My Street MBA: Lessons learned from Real Time Wine
"If I fail more than you do... I win." -- Seth Godin
Please note, this is a long read. It had to be. If you'd like to read a condensed version, my friends over at HTXT.Africa have done one. Together with Prezence, the source code to Real Time Wine has also been released - for everyone to have a little look see: click here to read more.
Real Time Wine was a retail discovery app. It started in wine, moved to beer and ultimately wanted to gather consumption data and build communities across multiple retail verticals. In doing that, we hoped to personalise and improve the eCommerce experience – one that is so largely dependent on spammy, irrelevant daily emails. I shut Real Time Wine down in April 2014. Revenue didn’t scale quickly enough.
“Lessons Learned”
posts can suffer from two fatal flaws. Firstly, they can be schmaltzy.
Secondly, they can be preachy. But if done right, they can hopefully give a
little back to a community that provided an enormous amount of support during
this startup journey. In addition, this type of writing usually offers some form of catharsis for the
Founder/Writer – which is important.
I wrote a “long letter”, not because I didn’t have time to tell a “short story.” – but because this isn’t. I’m going to try and do this right. Chris Poole (4CHAN / DrawQuest) did it right. I’ll take some inspiration from his approach.
I wrote a “long letter”, not because I didn’t have time to tell a “short story.” – but because this isn’t. I’m going to try and do this right. Chris Poole (4CHAN / DrawQuest) did it right. I’ll take some inspiration from his approach.
“They” always tell you
that 9 out of 10 tech startups fail. So you realistically should be prepared in
case you’re 1 of the 9. It’s still hard when it happens. What “they” don’t tell
you though, which they should… Is the enormous amount of experience the startup
journey provides. You come out a bit sad, but also a bit rougher, tougher and a
much more mature businessperson than when you went in.
Here are some big
lessons I learned during the Real Time Wine & MyBEER startup journey. For
context, here’s a link to the closure announcement (and the announcement that even though the app and
business is being shut down, the community will live on in a combined passion
project called Incogvino).
OK. Go.
I say “we”, but I
really mean “I”. The Curse of the Single Founder.
I was blessed to have an amazing support team around this
startup. Active, engaged and responsive investors in Michael Jordaan & Mike
Ratcliffe and an advisory network including Josh Adler (Founder Everlytic,
Director of Entrepreneurship at the African Leadership Academy), Brett Commaille
(AngelHub Ventures) and Keet van Zyl (HBD / Knife Capital / AFDAWN) among others.
But I didn’t have a co-founder. And I will never, ever, do
another startup without one.
In 2012, this idea and passion for a retail discovery app started
to form. I laid down the first PowerPoint slides. Sketched the first notes.
Overestimated my first market size. All the good stuff.
At that stage I had a choice: sit around and wait for a
co-founder (something I’ve battled with my whole life) or just HTFU and get
going. I chose the get going option, of course. And I have no regrets about it.
But the life of single founder is tough and lonely. Amazing
businesses are built with people not with products. The chemistry between
founders and early staff is probably the single most critical factor in its
success. When things are going well, you need people around you to high five.
When things are going badly, you need people to prop you up and help you get up
off the floor and keep punching.
I would have moved faster with a co-founder/team. I would
have failed faster at our first 4 business models with a co-founder/team. And
those are both critical factors. I’ll
speak a little more about this in the lesson around Timing.
Do everything you can to find that support network. Do everything you can to find a co-captain. Whether
that means events like Startup Weekend, Incubators, Speed Dating (cough, nerd!)
or general Networking events. Cast the net wide. Don't be afraid to ask. Nothing ventured, nothing gained (slipped that one in before I ran out of cheesy metaphors).
On the other side of this argument, just remember that
divorcing a business partner is harder than divorcing your wife. Choose well.
Look up the word “vesting” - it might just save your life!
Pay yourself up front. Burn the ships!
I’m very divided on this one. I didn’t pay myself a cent
throughout the whole Real Time Wine story. It was probably the wrong move.
On one hand, I think this showed my investors how committed
I was, how I’d go to the mat and do anything to give the startup as much runway (the number of months you have left before revenue needs to cover costs) as possible. On the other hand, it gave a completely unrealistic view of what
the startup would actually cost to run. And even worse, almost distracted me
from hiring a team earlier (or at all). At one investor pitch, I’ll never
forget a clever chap saying “Andy, if you’re chasing pennies the whole time,
you’re never going to get anything done – you’re never going to go for the big
picture.” He was right.
On the other hand (Darren), I also remember a conference talk that Josh Adler gave many moons ago – when we were both young and ready
to conquer the world. He spoke about the idea of a “one foot in, one foot out” approach
- one of the methods he used to start his first company. Keep a consulting gig
on the side and a startup on the other side. Keep some money coming in, work on
your dream in the evenings and the gaps. It was something I took to heart with
Real Time Wine – and probably the only reason we lasted as long as we did.
While the “one foot in, one foot out” approach is still the
only one possible for many – you run the very serious risk of distraction and
lack of focus. Another friend, Gareth Knight (founder of Tech4Africa and Big Daddy
to many more proud startup failures than myself) advocates the opposite
approach. To be fair, Gareth tends to raise money on shores slightly
more lucrative than SA!
His approach is “burn the ships”. Get rid of every distraction possible, so the only positive outcome can be success. Others call this giving yourself “the fear” - the same approach to quitting the job you hate, even though you don’t have a new one.
His approach is “burn the ships”. Get rid of every distraction possible, so the only positive outcome can be success. Others call this giving yourself “the fear” - the same approach to quitting the job you hate, even though you don’t have a new one.
I guess I find myself looking back and wishing I’d burnt the
ships a little more. But I also understand that life stage plays an enormous
role. You’ve got a family to support and a bond to pay. But you also don’t want
to miss the opportunity to put yourself out there and try something, or even
worse, not give it a good enough shot.
So pay yourself up front. Even if it’s R5000 per month. If
you’ve raised even a little bit of funding (or have some savings), this number
is actually meaningless in the grander scheme of things – but meaningful in
keeping yourself motivated. You can always escalate your salary quite quickly –
investors understand you have to live as well as work. You may not know it, but most investors I've come across are quite happy with a R30k to R50k salary for the founder, depending on experience. If the business can support it, of course...
