30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

Essentially none of those 30kloc were part of the actual product, just set dressing. You could easily launch the same basic product without writing a single line of code, just handling everything through e-mail attachments and a paypal button. I don't believe that the user experience would be significantly worse for it.

In the middle of the article, the OP lists various mistakes he made, but I think he's basically wrong on all counts. His essential mistake IMO was launching too late. In six months of work, he gained no insight whatsoever into the market. He could have learned just as much with a handwritten flier on the college notice board - "Your mock exam reviewed by a postgrad, £10. Email foo@bar.com".

For the technically-inclined, coding is the perfect form of procrastination. It can absorb a near-infinite amount of time and feels quite productive, but it's usually a distraction. Steve Blank's most important message is that in an early stage startup, your job is to learn about the market. Anything which doesn't connect you with your customers is wasted effort.

The market wasn't there but I disagree that that means he should have started with little or no product.

I forget who said it, but the best advice I've heard from a V.C. is that one of the biggest mistakes they see is founders going overboard trying to avoid making the mistakes their last startup made.

That said, I had an experience at a startup that did what the author now considers "the right way." We went out and sold before we had a product built. We figured out the pitch that the customers wanted to hear and had all of our best leads ready to go. But then it took more like a 12 to 18 months to build the thing, not the 3 to 6 we were promising. Unless you've built something exactly like the current product before, there are always technical problems you don't anticipate, and they always get solved the same way: add more engineering time.

Your earliest/best sales leads are a precious resource. Do not look like a dumbass in front of them. The second batch is not as easy to find as the first or they would have been in the first batch.

Great article. I don't think we can repeat this enough:

Hard work != value. Clever code != value. Writing something hackers think is cool != value.

Sometimes I think the hardest part of startups is re-aligning our value system from what we've learned in school and society into something that's actually useful for startups.

Someone called Humourisok posted this, but it is dead for some reason. I thought it was a good idea, so repost:

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Humourisok 20 minutes ago | link [dead]

from the tech point of view you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs. Sort of "web 2.0 Sharepoint". The niche that I see for such a service is legal. Lawyers can receive, annotate and remark on clients drafts for proposals, contracts etc. So it's something like Scribd+ or Docstoc+, for closed network of service provider & his/her clients, where a lot of paperwork is required. Legal services seems like the case. ----

Completely missing from your postmortem (from which I learned a lot and for which I am very grateful) is the fact that the service you offer, to judge from the demo alone, is frankly not very good. Perhaps your analytics show that few visitors bothered to look at the demo, so maybe the point is moot, but I think the demo is awful, and if I wanted to take over this business, I would completely redo it, or remove it altogether (sometimes it’s better not to show the product!).

I’m not talking about the implementation, which is great. I’m talking about the actual advice given in the demo, which you are offering as an example of the kind of thing students should be willing to pay for. The first comment is, essentially, use “and” instead of “&.” The second is, in effect, “make this bit a separate paragraph, and tie it in better.” And so on. The advice is generic or, when concrete (as in the case of “use and”), banal. There is very little of it. And there is very little of value in it. And since it’s a bit of a struggle to read the handwritten text of the sample essay, it’s even harder to tell if the generic advice is relevant--except in the case of the advice given for the conclusion, which is so general as to be universally applicable, which is not to say it is good advice.

I got a sense from your postmortem that you in part want to blame your lack of success on students not being interested enough in their own studies to pay for your service. I’ve taught thousands of students, so I know well how few are willing to write out practice exams, and how few of those are willing to seek out feedback. But a very small percentage of a very large number can surely translate to a modestly profitable business (especially, in this case, if you had plans to expand into the huge American market and into the college essay review business, which is what my crummy site is trying to do). God knows it’s hard to get students engaged, but the ones who visited your site were looking for something, and I don’t think they found something worth paying for.

I'd argue the main reason it failed was it was a bad idea. Their was no market for your product no matter how well you made it.

Try not to take away execution lessons when the idea was poor. The execution was fine and if you'd have used a good idea you'd be doing reasonably well now.

As an aside, does anyone have links to other startup postmortems?

There's a more fundamental flaw, something that you wouldn't have uncovered by interviews....

1. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to write it for you. http://www.bestwritingservice.com/ has essays for ten dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.

2. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.

There are a lot of times that it doesn't make sense to write any code before selling the product, but there are also times it does. The whole decision comes down to "Can I convince somebody this will work?"

The less likely your product is to be implementable, the more likely you will need code up front: 140 character mini blogs? Sure, fake it with photoshop. Real, Turing complete AI? You better have a prototype because nobody will believe you can do it.

Most startups tend to lean towards the former, but don't get sucked into that mentality if you lean towards the later. You'll be wasting your time.

It's sad no one ever paid for the service, but if not don't talk to customers or potential customers (people who pay, not "users" i.e. in the sense of people that do not pay), you'll never know what they want. Generally, it's only when people part with cash that you know you are providing value.

However, major kudos for releasing the code and design docs so others can try some tangent, along with the post-mortem so others can avoid similar pitfalls. That's seriously cool and not something I often see people do for projects they invested so much in. Thanks.

FWIW: I had a student cheat by using a paid answer service during a final exam (in class but done online, easy to abuse a website when I'mnott looking). I figure it cost him over $300 to buy the answers (obviously not his writing style and proficiency); still failed the class.

Make sure assisting on those "practice" exams aren't real ones.

Nice writeup! I agree with you - I love reading post-mortems. Success stories are worthless (too much survivor bias) but post-mortems really tell me something.

Hi Tim,

I would argue that the majority of your target demographic doesn't have the inclination to put disposable income into this.

Most of the time, when I needed help, I'd find someone who could help me for free.

Maybe it's different in the UK and other non-US places, but here, IME, there is no large-scale culture of hiring tutors. People typically hire tutors when they are out of their depth.

Just my thoughts and experiences. I wish you the best next time!

Sales cycles can be a real problem, especially if the average sales cycle is greater than your runway.

Personally I think the main problem was lack of commitment in customer discovery and how much were you paying the PHD students? Why weren't they motivated enough to help you advertise? In the US, most graduate students assist professors in teaching classes, so they would have direct contact with the people who would want your services the most.

What was your motivation for your startup? Did you just want to make a buck, or did you really care about helping students do better in their exams? Do you think the decisions you made would have been different if you had different motivations?

Interesting thought about phd students being a potentially untapped resource for startups. Anyone want to launch phdturk? The domain name is available (for now anyway)

I think he just misjudged how most students study. In law school almost all of my exams were essays. The fact is that most people did not study by writing practice essays.

To answer an essay question well you need to be able to do two main things: know the information the question asks for, and present that information in writing. For me and everyone I studied with the first part was crucial and the second not that important. Everyone trusts their own writing skills to write a proper answer once they have all the info.

So when people study, they concentrate on memorizing the information, not on writing the answer. People just assume that come exam time you will be able to write the answer.

Of course it would be very nice to be able to write a bunch of practice answers, but usually there is not enough time to study, you always feel like you do not remember all the info that you are supposed to remember, so you spend most time trying to remember more things.

Uh so you wrote that bad code isn't a factor ..

imagine if it had taken you 2 weeks to write the code instead of 6 months and you spent the rest of the 2 years on customer discovery instead, imagine if you were able to make significant feature changes to your product in a few days based on what you found out about what your customers wanted .. do you think you would have been more successful?

The fact that you used lines of code as a metric for how much work you put in, and the fact that you think 30k is a lot of code .. and you used php/flex .. I don't want to rain on your parade but there are MUCH MUCH better coders out there, who can do stuff much much faster. I don't necessarily recommend the following languages overall but you might want to check out ruby or python and see what is possible in just a few days.

Dang great story. I've been working on a few projects here and there. The first one was too big a project and I called it quits after 2 months because 1) I did it for learning purposes and 2) it was too big to complete and launch in regards to other competitors. But 3 years is a long time to spend on a project. There are definitely lessons to be learned here and as long as you don't lose hope, you will eventually find something that works. Your mention of testing if people would actually buy your service/product w/o writing the code behind it is a great idea, much like what I read in the 4 Hour Work Week. Definitely something entrepreneurs should apply if possible in order to reduce the amount of time potentially spent on doomed projects or projects that need to pivot.

