

“SIROLLI: It was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River. And we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini. And of course, the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. And we were amazed that the local people in such fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, thank God we're here. Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation.

And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully and we had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. And we were telling the Zambians, look how easy agriculture is. When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came up from the river and they ate everything. And we said to the Zambians, my God, the hippos. And the Zambians said, yes, that's why we have no agriculture here. Why didn't you tell us? You never asked. I thought it was only us Italian's blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing. And after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.”

There's an intersting nugget :

>>> Failing unremarkably can happen and is something you should consider as a possibility. If I were to claim I had built career capital as a result of my 2.5 (mis)adventure, I would be deceiving myself. As it is I walk away with no cool story, no CV points. At least if I’d blown some money (mine

That's real failure.

While it is pretty easy to think of things to criticize with this article and the author's strategy, I admire the willingness to share stories of failure. It's an interesting contrast with several stories I've read recently about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, the startup that had an idea that didn't work out, that wouldn't quit, kept getting money, kept doing whatever it took to keep trying, and ended up resorting to deception. There is something to be said for the honest admission, "this isn't working, it's time to stop and try something else." Getting lots of money invested in your idea may make it harder to admit when you need to try something else.

I loved his 'the Mom test' link to Rob Fitzpatrick's 'how to get feedback when your customers are lying' video [0]. It reminds me of an old Jakob Nielsen post about user testing. You need to watch users actually using the product without your help, but you can probably get away with only 5 users [1].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_xjb7LB7VY

[1]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...

I am extremely curious what they were actually trying to build, because as described it sounds like the sort of thing I'd expect to take at most a few months as a side project.

Though this was concerning the company who handle our home insurance, also a startup named Hippo, who are great. Thankfully not!

As a developer it's pretty easy to laugh a little condescendingly at the naivete and the missteps outlined here. However I think it's worth pointing out even skilled developers have their own version of this where they spend months or years churning on code that never produces any value because they are scared to ship and face real user feedback.

Oddly enough, my friend and I were looking for almost exactly what Hippo is offering. I guess the market is too small and not flush with cash for something like this to exist? See requirements here: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/45070/2134

Seems like maybe the lack of random nudges during the day was the biggest missing piece here? Maybe the founder could have hired someone for minimum wage to just manually send these notifications on a schedule and send the recommendations. Scale with more cheap labour as necessary until you finally have the fancy ml automated solution

If you like this article, you might also enjoy this one by the same author: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/yv/is_effective_altruism_ov...

"TL;DR version: Mental illness is probably much worse than poverty or physical illness. Interventions which change how people think - i.e. reduce mental health and increase happiness - may be more cost-effective ways of increasing happiness than AMF or Give Directly. I outline some new opportunities EA should look into."

<rant>

Why do millennials think that working on a side project for a short while constitutes a start up or being an entrepreneur? You had a vague idea, worked on it for a while and it turned out to go nowhere. There is nothing wrong with that. But it was just a side project and not a start up. It certainly does not make you an entrepreneur.

By that definition I have had a dozen start ups and almost every programmer I know must be an entrepreneur. When did the bar get so low? Is no action too small for self-aggrandizement?

If I write a blog post I am not suddenly a published author. If I give $20 to a homeless person I am not suddenly a philanthropist. Helping a friend with some code does not suddenly make me a professional teacher.

Millennials, get over yourself.

</Rant>