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Comment by 7Figures2Commas | Hacker News Reader

Not all startup failures are created equal, but when it comes to true flops like this one, one of the commonalities I've noticed is a general inability of the founders to step back and see the forest for the trees.

From http://alpha.flowtab.com/:

   We also set a major company milestone to reach 50 "Flowtab regulars" (defined by 2 or more orders in a trailing 30 day period) by March 1st 2013.

That's a really remarkable comment given that the venture was started in May 2011. With its $1 per order fee, this means that after nearly two years, the company's "major" goal was to acquire 50 customers who would deliver a baseline of $100 in revenue in a month.

Sadly, one of the lessons listed on http://alpha.flowtab.com/ is "Do things that don't scale."

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Agreed. I was the founder of Flowtab and I can tell you we always felt just one step away from success. We felt mobile ordering was inevitable and those who fought the hardest for the longest would win. I think different now...

It seems like the "inevitibe" attitude works contrary to startups.

Its like a convenient way to remove your obligation of actually encouraging people to do something because "they'll do it on their own"

Many things that seem inevitable are only so in retrospect. At the time, they were probably seen as unlikely or simply possible.

Frankly after 6 months we began to realize that it would be nearly impossible to earn any meaningful revenue from users or from the bars themselves.

Only two of our bars in Denver actually paid for the product ($1,500 for license + hardware upfront, plus $99/month), which wasn't enough to justify the $3.5 million valuation we raised on. What got our investors excited is tapping into the $3 billion of advertising dollars spent by the liquor companies every year. In 2012 less than 3% of this was actually dedicated to mobile, these were the deals we wanted to go after. So it became more about user growth and number of orders than revenue.

I still think there is an opportunity there -- giving liquor companies a better way of marketing their products on-premise through mobile. But I doubt it will be a mobile ordering app that cracks the nut.

Kyle H.

First, thanks for sharing your experience.

This seems like a good example of how investors can be a detriment. Your original concept was designed to solve a problem you thought existed with the drink ordering process. The marketing "pivot" is completely unrelated to that and assumes a completely different problem for a completely different customer.

Personally, I don't think there's much to the marketing concept. When at a bar, most people are going to order what they like, and they're going to be engaged in a social experience. Both of these things work against a mobile app that is trying to serve as a channel for delivering in-bar advertising for liquor companies.

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