Takeaways from Folding Our Startup | Hacker News Reader

Takeaways from Folding Our Startup

grinn.it

40 pointsrcolinkennedy26 comments

We decided to unwind our startup; here's why. Hope this helps others.

6. Pick a better brand name. Sorry but GRINN.IT is a VERY bad name. Why? Because you have to spell it out for them every time. Just like pownce.

Hey, what's your new site?

grin it, check it out.

Grabs smartphone, types in grinit.com, nope nothing, grin.it, nope nothing. done.

Keep and understand the distinction between a bad PRODUCT and piss poor marketing.

In today's domain ecosystem, you're not going to easily find a name which is easy to spell, pronounce, remember AND is free (or affordable) to acquire as a domain name. The vast majority of non-technical users are just going to google for your company, so your example seems a little contrived.

The first part of the conversation would go more like this:

Hey, what's your new site?

grinnit with two n's. So grinn dot it.

However, there is definitely a problem when a search for "grin it" on google doesn't find your site. Moreover when a search for "grin it photos" or "grinit photos" is also unsuccessful. That's definitely a problem. If the spelling of your website isn't immediately obvious (a la reddit), you just need to ensure that users can still find your site.

I don't think it's a horrible name. Seeing it in print makes it instantly memorable which is always helpful, they just needed some additional work on seo for the typos of their name. Calling it "piss poor marketing" is disingenuous and unnecessarily inflammatory.

I think you're wrong. Yes, a lot of very good domains are taken, but you can spend as little as $200 in Flippa.com to get a decent one that people can at least remember.

I think ease of spelling was the problem I was getting at, not memorability, but after visiting Flippa, I can see your point.

really dude? After reading that earnest post, your only issue was with the URL? What a trivial matter

If you think your brand is a trivial matter, then I'm sorry to hear that.

Look, Being an entrepreneur is not about lining up your ducks 100%, but it is about getting each element of your project as close to "pretty damn good" as possible. Don't let something as important as brand slip to the side guys. It IS important.

You're totally right.

We were going to call it http://trololololololololololo.com/ but that was already taken.

Wish you were there when we were working on the backup name, sounds like you would have been very helpful

Your attitude stinks!

Is this how you take feedback? Someone has taken time out to give you a sensible feedback and you call him/her a troll?

Maybe it sounded a bit harsh, but c'mmon.

It says a lot about you Mr Kennedy.

You are correct and I reacted too defensively. Yes, marketing is absolutely critical, and perhaps there are better domain names that could have been chosen.

HOWEVER, name / domain was not at all the root cause of what we decided was ultimately the reason to stop pursuing this endeavor.

True, but you've just demonstrated that marketing / PR isn't your forte, and you come across a little brash in an Internet forum filled with entrepreneurs and VCs.

I disagree. These kinds of posts take a lot of courage to write, and then people jump in with all kinds of "well, you should have done ..." bullshit advice. People here on HN need to learn (and respect) when someone is asking for feedback vs when they're telling a story.

this person just closed his/her business and trying to help others. Then the commenter calls them "piss poor" - that's not "sensible." Perhaps there is a more mature way to respond, but that's still not cool. I feel for these guys. Call it a tie.

Actually, that was hilarious. Well played.

Grinnit = grin+innit, innit?

Not sure I understand your equation, but I think you're right. It's a happy photo if you GRIN IN IT. The goal was to have a name that's easy to say, short, and bring a smile (Grin). We actually had a list of 50+ names which we brought down to four contenders and checked in every language using Google Translate; we those put out to a survey. 58% of respondents preferred Grinnit.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=innit

I appreciate this post but I disagree with it. I started my company in 2003. There were hundreds of times that we should have "folded." Last year we did $500k. This year we will do $1M. Turns out we were just too early, but because we were too early we made all of our mistakes before the market caught up to us. It was a tough road but now we are sitting in the catbird seat.

My advice to others is: never give up.

What specifically do you disagree with?

I think the startup ecosystem is woefully lacking in negative outcome posts like these. It's fun to write about your awesome traction, your latest funding round, but it's painful and bitter to write about failure. As a result, many new entrepreneurs get a highly distorted perception of the probability of success.

These new entrepreneurs look around and see guys/gals of comparable intelligence and think to themselves, if Jimmy can build a $500M company, I surely can build a $50M company. After all, he's not 10 times smarter than me, and I see everyone winning on every post I read.

What this assessment belies is that for every Jimmy, there are hundreds, if not thousands of other startup attempts that have acheived moderate results or outright failure.

So I welcome the author's post and ecourage more to do more self-reflection, if only to give a more balanced views as to really how hard this road is.

Specifically, I disagree with giving up.

Timing is always an issue, and it's awesome that you were able to grind it out and stay solvent while the market was able to catch up. We aren't proud of 'giving up' but we stand by our convictions. Every situation is different and our decision came down to a multitude of factors. We're not applauding our unwind, but more so trying to convey a little transparency into our decision.

Your story is inspiring but you're making the very common mistake of assuming because you did X and were successful, X is the key to success.

I'm sure there are many others like you who had a "never give up" attitude and put it all on the line for their business and then still drove their companies through the ground, entering financial ruin and perhaps destroying relationships (marriages, etc).

"Never give up" is a good mantra to have, but in reality sometimes you should give up... for now. If you're giving up your current company because the model is unworkable and the brand has no intrinsic value, that's a perfectly valid thing to do.

Sometimes you need to "pivot" more than you really can within the box you've built for your current small company. Regroup in the working class and then start a new thing later... that isn't really "giving up" and sometimes it is 100% the right thing to do.

There were hundreds of times that we should have "folded."

Was one of those times being, oh, I dunno, $180k in personal debt? Just pulled that number out of thin air (didn't happen to me personally), but I would disagree (as would your bankers/financiers/investors) that there is never a time to 'give up'. You could perhaps mask it as a 'pivot' (or whatever term is in vogue at the time) but "giving up" is something some people eventually have to do.

Congrats on doing $1M in business. Realize that you didn't get there solely because you didn't give up, though. There were other factors involved beyond just "keeping on keeping on". I don't even know what those factors were, but they existed.

-- When we arrived at the filtering problem, we realized that we had solved the collaboration problem. --

True to any consumer-facing startup. When you successfully scale up, you have to somehow keep the quality.

Note to self : think about this "beforehand" ...

It's great to see such a positive retrospective. Keep your head up and thanks for sharing!

Thanks! Not to be cliche, but it would been easier to keep going - but nobody wants to be a zombie. Lots of hard choices.

Thanks Jack. Happy to share something that can ring true for a large number of startuppers.

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