I killed my startup

My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.

If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.

This reminds me of "The Mom Test" and why even people who are nice and helpful give you completely useless information and advice if you don't know how to parse it.

As an aside, "parasitic software" is often how you approach these kinds of things - someone complaining about a process in Salesforce or Outlook that they have to do manually probably won't switch to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it.

I'll admit, I hadn't thought of this perspective until reading this post, and I've been in the game for too many years.

There are challenges when bringing any start-up to life. The first one is potentially competitors.

This start-up, Storied, entered a market with competitors that were well backed, had many customers, and are making big names for themselves.

Why did Stephen think Storied could compete in this space? Never in the post did I hear why Storied would be able to compete, what was it's point of difference?

That's like trying to perform CPR on a body with an elephant sitting on it's chest. Unless you can get some leverage to get the elephant off the patient, you 're not going to be able to make a difference.

I may write a blog post examining this thread further if it's of interest to people.

> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving.

I believe you pulled the plug a few months early because of this. But your startup was unsuccessful because you ran out of money while toiling in a market niche with well established dominant players and you did not have enough value add. That was where you needed more due diligence.

It's simple and very hard. You need to build a product customers want.

I agree with you on the unique highs of the start up life. Great, horrible, great, horrible. The successful startup was one of the peak experiences of my life.

It turns out it's sometimes better to focus on the market area and its participants' value streams, rather than putting your sole focus on just one problem.

Focusing on the market area can enable the startup to discover new problems within the market area, and within the participants' companies. Then the startup can experiment with those problems, and possibly pivot to one of them.

Use the idea of three discoveries: market discovery, customer discovery, product discovery.

For more about this idea, Steve Blank and others emphasize these three aspects and how startups can benefit by understanding them.

Today it is a much more mature market, and as rightly pointed out, a survey platform is no longer enough. But there is still so much room for innovation. Actually improving employee engagement is far from solved or commoditised, and I believe that anyone that can bring an original idea that can be proven to lead to real-world change can still find a place in this industry. Personally I believe that any future success stories are likely to be focused less on customisation and configurability, and more on opinionated takes that suggest better ways to manage and measure employee engagement.

The idea of linking HR initiatives to measurable change is a good one! But it's fairly easy to see that you can extend it to 'events' more widely. Customers don't just care about what HR has been doing; they want to know what impact virtually any event has had on their employees, whether internal, external, global or local. You may have noticed that over the last few years the buzzword 'moments that matter' has become pervasive in our industry, and you can see the majority of providers have delivered some kind of feature to capitalise on this.

One final point is that I would say that the idea that HR is responsible for improving employee engagement is a little dated. I think it is uncontroversial to say that HR does not have the time or resources to actually do anything about employee engagement themselves. The modern role of HR is as enablers, measurers and instigators - undoubtedly a key stakeholder - but ultimately if you actually want to change something then the responsibility has to be more widely distributed.

Disclosure: I was an early hire at Peakon, an employee engagement company, and I ran the ML and DS functions for four years until our acquisition by Workday, where I still work on Peakon today.

I do like working on what I'm working though and at best, maybe I could be done with it in 7 years from now - with a small acquisition that could make it easier to build the next product (or wrap it up as a failure in 4 years and still get tons of experience from that). In contrast, the more ambitious product would take 7 years just to launch it, however it's not that much of a difference on a bigger scale.

In the end, I think I'm sticking with the current product, for better or for worse. I already spent a lot of time on it, I have very limited resources and it's faster to ship, to get some success or fail earlier and use the experience (+ resources if any) to start working on a new product in 4 - 8 years, whatever it could be.

But it does get me, that things take time either way, things are hard either way, so maybe it's better to work on something with bigger potential. I have some more thinking to do.

It didn’t really matter what they built or how good it was. Unless they had a truly brilliant self-service onboarding freemium type approach they were doomed every day of their existence, they never actually tried at all.

Of course it's just a title, and titles are often mostly meaningless, but it strikes me as odd to label oneself a CTO without much professional programming experience to speak of.

OR

Startup 101: What is the problem we can find for our widget?

Which makes money in the long run?