Anatomy of a Startup Fail

I am officially closing the book on my second business venture. Schedule Bin will still be around but in a much more diminutive state. Let me tell the story in blog form:

A few years ago, a friend and I decided we needed to join forces and create a company. We both had steady jobs as computer programmers that we didn’t want to give up on, so we decided to start a project in our spare time, as is oft recommended. The first thing we needed was an idea, we thought about making video games because it was something that made sense for the both of us, then one night, he was telling me how someone he knew was complaining there was no online tools to schedule employees. After maulling that over for a couple weeks, we decided that this was the perfect project because it made so much sense and was something we felt we had the ability to do and blow everyone away with the result. We searched for competition online and found there was no one doing online employee scheduling.

So we got cracking and slowly started working on the project. Early on however, my friend and business partner decided that Schedule Bin wasn’t something for him. We were both realizing that there was a lot of work. When you think of working on a cool new project in your spare time, it’s easy to glance over the fact that “spare time” can mean 1000’s of hours of evenings and weekends. That is a big commitment no matter how you slice it. Another factor was that competition was suddenly coming out of the wood work. Maybe our google searches got better, maybe other people had the same idea just before we did, for whatever reason, there was competition. So my partner left leaving me the sole pilot steering the ship. A little while later, I lost my full time job.

I started doing software consulting on my own which proved to be a great means to support myself. But I also worked that much harder on Schedule Bin. Perhaps it was pride, perhaps it was genuine niavity, perhaps it was because I thought things were almost done and the end was within sight, perhaps it was a lack of better things to do with my time; I pushed on and the further I pushed the more I realized that things were not working out. Here’s why:

• I was never “almost done”. Never is a business product “almost done”. Even now that it is “done” there is no shortage of features that I could be putting into the site. Ever wonder why big software companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, Apple, etc etc put out new products every year or two? It’s so they can keep making money. If you build something and call it “done” within a year the competition will have the same thing but with better features. You’re work as an entrepreneur developer is never “done”.
• I made an employee scheduling web site. I have never at any point in my life been passionate about how employee’s are scheduled. From the get-go this was purely a means to make money for me. When the going got tough, it was that much harder to man up and go the extra mile because it was employee scheduling, not something I had any burning convictions about. I had a hard time thoroughly testing parts of the system myself because it was simply too boring. Don’t get me wrong, any labor of love is going to hit a point where you are simply sick of it and want it to go away. But it is that much harder when you don’t really care about it on a good day.
• I don’t know if I was a great salesman or not. I certainly put in some effort, maybe not enough. I cold called around 75 business’s and though I got a few meetings out of it and a chance to demo Schedule Bin, I didn’t get any sales through cold calls. I hired an SEO company to help me with online marketing for a bit and though I got a few leads, I didn’t land anything solid. I tried to do my own SEO and as my adwords bill kept coming through each month with little to show for I eventually stopped doing that too. I wasn’t able to find a repeatable way to sell my product. I did find one paying customer, but they left after a while due to the beta-state of the website, as well as the lack of more enterprisy features.
• I used Adobe’s Flex to build the site. It was a tech I was good with and didn’t think it would be sidelined as fast as is has been. I also used Google’s AppEngine which was great for the last few years. But now Google has changed the pricing so it is now more expensive to run Schedule Bin (though to be fair, still cheap, just not free). Whats more, changes in their server have unexpectedly broken things on Schedule Bin. So I had to keep a close eye on Google’s Appengine in case they change something that will break my site.
• I burnt out. After so many months and so many hours the fire simply petered out. This is the perfect indication that you’re done with a business product. But because I put in so much effort, the thought that a little bit more effort was all that was needed to turn it all around kept me working on it for a few months longer than I should of. But once you realize you will wake up tomorrow caring less than you care now, nothing less than a weekend camping with Tony Robbins is gonna change your attitude.

Mercifully, I did have enough sense to do software consulting and that kept me pretty busy. Never was I working on Schedule Bin fulltime for more than a couple weeks. Having a steady source of income was great and I feel definitely helped moderate the emotional rollarcoaster ride I was on when working on Schedule Bin.

Here are my tips when considering starting your own business:
- Do something you actually care about. We should of stuck to video games, especially considering it was just as the iphone was coming out (the cliche “hindsight is always 20/20″ comes to mind).
- Do not put all your eggs in one basket. Always have a plan B. This is especially important if you have a family or other financial obligations.
- The fear of failure is rampant and superficial. Ignore it. I didn’t fail, I simply found a way to make money that wasn’t efficient.
- Choose your tech well. Cloud services might be perfect for your project. But at the end of the day, API’s, EULA’s, terms and conditions, technology trends, direction of the product/company can all change and leave you and your product blowing in the wind.
- You must be able to generate revenue or attact users right away.
- Test your concept before you start and during development. Don’t make something for other people to use based on what you think they’d want.
- No amount of networking or attending startup events will make your product fly if you can’t get the any part of the business model working on your own.