Use the “one foot in, one foot out” approach sparingly. It
may be necessary, but the real trick is understanding when to “burn the ships” and
go for it. I never quite made that call, and probably suffered somewhat of a slow death
because of it.
To Outsource or Not. How to Develop if you’re not a Developer.
With no technical co-founder, the first major challenge was
how to get the product launched and iterated - a classic “rock and a hard
place” challenge. If you want to hire a developer or development team, you’re
in for a cost surprise - which can considerably shorten your startup’s runway. After
all, developers are the inventors and engineers of our century – they’re rather
in demand (and have unfortunately figured this out!)
Here’s my napkin maths:
For a mobile play, you don’t often get multi-skilled
developers. So you’re going to need 1 iPhone Developer and 1 Android Developer (that can hopefully double up as backend developers). Hard core coders like this
don’t usually design. So you’re going to need a designer.
Let’s say you get extremely lucky and you can grab these guys/gals for R30k/m each (almost impossible in JHB, possible in Cape Town if you get them young). Then you pay yourself R30k/m. Assign R30k/m for marketing and ops expenses (which is as lean as it comes).
TOTAL: R150k/m burn rate.
Let’s say you get extremely lucky and you can grab these guys/gals for R30k/m each (almost impossible in JHB, possible in Cape Town if you get them young). Then you pay yourself R30k/m. Assign R30k/m for marketing and ops expenses (which is as lean as it comes).
TOTAL: R150k/m burn rate.
If most Angel funding in SA is between the R500k and R1m,
your runway is, shall we say, limited. 3-4 months to develop a product, launch,
test traction, get revenue and cover costs. You can play the numbers any way
you like, they usually work out in the same range. Interestingly enough, this is why many US startups already have a project by the time they pitch for Angel. We need to learn this trick in SA.
So: get a technical co-founder. That’s the simple answer.
There’s a reason hustler/hacker teams are so popular in the US – they keep costs
down and allow for speed. In fact, what we’re seeing more and more of in the US
is hustler+designer/hacker teams.
If the stars don’t align, you’re going to be forced to
outsource. This was really the only viable option available to me 3 years ago.
I looked at 3 potential options within the outsourcing approach. Here are my thoughts, largely coated with a dollop of my own experiences:
I looked at 3 potential options within the outsourcing approach. Here are my thoughts, largely coated with a dollop of my own experiences:
#1 Outsource to a small dev house/agency. Be careful. Money
talks, equity walks in this segment of the game. You don’t want to base your
startup on a dev house that will easily de-prioritise you in the face of paying
work. Increased risk for decreased cost.
#2 To a big dev house/agency. They get expensive. Ludicrously
expensive actually, but that’s where all the good creative and engineering
talent is hiding, so they’re entitled to charge what they want. My general rule
is: if you’ve got the money to hire a big agency, you should rather hire your
own team – it’s better in the long run.
A big agency does provide a positive spin on risk. I’ve often caught myself saying the following when telling stories of my development experience: “With a small agency or your own team, you’ll pay less, but you’re never really guaranteed a product. With a big agency, you’ll pay more and you’ll be guaranteed a product – you just won’t be able to guarantee when you get it!”
A big agency does provide a positive spin on risk. I’ve often caught myself saying the following when telling stories of my development experience: “With a small agency or your own team, you’ll pay less, but you’re never really guaranteed a product. With a big agency, you’ll pay more and you’ll be guaranteed a product – you just won’t be able to guarantee when you get it!”
#3 To India. You hear some good stories and some horror
stories. In my opinion, the only work that can be freelanced out virtually is
something so simple you’re not going to get anything lost in translation. And
stuff will get lost. Be prepared to rewrite everything for your next version.
But if India/Malaysia/Vietnam/Brazil can get you to a simple prototype – and you can’t, go for it. It
certainly is affordable. I’ll never forget a consulting colleague of mine
showing how he managed to outsource elements of a big research project, specifically the number
crunching, to Indian MBA students at $5/hr. Some call that a sweat shop. Others
call it an efficient global economy.
I was lucky (and unlucky) as you’ll see. Through some
trusted industry relationships, I was able to get a big agency at mid agency
rates. It was affordable (much more affordable than hiring a team), I was guaranteed a product. I just wasn't guaranteed a time frame.
Managing Digital Agencies and Dev Shops
After a bit of a search I decided to develop my prototype
with Prezence, one of the hot mobile development shops at the time in South
Africa. It’s a funny tale. Throughout a more than 2 year relationship with
Prezence, I had both the best agency experience I’ve ever come across... And
the worst.
For Phase 1, the prototype, I cannot overstate how good
Prezence were. As a creative team that worked alongside the entrepreneur
through all elements of the project, they were amazing: conceptualisation,
architecture, wire framing, design, UX, development, testing and launch.
Lynette Hundermark, George Reed & Deon Heunis and their
respective teams deserve every award they got for building this product with
me. And we certainly won some awards!
Regarding further development and product work, the creation
of MyBEER (Real Time Wine for Beer, kindly sponsored by the forward thinking
team at SAB) went pretty well, especially considering some enormously tight
deadlines. The only negative was that it probably created more bugs across both
platforms than it should have.
That provides an interesting observation in itself. Everyone talks about building a platform – but building a platform is enormously difficult. You have to cater for an insane amount of variables, most of which you don’t figure out till you launch. The ability to iterate at pace - is essential.
That provides an interesting observation in itself. Everyone talks about building a platform – but building a platform is enormously difficult. You have to cater for an insane amount of variables, most of which you don’t figure out till you launch. The ability to iterate at pace - is essential.
For Phase 2 of Real Time Wine, the idea was to iterate on the
code base, implement revenue streams and fix bugs. Phase 2 was a complete
disaster, the worst and most inefficient agency experience of my life. There are many reasons for it, some on my side, some on theirs. It
was painfully slow, we suffered from large amounts of staff churn with senior
developers/architects coming and going – and it literally took more than a year
to get through the bug lists.
It led me to a fundamental belief, one that may cause ire amongst
my colleagues (and friends) in the agency world. It is a belief cemented by the
Real Time Wine experience, but one that I’ve seen occur time and time again
across a 15 year career: I don’t think digital agencies are structured for or good
at iterating on high risk, high speed consumer products. Simple as that.
