Thursday 13 October 2011

Why my startup failed...

Today is the National Fail Day in Finland. It is celebrated because the Finnish culture is very risk averse and failure is seen as not being an option - if you fail, you are a failure. This part in our culture has to be changed as if we don't allow ourselves to fail, then we never get courage to try out anything new or risky, but we also don't make the best of our eventual fail. To advantage this cause, people are encouraged to share their failures to get the message through that failing is not a sin. That is why I now share the story of my startup and why it failed...

The startup
In March 2006, I and my friend started a software company specialized on survey research software. I had started the project at the end of 2004 when I wrote first lines of code to test out some ideas that I had. Fast forward the little software project matures and my friend joins the project as a business lead. More time goes on and finally as our software matures and starts to look as real enterprise software, we decide to try out and found a company.

The software itself that we planned to run and sell as a service was pretty impressive. It had a modern styled web UI with everything rounded and shaded as was the custom. It had more features and functionality than any other competing service had. And it was fast and lean piece of software. It was written completely with J2EE, used MySQL as its database, supported Active Directory and many enterprise features. But the best thing was that the database code that was hand written had built-in sharding implemented. Sharding is horizontal partitioning of the database. In our case every survey had its own shard, its own tables that insured that our database didn't wasn't slowed down by having too many surveys or too much data in it. The code was so good that when we started our company, we didn't buy our own server nor did we rent one, we rented a cheap Linux virtual server that did the deal. Everything looked good, we had our software in order, we had our service running in lower costs than our competitors, and we thought that nothing could go wrong...

Screen capture - Making a question
Screen capture - Reporting results

Time flies and soon it is 2008. Our company had signed customers. We had sold and delivered our software both as a product and as a service to number of customers. However the number of customers and the money we were making was abysmal. Our company and our software seemed to have failed in the market. We make the only rational decision that we can and put our company into end-of-life care - continuing delivering service to our paid customers, but not signing or seeking any new ones.

The failure
So what had happened? Why did our startup failed? Well there was large number of different reasons, but in the end the fatal mistake and failure that much contributed to our other failures was the failure of understanding how our customers experienced value.

We as a couple of university students had thought that what customers wanted was a versatile tool with multiple question types and options and various optimized schemes to enhance information gathering from surveys. We thought that the more features and advantaged features we would have the more value customers would experience. We were wrong! We were biased, we were power users, not irregular users of survey tools that most of our potential customers were!

Our potential customers did want a versatile tool, but their experience of value didn't follow our pattern. Instead they got most value from the single function of just having a simple form to gather answers. Of course additional features did add value, but in a diminishing manner. At the end we estimated that at some point more features in our software would actually lower customer experienced value than increase it. This was because more features essentially meant more complex user interface and software, making customers unable to use the tools power.
Experienced value / number of features
Of course one mistake doesn't mean a total failure, but it can help you to make other mistakes that will in time cause the eventual fail of the service and firm. In our case because we burned more time and money to build our product, and when we went to the market and failed to reach our potential customer base, we were already in a thigh financial position. We understood that we need to angle for professional users, but they were both hesitant to try a new product from a startup and wanted additional features, and because we were in too thigh spot to negotiate good enough deals, we took in deals that involved too much work for too little money. We were essentially living from month to month being unable to really break from that death spiral. It was too much and we had to just confess that our startup had failed.

Lessons learned
There were many lessons learned during our startup. I for one don't regret at all that we started the company. If I hadn't been there and done that, I still would be asking myself on if I could have done it, could I have started a company and what would have come from that. Now I know the answer to that and it brings me great satisfaction that I tried. I failed, but I tried and learned some lessons and that is what is important to me.

And when I look back our company, there were some innovations that came from our customers that were actually very good ideas and our implementations of them worked quite nicely. One could build a successful startup based on one of them, however the business model would be completely different than the one we had. I don't know what the future brings, but maybe I will try entrepreneurship someday, after all it was very fun and exciting time. :-)

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