Failed or not, this will still be very valuable on your resumé, when or if you apply to other companies.

First: a time / value mismatch; students don't want to spend more time doing something, then waiting before they get feedback, and your PhD students are taking longer to crit, annotate, explain their reasoning etc. through an interface than they would take vocally. In fact, a paid telephonic [ VOIPic? - Ed. ] mentorship service would probably do better.

Second: you didn't understand the market, not just your customers. The market is _everyone_ you have to deal with, not just those that buy the bread.

Third: I'd place PG's #5 (Obstinacy) covers both your 'knowing how to code' problem, and the fixated / obliviousness.

Knowing how to do something is just knowledge. Knowing why, when, and when not to is wisdom. In the end, it sounds like you're glad that you could afford the lessons.

Maybe if you made the app free to use and have introduced a karma system , such as the one on StackOverflow, it would maybe make your (ad)venture more successful.

Personally the Flex UI puts me off -- the first impression after clicking the demo button. (The site frontpage looks ok)

I agree that a simple text annotation version would be much better and appealing. (its easier to upload a .doc or .pdf of your work, than scanning it, people who prefer to handwrite are less likely to use any online services than those who prefer doing stuff on their computer when possible

I wouldn't say it was a total failure. You learned something, and you can always reuse code (such as the 700 lines for credit card payments) for other projects.

Failure is a lesson learned. Now you know a few things that don't work so next time you'll know to be cautious about 'em. All the best!

From the article:

>Please take the code (30k lines, PHP/Flex), design & docs and make a go of the business.

Could the OP please give a more formal license statement, even if it's just on this page?

Also, as others have said/hinted the execution looks (after a brief glance) to be pretty hot. The design is certainly crisp and clean and the screencaps look well laid out. Pivoting seems a good option.

Another idea is to market to teachers. Scan in homework, grade/annotate on the computer, and send results to student and parents. Then, teachers wouldn't have to lug all that paper around, parents are involved in the feedback loop, 9 month sales window, doesn't require institutional commitments (any teacher could use it).

Thanks for providing so much detail into the inner-workings of your venture. Most people wouldn't have the guts to put themselves out there like that. If you think about wealth in terms of 'prevention of loss,' you've just made everyone on this forum quite a bit wealthier.

The only thing about this that irks me is not writing code until you have interested users. Wouldn't it be odd to say "oh, my product? It's coming, and it's awesome, but I haven't coded it yet." I'm all for the fake it till you make it but perhaps a bit too much here.

How do you create a poll ad on Facebook? I thought you had to get a sales rep and drop $25k to do that...

Lessons learned, experience gained, time to move on and start another project - All the best!

good to see some honesty in the often over-hyped world of startups

that's why it's important to stick to the minimum viable product philosophy.

if you can do everything manually and just forward emails...do that until you it gets big enough to require automation

Thanks for sharing your story dude. I'm sure it wasn't easy.

Why haven't you used Rails for this project? I can see on GitHub that you know Rails. I believe that using it you would have developed the app faster.

The problem with how seasonal this is seems exaggerated. Just rename it hwbuff.

You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses.

You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that have raised a million dollars and don't have that much revenue.

Don't forget advertising. Sure you need lots of hits to make good revenue, but I know guys living off only ads for their apps. They also offer paid versions, but these tend to be a minority of the revenue. Don't underestimate what adsense/admob plus some social media exposure can get you.

You probably don't realize how successful you are already. That leads me to believe that if you stick to it, you're going to be quite successful. It may take 20 years, but eventually you're going to get some traction.

It's not the idea. It's not really even execution. It's persistence. If you keep trying your startup long enough, you'll eventually make enough to live. Maybe not be rich, maybe not make as much as you could have in a big corp (TM), but you'll survive, and you'll be your own boss.

My family has been doing startups for literally generations. I'm not rich, and neither are they, but we've survived. We did it by being persistent.

Stick with it, and I know you'll succeed. Don't give up.

WHen I first visit your landing page, and stared at it for 5 minutes.. I still didn't understand what the site is about. I kept asking myself HUH? Huh? I still dunno what it's about.