I think digital agencies are at their best when there is a beginning, middle and end. It fits their scheduling better, it avoids complications of staff churn and prioritisation. Speed isn’t as essential. Agencies are just better at once-off builds, be it campaigns or products. If iteration is required, it’s usually a slow, methodical process with a big corporate client that values consistency and lowered risk over speed-to-market.
I think digital agencies are at their best when there is a beginning, middle and end. It fits their scheduling better, it avoids complications of staff churn and prioritisation. Speed isn’t as essential. Agencies are just better at once-off builds, be it campaigns or products. If iteration is required, it’s usually a slow, methodical process with a big corporate client that values consistency and lowered risk over speed-to-market.
So, if you’re outsourcing, go into it with both eyes open.
An agency or a dev shop will never be your team. They just can’t fulfil that
role. I probably got too close to Prezence in Phase 1 of the project, such was
our success. I began to think of them as part of the team – and while some of
them would have loved that, the reality is that a startup is always one small,
highly demanding agency client in a portfolio of many less demanding and more profitable ones.
Use external suppliers for what they’re good at – and have a
different plan for reaching and achieving scale.
The importance of channel focus in lean startups
One of the biggest lessons I learned was around focus. It
appeared in two fairly costly instances.
Firstly, in early 2012 when we were planning the build,
BlackBerry still utterly dominated the South African Smartphone Landscape. If
you remember back then (it wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like it sometimes), South Africa had quite fragmented smartphone penetration. Market share in the smartphone segment still is in many
ways. There was definitely no cut and dried approach towards which platforms
you should build for which you shouldn’t.
So we made the decision to support all of them. We built
Real Time Wine as a mobisite that could be “wrapped” inside native apps. HTML4
and some JavaScript (for the fancy UX elements) were the chosen platforms.
If you remember pre BB10, Blackberry’s didn’t support HTML 5 and Facebook had just lambasted HMTL 5 as a platform and gone native. We couldn’t afford native. We thought we’d better support Blackberry. And so the architecture decision was made.
If you remember pre BB10, Blackberry’s didn’t support HTML 5 and Facebook had just lambasted HMTL 5 as a platform and gone native. We couldn’t afford native. We thought we’d better support Blackberry. And so the architecture decision was made.
Using the app wrapper approach, we could release on iPhone and Android as apps, then still be available to Blackberry users via the mobile browser. We could deploy quicker (Apple App Store had a 2-4 week approval time back then) and as an added benefit, we wouldn’t have to build a website – we could just render the mobisite inside a picture of an iPhone.
We patted ourselves on our collective backs, thinking we’d been really clever.
Turns out, Blackberry users before BB10 came out weren’t app
users. Turns out versions of Android were so horribly fragmented that the app wrapper approached
just garnered frustration from users used to US/Europe quality native apps.
Turns out the amount of time and cost involved in getting people to discover
you inside each app store was a badly missed budget item (there's a whole branch of SEO related to app store discovery now).
Turns out that app users are fickle (certainly not tolerant of struggling South African app developers in a world of beautiful heavily VC funded US/Europe apps). A couple of 1 star reviews can really sink an app in rankings – users certainly wield the power these days. If you’re not a 5 star "viral" app, you inherit a nasty line item to your advertising budget: help people find this app in the first place.
Turns out that app users are fickle (certainly not tolerant of struggling South African app developers in a world of beautiful heavily VC funded US/Europe apps). A couple of 1 star reviews can really sink an app in rankings – users certainly wield the power these days. If you’re not a 5 star "viral" app, you inherit a nasty line item to your advertising budget: help people find this app in the first place.
There’s a reason US/Europe startups usually launch with
iPhone first. Channel focus allows you to put all your energy into creating the
BEST experience for a segment of your potential users. iPhone users tend to be app early adopters
(although this is slowly changing as Android becomes more mainstream). I honestly
think we would have done just as well and got just as far if we’d only released
on iPhone. Focus is your friend.
Focus reared its head again with Phase 2 of Real Time Wine
development (roughly costed at half the funding raised). The idea was to
iterate off the base, improve the product and add features that would help us
generate revenue. We added activity streams, the ability to attach price
specials to locations, the ability to deliver content and ads to people as they
reviewed a wine (at the “moment of consumption” – still the cleverest thing I
think I came up with).
Phase 2 was a mistake and it should never have been built. For
2 important reasons:
Firstly, your prototype should have SOME way to get you to
revenue, even if it’s extremely simple. Mine didn’t. The further you push
revenue down the timeline, the less likely you are to actually test your
business. It’s a cardinal sin and one I won’t make again. Get that first dollar in the bank at all costs.
Secondly, Phase 2 took six months of focus away from
grinding out revenue and traction. It was a wonderful and ultimately useless
distraction.
It’s easy as an entrepreneur to get distracted by the cool
stuff. Designing products is cool. Grinding out revenue is not. I got
distracted. I should have put that Phase 2 money straight into marketing and
staff and scaled a “team” much earlier.
Don't believe your PR (too much)
PR is an interesting one. You can’t live without it, but you
can easily get distracted by it. PR is critical for opening doors and building long-term
brand recognition. PR is not great for bringing in revenue and driving
immediate user adoption (at least not in my experience).
Real Time Wine won plenty of awards and due to the kind
community of journalists who supported us, it had a enviable amount of coverage.
If I’m honest about it, I think I got a little distracted by the product’s
media success. When the world is telling you (mostly) what a great product you
have, it becomes a little easier to focus on making that product and its
associated community sexier – instead of grinding your way to those user and
revenue milestones.
In a small market like South Africa, especially with Silicon
Valley style products (those that rely on sex, sizzle and scale) – you can’t
get distracted, we just don’t get the same kind of runway that Valley startups
do. As you'll learn, this is both frustrating and liberating.
PR helps you craft your story. It doesn’t help you execute
and operate. Lots of PR doesn’t mean you’re winning. Lots of revenue does.
I do have to say thank you to Duo Marketing (who worked with
many AngelHub startups) and helped me launch that PR storm. It was quite
wonderful to witness – how a guy knowing nothing about wine, suddenly
became known for wine in the wine world, well... That was just awesome.
Actionable Metrics: The Wonderful Art of not Deluding Yourself
The journey of entrepreneurship is about constantly avoiding
your inherent ability to delude yourself. This may sound funny, but it’s true.
Humans are very good at post-event justification and in a startup, that’s
dangerous.
