Failed to delight. Post-mortem of Delight IO

There are an alarming amount of typos and grammatical errors in this article. It detracts a lot from the content, and (sadly) hurts the credibility of the story.

A few writing tips:

1. When done writing, read the article aloud to yourself. This will help you catch a lot of errors which might easily be missed after having looked at a wall of text for an hour.

2. Always, always, have a friend proof read the article.

3. Sleep on it. When you're done writing, put it aside for a day or two, and re-read it when your mind is 100% fresh and you've forgotten the details.

I like this trend of discussing failure bluntly. So many of the startups I've ridden to the end just sort of faded away - get called into a room and laid off, founders lie to the pliant Seattle tech press about how great things are, company fades away, nothing learned.

Enjoyed the write-up Thomas -- thanks for opening up about what happened, and look forward to part 2.

I added this to a list of startup postmortems I've been keeping notes on: http://www.soulmix.com/remix/363

(I should probably disclose that I building Soulmix also :)

Your product sounds very invasive. I assume production apps could still include your analytics code and screencap my screen, tap my microphone, and spy on me with my phone's cameras. Your features page claims "Record audio and video from front facing camera and play back along with the screen recording." What measures do you take to make sure users know when their actions are recorded?

The thing about the company not failing, but you failing... The best bit of advice I ever got was "don't beat yourself up, there's a line of folks who will do that for you if you let them, don't do their job for them."

Remember, sometimes when an airplane crashes the wings come off before it hit's the ground. The wings failed! Of course, the fact that the bonehead flying it has put 4 the structural load on the wings that they were designed to support might* be what caused that to happen - but "stupid wings, if only we had made them out of concrete"...

Don't beat yourself up, learn, suck it up, move on.

"Customers pay for information, not raw data" is the key take-away for me. I think customers pay even more readily for action, particularly marketers as they are often incapable of implementing actions (i.e. programming). See companies like Intercom.io and Customer.io that are cleaning up because they let marketers actually do something with their analytics.

As a most picayune silver lining, one person, at least, enjoyed the title of your blog post, and even more so after learning your last name.

I'm working on a mobile app right now and delight.io was one of the (many) services in my "try later, when we have a working app prototype" bookmark folder. Shame I won't be able to try it.

So maybe it's too late now, but I have some "feedback" or thoughts on the service and its offering.

- Pricing. Seemed really expensive to me at first, but thinking about it 3 hours of recording are quite much. Still, I never felt that the pricing was 'right'.

- Code vs. features vs. benefits. Oh great, I can paste some Objective-C to my app. I as a product manager don't care at all about that, developers do. I would care about what I can do with the lib, how the interface looks and how an intergration feels for the user. Can I comment the stream I get to persist my thoughts I have when watching it? How do I view them?

- Design and English. Bootstrap and unedited English are fine for a MVP or personal project. A real offering should have more. This certainly wouldn't have a been a dealbreaker for me, but still - it makes it much harder to just try a project.

- iOS only. I know you had to priotize, but for me this would have been a problem right now as we are Android first right now.

So I'm still very much interested in using a service like delight.io. A website that shows me how the recording looks for the user, what I as the customer see of the recording and how I can use it to gain real insight and generate change to my app could convince me.

>> "3. Price your service to encourage engagement."

This probably should be changed to "Make the price transparent." I read their pricing based on credits and I still don't get it.

Honestly, I am still baffled by the fact that so many startups build software for developers/small businesses without selling their software first!!!

Make a prototype, go to customers, sell it, and ask for feedback right then and there. Ask for what they want, pivot (or add features) before you have written a single line of code.

Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?

Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?

First, folks give up way too easily. It takes time for things to hit even when everything's dialed-in.

Second, unless an app costs a ton of money to keep going, find a home for it. There's always some shop that will buy up your "failed" startup. Turning just it off is like killing a baby. So wantrepreneurs out there: try not to be so quick to strangle her in the bath water.

I was hoping for an article about the Delight language, http://delight.sourceforge.net/ . Python-like syntax, compiles to D.

What awful grammar and spelling. Color me unsurprised.

Sounds like it was really expensive for a startup that should have been going for fit and then traction before monetization.