The Lean Startup (by Eric Ries) talks about the difference between Vanity
Metrics and Actionable Metrics. This is possibly the single most important
lesson you need to take into a business. Any business.
There was a beautiful (and embarrassing) moment after I read
that book, looked at my management reports that I’d be sending and obsessing
over for the first year and half of the startup – and swiftly realising they
were all vanity metrics. Downloads. Registered Users. Unique Users. Total
Reviews. Total Ratings. You can see these (now proudly labeled as "vanity") in the top 2 reports in the image below.
Vanity Metrics are great for the warm and fuzzy. They’re usually cumulative and therefore pretty much always go up and towards the right. They make you feel proud, they pump you up – and they’re pretty much useless for making decisions about your business.
Actionable Metrics are the tough ones to look at. I’m not
going to repeat what The Lean Startup teaches – but when you start looking at
Revenue Per User, Active Users, Referral Mechanics, Conversion Rates, Cohort
Segments. That’s when the truth hits you hard.
Active Users was a particular eye opener for me. It’s an
important metric for both consumer products (like the app) and eCommerce
portals - an indication of a user’s likelihood to do what you want them to do:
submit a review, buy a product etc.
Being honest about your Active Users (and how they’re
actually active) will also remind you of a lesson further up in this epistle,
the importance of scale. Social systems tend to work on a ratio of 1 / 9 / 90.
90% of people consume content or just watch what’s going on. 9% contribute in a
small way (e.g. click Like / Vote) and only 1% actually create
content. Some social systems do better at these ratios (like Facebook with it’s
frictionless sharing approach) but most tend to toe this line if you really dig
into it.
I thought we were pretty special with a 10%
create/contribution rate (I defined Active Users as anyone who was earning
points on the app – most likely through the creation of content). In reality
though, 10% of 4000 is only 400. Not a big number at all. Scale scale scale.
What’s worse, was that the contribution rate was pretty flat
through the lifecycle of the product, indicating we got new people to jump on
try it out. And then, kind of like FourSquare, they got bored and moved on. We
had user churn that wasn’t saved by user adoption. It's a big lesson in both products and game layers - even the most addictive game layers (and we had a great one) only last 6-12 months. Then product value has to take over. To end the Foursquare comparison, they've done this quite successfully, moving from a check-in game to a recommendation engine for exploring your city.
If I had realised this a bit earlier, perhaps things might
have been different. Go read that chapter of The Lean Startup. Put together
some Actionable Metrics – and more importantly, action them!
Feel free to gaze lovingly at your Vanity Metrics. But don’t get distracted by them.
Feel free to gaze lovingly at your Vanity Metrics. But don’t get distracted by them.
Fail fast. Get to revenue as quickly as humanly possible.
It’s sounds silly, doesn’t it? Like something every
entrepreneur should know. Fail fast: the ultimate cliché. But you’d be amazed
how easy it is to sidetrack the importance of revenue in the Silicon Valley
“business model comes second” world we live in.
I only read The Lean Startup 2 years into the
Real Time Wine journey. That was a great pity. Amongst other clever things the
book covers – it PREACHES the fact that you need to get to revenue before
anything else. R1 in the bank account is the beginning of you validating your
assumptions, testing your products and proving your business model. We failed
too slowly to test our revenue models, partly because our original plan relied
on the enterprise sales cycle and partly because we didn’t build a revenue
model into Phase 1 of development.
Failing fast, if you can do it properly, is absolutely liberating
– because it leaves you with enough time to pivot. Failing slowly is like
cancer. You know in your heart that it’s inevitable, but you hang on, just in case. By the time you've ticked the "just in case" boxes, you’re out of
runway.
I had 4 business models at Real Time Wine that gloriously
failed. It’s interesting to look back at them and try understand why they
failed. If you can figure this out quickly, you can build a model that works.
That’s what a startup is all about.
BUSINESS MODEL ONE. Real Time Wine was never about wine.
Funny that. Wine was a test bed for a much broader idea. I wanted to disrupt
the eCommerce and “product discovery” space by creating a mobile experience
that captured consumption data. I figured that if we could be present at the
“moment of consumption”, if we knew what product you were using, when, where,
how often you had used it before, what you paid for it and a qualitative and
quantitative indication of sentiment – we’d be sitting pretty.
I would have data that would allow me to understand customers better – and therefore get them to buy more. I could start to improve the buying process. I could start to improve those horribly unpersonalised daily emails that local and international eCommerce is so reliant on.
I would have data that would allow me to understand customers better – and therefore get them to buy more. I could start to improve the buying process. I could start to improve those horribly unpersonalised daily emails that local and international eCommerce is so reliant on.
With wine as a test bed, I also thought we had an interesting
insight into the reality of the market. 85% of wine in SA is purchased through
a retail/supermarket channel. If you build a consumer facing product, you’re
likely to fight for the 15%. If you build a consumer facing product that is
actually a B2B platform (that you sell to retailers) – you can go after the 85%.
So the first business model was to target retailers: licence
the technology into Pick ‘n Pay, Woolworths and others. Even if we had to exclusively
give it to one. Plug into their rewards programmes (where instant scale lies
– most of these retail rewards programmes have more than 1 million active
customers) and slowly expand into interesting verticals. It was something we
got right with MyBEER and SAB. Unfortunately that didn’t scale quickly
enough for them on tight test marketing budgets – so it only lasted 9 months.
With the retailers, there could have only been 2 reasons we
didn’t get anywhere. Either I was a crap salesman (I’d like to argue that’s not
the case!) or we were just too early. I think the reality of retailers and
eCommerce is that they just weren’t ready. Woolworths released their redesigned
(pretty good looking) eCommerce platform in 2014. Makro also cracked this in
2014. Pick ‘n Pay, I think, is in the midst of an eCommerce rebuild. We were
talking to them in 2012. And even though apps and mobile experiences were on
the tips of everyone’s tongues – I fear we may have just been ahead of the
curve.
The unfortunate part of the B2B business model is that is
took us too long to fail – too long to get a final and definitive NO from the
retail space. If you’re building for Enterprise, remember that a 2 year sales cycle is not uncommon.
“Timing” is a theme you’ll see appear over and over in the
war stories told by entrepreneurs. It’s a critical factor, one that’s also
often out of your control. Being ahead of the curve isn’t as sexy as it sounds.
A startup of any nature needs to be on the curve – otherwise you’ll spend too
much time convincing people they actually need you.
BUSINESS MODEL TWO. Sell the data. Even a year in, I was sitting
on some pretty amazing data: consumption and sentiment data for wine and beer
across a segment of high LSM smartphone users.
But there’s a big lesson to be learnt with data. Data are only as valuable as what a company can easily execute off it. And
consumption data sets are extremely hard to execute off.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say we have a sample of 50
customers that buy Wine A at Retailer A. 45 of those 50 rated it YUK. Yet the
stock is still moving on Retailer A’s systems and they’re making margin. Are
they going to change their buying patterns? I doubt it. Not yet, at least.
Does that mean your consumption sample is not statistically significant? Or does it mean that “love” for a product doesn’t always trump price? I fear it may be the latter.
Does that mean your consumption sample is not statistically significant? Or does it mean that “love” for a product doesn’t always trump price? I fear it may be the latter.
I saw research companies and internal customer intelligence
departments get seriously excited about the data we were collecting. At one
stage we were looking at simple word clouds of phrases customers had used when
reviewing Client Product A vs Competitor Product B – and building “taste”
profiles that could theoretically drive marketing messaging. But I never saw
anyone actually able to execute off it.
Data certainly is the new oil. Just make sure you can show
people how to turn the oil into petrol.
BUSINESS MODEL THREE.
Advertising. I’ll cut to the chase on this one. Advertising requires
immense scale. As an African business model in anything except mass product
markets, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
There’s a reason content portals & news sites are
pushing millions of page impressions - that’s the kind of scale you need to
make advertising work.
We built some pretty nifty ad tools, with the ability to
target specific messages to people at uncannily specific times. You’re on your
way home, you hit the SPECIALS button, it pulls back a list of wines on special
at a supermarket on your way home. You’re drinking a wine, the app delivers you
content specific to that wine (food pairings, tasting notes, a discount voucher
for you next purchase or even a cross sell voucher into a deli product that goes
particularly well with that wine).
Here’s where scale plays its role. With 5000 odd users, we just couldn’t generate enough ad impressions to make the tools exciting. With the ad format where we delivered content to users during that beautiful “moment of consumption” – how many people were going to be drinking the same wine at the same time inside our community? We could deliver 10 perfectly targeted impressions. But only 10.
Add to this, media buyers just didn’t understand what we
were selling. I don’t want to sound derogatory, but the media industry still
works on things they can easily understand and bill: banner ads and search ads.
If your “ad unit” doesn’t fit the mould - you’re going to have to do an
education job as well as a sales job. Sales jobs are hard enough.
There’s a reason investors don’t jump up and down for
advertising based business models. They’re hard. They usually require lots of
money and time - to make very little money.
BUSINESS MODEL FOUR. Affiliate sales. Again, this business
model provided a nasty little lesson in scale. We ran some affiliate sales
pilots with a particular online wine retailer. Results were interesting, even
quite exciting. 6 emails into an untrained base moved around R100k worth of
wine.
That’s a promising equation – if you own the eCommerce
infrastructure. If you’re on a 7.5% affiliate fee (and that’s high for an
affiliate) – do the maths. You’ve got to move a metric f$%! ton of product
before anyone makes any money.
Affiliate models need immense scale to work.
And there we have it. Due to failing slowly, a fair bit of unfortunate
timing and sometimes getting distracted by the sexy stuff… by the time we
realised we had to build direct eCommerce (which I had avoided from the
beginning because of its commodotised nature and the expense of the
infrastructure) – it was too late.
Timing is everything.
Here we are back at “Timing”. During the Real Time Wine
journey, my investors and I presided over 3 failed acquisition/merger opportunities.
I say acquisition/merger because in reality, no-one buys a 1 man team unless
the product has really shot it out of the park in terms of revenue and
traction. But there are plenty of opportunities to fold that product into
another stable, use it as a framework for a round of funding and crack on
together with a bigger proposition.
One attempt failed due to some flip-flopping on loyalties
and questionable business ethics (although you have to keep
reminding yourself that you probably didn’t want to partner with anyone that
had these ethics in the first place). One failed due to culture fit and timing.
The final one, a promising merger even if a bit of a long shot, also failed due
to timing.
Timing is never anyone’s fault. It’s just a reality. And
you’ll see it in the startup space from two angles.
Firstly, timing for finding a co-founder or business
partner. In my first startup at university (gAL.co.za – don’t go there now,
very long story) I had people lining up to get involved. We were students. Our
risk profiles were the same. We didn’t need a lot of money, we wanted to have
fun and we had tons of energy. In fact, if I remember correctly, gAL was the
subject of 5 third year theses. That was 5 people, including myself willing to put
a pile of work into a project, for no monetary reward (although there was
plenty of beer).
Since then, finding a co-founder has been an eternal
struggle for me. I’m not sure if it’s the slightly (and I mean ever so
slightly) elevated public profile – a friend calls this the “lone wolf” theory
– people think you’re on a path that would never possibly include them. That
you’re uber successful – they believe my PR! But it’s more likely risk profile.
Finding someone in their mid 20’s to mid 30’s who can make enough money on the
side to pay the bond and feed the kids – and still put 90% of their time into a
startup is tricky. Timing.
You’ll also encounter timing on mergers, deals and sales. If
the timing isn’t right between 2 businesses, that may have extremely similar needs,
wants, desires and shareholder forces – it doesn’t matter how sexy the deal may
be, it’s unlikely to happen.
I’ve come to learn that deals require both momentum and
hunger from both sides. Sure, every now and again you’ll find an exception that
proves the rule. But I’ve rarely seen something happen where one side is
chasing harder than the other. Unless it’s our good friend Timing at play again.
I’ve definitely done some sales and deals in my life (like I’m sure you all
have) where the initial chat and the actual sale are years apart. Having the tenacity to survive the ups and downs of timing is an important characteristic of entrepreneurs.
There’s not much you can do about timing – it’s the “luck” portion of starting a business. Just keep having conversations - as many
of them as possible. Be brave. I’m certainly going to be using the phrase “we
should look at working together” a lot more in the next phase of my career.
Point your Startup internationally. Even if you can’t.
I remember this moment quite clearly. The original spec for
Real Time Wine was designed for any wine drinker (or generic "product user") across the world. The database
was architected by Prezence to allow for a very dynamic set of Country / City /
Product Category / Product / Review / Rating data points.
Then we hit currency and price as data points - how much a user paid for a product and where they paid it (restaurant, retail, wholesale). Currency and price are collective bitches.
Then we hit currency and price as data points - how much a user paid for a product and where they paid it (restaurant, retail, wholesale). Currency and price are collective bitches.
Ignoring the retail vs restaurant challenge, the first
question was: do we show the price in Rands (because we knew initial usage and
revenue traction would come locally) or Dollars (to be more “international”)?
If it’s Dollars, it’s pretty meaningless to local users – and we certainly
didn’t have the ad budgets we thought we would need to compete internationally.
What if we allowed the user to put in the currency? But then
we’d have to tie that user and product to a country and put a filter on the
front end to make sure we only show products or users from the country you’re
in and the currency you’ve indicated. Throw into that melting pot the fact
that wine (as a product type) gets exported everywhere and you had a doozy of
an architectural problem.
The edge case we explored was a South African travelling to
the UK (we have some worldly SuperFANS so this is highly likely) and reviewing
a South African wine available in South Africa but bought in the UK. Just how
would we capture and present that data without making a mess of an already
fragmented product set (there are roughly 15,000 wines per year on the shelves
of South African wine selling stores).
In the “lean” mode we were in, currency got pushed to Phase
2 and eventually out of Phase 2 and into the bucket of “never got done”. That
was probably my fault. The solution is most likely a simple one, I just
couldn’t see it. Perhaps this is symptomatic of our fledgling ecosystem just
not thinking big enough…
From that point on, the reason I never focused on
international audiences (aside from one failed attempt to target ex pats living
overseas) was primarily because of the quality of our “Third World app” vs the
quality being generated in the “First World”, a horrible naming convention I
know. I was pretty convinced that the app wrapper approach was just not good
enough for international audiences who would put us up against Vivino, Snooth,
Drync, Foursquare and other buttery smooth apps with enormous budget for
multiple native executions and almost constant iteration.
I’ve spoken previously about the frustration some users
experienced because of the mobisite within an app wrapper approach - that extra
couple of milliseconds it takes to move between pages. Combine that with
sketchy bandwidth conditions in South Africa – and Real Time Wine wasn’t the
greatest experience unless you were on solid 3G/LTE or Wireless. This got us a
LOT of negative app reviews – for a product that was largely hailed as being
fun, useful and a great example of South African innovation.
This is where my concern of competing in US/Europe was born. It was the worst rock and hard place challenge – I didn’t have the money nor the technical team to build native – so I got a bit stuck. Read back to the lesson on “channel focus”. If I had to do this all again, I’d go iPhone only.
This is where my concern of competing in US/Europe was born. It was the worst rock and hard place challenge – I didn’t have the money nor the technical team to build native – so I got a bit stuck. Read back to the lesson on “channel focus”. If I had to do this all again, I’d go iPhone only.
Combine that experience with the complexity of currency
(some smart ass is going to suggest an easy solution to me after reading this –
I know!) and I basically never had the confidence to point this
internationally.
“The app just isn’t of First World quality – compare it to a
native app and we’ll always lose,” I said.
“South Africa is a great test market, let’s find a bed of
revenue here and then point internationally when we have the funds and
flexibility to compete,” I said.
“Vivino just did a round for R120 million. There’s no point
competing, we don’t have the firepower. They’ll out-AdWords us in seconds,” I
said.
Those facts were all correct. But they were bullshit excuses.
The Internet works on sub-cultures and sub-currents. And
successful (mega-successful) consumer orientated product startups by luck or
design, manage to hit one of these. You can’t hope to catch a current if you
aren’t out there.
Unless you have a very South African specific idea – point
internationally. Be available internationally. Be usable internationally – even
if you don’t focus on it in the beginning. If this scares you, try your hand at
a B2B product first, we’re still learning how to THINK BIG in this country. Or
at least I am.
The power of Influencers. Know your SuperFANS.
Possibly the greatest thing to come out of Real Time Wine –
and the part which will hopefully survive through our passion project,
Incogvino – are the SuperFANS.
It was an idea transported (stolen/borrowed/nationalised)
from Jason Calacanis in the US. A couple of years back, he stopped blogging,
turning instead to a private mailing list of fans and colleagues. This list is
alive today, a thriving community attached to his podcast This Week in
Startups, aptly called The TWISTList.
I took this idea and wrapped some marketing thinking around
it. How could I leverage a niche within a niche (super active users within the
“wine drinkers with smartphones who are app active and want to change their
buying habits” segment)?
Essentially, the Real Time Wine SuperFANS were the most
active users on the app. They had to reach Bottle Bandit status level, no mean
feat as that meant 30+ actual reviews on the app. Once there, they got an
invite into a private Google Groups mailing list. I then charged Wine Brands to
be a member of this mailing list and encouraged everyone there to have open and
casual chats about wine, wine events, wine tastings and the wine lifestyle.
Some of the best, most valuable community interactions have
come from that list. And 8 wine farms have been delighted to pay a membership
fee just to be part of it. The SuperFANS drove social media activity for the
product. They became (and still are) a rather sought after base for wine festivals – an
engaged audience who actually cares about the product, wandering around, tweeting up a storm. They’ve even started getting private invites to wine farms
– the surest sign that interacting with influencers is valuable to the wine
industry.
The best thing about the SuperFANS community,
is that they’re not what you would traditionally think of as “online
influencers” (read: have lots of Twitter followers). I think that’s becoming a
fairly archaic definition. You have the super celebrities with enormous
audiences – of course they’re valuable. Then you have the wannabe celebrities
with big audiences. Then you have the social media douchebags (like me I
suppose!) with slightly large audiences. But somewhere in the middle, we’ve
lost connection with the ONE TRUE FAN. Seth Godin said you only need 1000 true
fans to start a movement. That’s who I found in the SuperFANS.
I call them the Dinner Table Influencers. Sure, there are
bloggers and Tweeterers. But the real find has been those people who hold actual offline social sway. The people who’s friends turn to them with a wine and go “is this
good?” They’re the true fans. And long may they live on.
Together with the SuperFANS, Real Time Wine also gave birth
to our fairly infamous Twitter tastings. Wine farms sell mix cases through the
mailing list – and because a group of people then have the same wine in their
hands at the same time, we can all get together on a social media platform to
taste and discuss it.
These Twitter tastings were one of the runaway successes of
the startup. The last one, hosted by myself and Mike Ratcliffe of Warwick,
generated 778k impressions on Twitter and reached 130k people over the space of
90 minutes. Ok. So that’s a bit of a vanity metric – but in a sense, we were
selling these “hosted events” – so let’s let this one slide.
This experiential take on social content is something I’ll take with me – and something I’d encourage you to experiment with as well. Social media is so full of content right now, it has become worse than commodotised. But there is plenty room for experiences.
This experiential take on social content is something I’ll take with me – and something I’d encourage you to experiment with as well. Social media is so full of content right now, it has become worse than commodotised. But there is plenty room for experiences.
Know your early adopters. Know your product influencers. Put
your hands around them, love them, hug them and give them stuff. They’re the
ticket to great things.
Don’t worry about being copied.
I hear this a lot when I talk to entrepreneurs. Sign this
NDA. I can’t tell you what we’re up to – it’s too good. I don’t want to release
the product till this is perfect, otherwise someone is going to copy us.
All rubbish. And usually, in my opinion, this language is a
terrible sign to potential investors.
US and European startups PLAN to get copied. Their original
strategy docs usually have reaction plans for when it occurs. They take it as a
sign of market validation (sure, they’re pissed off, but we live in a Xerox
world – with great freedom comes great ability to rip something off). There are
even businesses like Rocket Internet that have made hundreds of millions of
Dollars simply by copying other products.
If you aren’t copied by China – you're not big enough for them to care.
If you aren’t copied by China – you're not big enough for them to care.
We were copied within about 8 months of launch. In some
ways, we were copied pixel for pixel. I got pissed off. I know Prezence was
livid (agencies still come from the culture of creative – where stealing ideas
is criminal, not the culture of product – where borrowing ideas, even in little
bits, is how it’s done).
I took a screenshot. Patted myself on the back. High fived
my imaginary co-founder and moved on.
Don’t worry about being copied. Unless you’re sitting on a
cure for cancer, success lies in getting out there and iterating quickly – not
in hiding everything until some big reveal (a reveal you usually won’t have the
funds to underpin).
Be tidy. Just in case that deal comes through…
Over the course of the startup, I spent close on R150k on a
combination of lawyers, accountants and “managing the books” (a hefty slice of
total funding raised). I remember having
a big fight with AngelHub about this, because both the lawyers and accountants
(and the quality of them) were their idea. “Do this properly,” they said, “keep
all your financial stuff clean as a whistle, it’ll keep your investors happy.”
Looking back now I can tell you two things with fair
certainty. I still think I spent too much – but that’s because I failed. If I
had succeeded that number would have faded into obscurity and I would have
thanked my lucky socks I had done it right.
During one of the merger deal discussions, we started to
open up company books to each other – and the other company was a complete
mess (that's being kind). It was nice to be the small upstart that had a professional set
of books that didn’t need any emergency accounting.
Deals are hard enough. Why would you want to add complexity
and barriers-to-success by having a messy set of accounts and a shoebox-full of
till slips? You don’t want to do that. A good deal with good people comes
along, you do everything in your power to make that as smooth as possible –
because it’s very rare that one company truly needs another.
So get those management reports out monthly. Spend a little
on an accountant and lawyer if you can. You don’t have to bust the bank – but
go look at our idolised US/Europe counterparts, sure they’re raising more money
than we are, but they’re doing things properly.
I’m sure your Dad’s a great guy – but there’s a stage fairly early on in a startups life cycle where he’s probably not the right guy to be running your books.
I’m sure your Dad’s a great guy – but there’s a stage fairly early on in a startups life cycle where he’s probably not the right guy to be running your books.
CONCLUSION: Startups. The messy and joyful art of getting your Street MBA.
The “Street MBA”. Borrowed this phrase from a friend, Andy
Volk. It’s such a good phrase – one
that I hope replaces “serial entrepreneur” and “entrepreneur enthusiast” – some
great new vomit words the Internet has brought into our lives.
The “Street MBA” celebrates what you learned, not what you
got wrong – because getting something wrong is pretty much the only way you
learn.
Failure isn’t a bad thing. South Africa has a horrible
stigma around failure. Where US/European startup communities celebrate it and
wear it like a badge of honour – we hide under a rock and pretend it didn't happen.
I’m not going to lie – I’ve been pretty worried to write and release this, primarily because of that stigma. Hopefully this content does something to move us towards a more accepting culture around startup failures. Failure is a couple of extra course credits in the Street MBA. In the US, most investors won’t even look at you until you have those course credits.
I’m not going to lie – I’ve been pretty worried to write and release this, primarily because of that stigma. Hopefully this content does something to move us towards a more accepting culture around startup failures. Failure is a couple of extra course credits in the Street MBA. In the US, most investors won’t even look at you until you have those course credits.
The Street MBA is a lesson in business, a lesson in stress,
customers, friendships, partnerships, revenue and product. A Street MBA teaches
you how to recover from being punched in the gut daily.
As I write this, I’m smiling. Which is a far cry from the miserable sod I’ve been during the slow death of Real Time Wine. That’s because it’s ok. I’d do it again. In a while.
As I write this, I’m smiling. Which is a far cry from the miserable sod I’ve been during the slow death of Real Time Wine. That’s because it’s ok. I’d do it again. In a while.
I hope you enjoyed this. It sure provided the catharsis I
needed – so the rest is up to you. Get out there and start something.
Andy Hadfield
May 2014
This great piece should come with a warning about how long it will take to read. Actually, it should be published as and E-book, because it is so much more than a blog.
ReplyDeletea) consider yourself warned :)
Deleteb) feel like publishing it?
c) have heeded your advice and added a sentence to the beginning linking to the htxt.africa version which is considerably condensed - http://www.htxt.co.za/2014/05/06/how-to-earn-a-street-mba-12-lessons-from-an-unsuccessful-sa-start-up/
Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for leaving a comment!
A brilliant read. So much resonates.
ReplyDeleteThanks John. Leave your thoughts in the comments. This should be but the beginning of a discussion and just a step in the journey of the SA startup ecosystem...
DeleteNot done reading it yet, but loving it already. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteFor you, Ithateng, I've updated it with some images, including some metrics from the startup. Enjoy :)
DeleteGreat read Andy and thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeletePleasure bud, let's design a product one day :)
DeleteHey Adam, fantastic article, read the entire way through, thanks very much for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear about Real Time Wine. By the way it sounded, especially going into understanding customers needs, analyzing the data in delivering more products etc... the idea sounded refreshing in trying to relate to the consumer. Even if it didn't work out the way you wanted, all you can do is learn from the experience and keep moving forward until something better comes along.
....I was hoping I could get in touch with you about a new start-up social network we are developing right here in Johannesburg? The project has been underway for nearly a year now...and I KNOW, if you give me 10 minutes of your time to share it with you, this will be something really special to be part of.
So many people are out there are trying to be different, but they always end up
doing the same damn thing you know?
Aki Anastasiou said on Technobyte Show last year:
"I've been making this prediction for years now and when I say this to people they look at me like I'm crazy...!
I say to people: The next Bill Gates, the next Steve Jobs, the next Mark Zuckerberg...will come from Africa."
I'm that guy. And trust me when I say this: This project is going to be bigger than Facebook.
Lets get in touch. You won't regret it.
Brad K.
Hey Brad... It's Andy, not Adam - #damnyouautocorrect :)
DeleteGotta be honest lad, saying something is going to "bigger than facebook" is a huge warning sign. But hey, I have some free time. Pop me an email and we'll do coffee!
Honest mistake haha.
DeleteAwesome, I really appreciate the response! I've sent you an email, lets make it happen :) Chat soon.
B
Inspiring piece Andy! I cannot wait for that rock hiding culture in SA to change. Read this while in line to vote and have been thoroughly informed, provoked and engaged...look forward to coming back to it. Very excited to get out there and work more on that Street MBA, but civic duty and active citizenry calls!
ReplyDeleteVote well Raymond - and thanks man. The rock hiding culture as you call it - will change. Look how far the startup economy has come just in the last 2 years. We're ramping up - just need more people to get out there and try something...
DeleteRunning Lean... DOH. More people should read it :P
ReplyDeleteEasy to read. Really hard to implement. And even when you do, it's amazing how much experience it takes to truly implement that model.
DeleteGood read!
ReplyDeleteInteresting perspective, but I have to disagree with you on one thing:
"An agency or a dev shop will never be your team"
Full disclosure - I work for a company that does pretty much that. We are highly selective of the clients and projects we get involved with and purposefully don't pump out volume in order to dedicate enough time to each client - we've been doing this successfully for a good 5 years now.
This is part of our strategy and we fill the role of primary dev team for various clients: Private Airports in the U.S, Financial SaaS systems in Dubai, big pharma companies etc. We even fall in with companies that have existing dev teams and assist in educating them to improve their own internal processes around it.
I would say that your problem here was a good mix of non-specialists, bad project management, complacency around deliverables & weak dev contracts.
It's very interesting to watch and analyse the various factors that cause projects to delay, decay or fail, they always seem to happen in the same order and magnitude.
Thanks for sharing your insights!
S
Thank you, Andy
ReplyDeleteHey Andy
ReplyDeleteI actually commented a week ago off my iPad and it does not appear to show? OR you deleted it? Really sorry to pick this up. If it is any consolation - ours is still not live. Despite more money having been spent. Keep well - chat soon. Brett Lowe
Hey Brett - never would have deleted it :) Don't think anything came through, maybe good 'ol 3G problem. Hey, it's ok. These things happen. The B2B model into retailers was probably too ahead of the curve - timing is everything after all. Sad to hear yours isn't live, but the focus on coupons appears to be paying off, so most likely the better decision in the short term...
DeleteA great read, thanks for sharing your experience Andy.
ReplyDeleteReally insightful read, I can relate to a lot of it. If we get the timing right one day, we'd probably make a decent team!
ReplyDeletePS: "some smart ass is going to suggest an easy solution to me after reading this – I know!" - did you consider geo-locating users by their IP and auto assigning currency? Sorry to be that guy, just curious :P
Geo-locating was the first thought. There was a minor issue with users who would travel (Eg. south african in england) - but in hindsight that was such a minor group it wouldn't have mattered. The only other complication was obviously a wine that existed in 2 countries. ie available in SA and available in England - then which currency would you show to which user.
DeleteAnd at the end of the day, all that is only relevant if we'd built the bloody ecommerce portion :)
Yeah makes sense, was just curious. Anyway thanks again for the post, a few points you made really made me think.
DeleteHey everyone. For all the devs who've read this and reached out, I did promise that we'd release the source code. Wrote a post, Prezence contributed some notes and there's a 75mb download that should give you all the interesting bits. Have a look here: http://www.andyhadfield.com/2014/05/open-source-code-for-real-time-wine.html - enjoy...
ReplyDeleteLiving the daily highs and lows of a "Street MBA" . Would appreciate a cup of coffee with you to gain more insights on my start-up www.ezeeentry.com
ReplyDeleteSure we can squeeze something in. Just pop me an email.
DeleteHi Andy - this is a great read. Thanks for sharing so eloquently and openly. It is going into our course curriculum. Please come and give a talk for us ?
ReplyDeleteThanks Keith, sure, fireside Q&A with wine? :) Just pop me an email.
DeleteHello Andy, I'm inspired after having read your trials and tribulations. The "ideas man" certainly is a lonely place - but imagine if you had to confer with someone who was just not on the same page as you and had contributed to sinking the ship. This way, you have no one to blame but yourself (and timing).
ReplyDeleteAnd well done, I salute you! You tried and the next time you try you will be far better informed to make a success of it. No need to be ashamed at all - I loved that you are happy to talk about it - and that you have been big enough to share your lesson is amazing.
What's next?
Pierre
Thanks for the note Pierre. Appreciated. No idea what's next. Something cool hopefully :)
DeleteHi Andy - thanks for taking time and sharing your story. It's good to know what entrepreneurs go through in the local context.
ReplyDeletePleasure Alireza...
DeleteAndy, did you consider for a moment that what you had simply wasn't a viable idea/product? After all, you get that first step wrong, and nothing - not the best developers, PR, marketing, facebooks likes or enthusiastic friends, is going to make it work.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes.
All the time! I think if the B2B model had worked (selling technology into retailers who had scale through their loyalty programmes) - then the product would have worked. It would have had the runway it need to continue iteration and "find" the alternative revenue. When that didn't work, the only real hope was to merge with an existing ecommerce player. Building out ecommerce by myself would just have taken too long (opportunity cost). And without ecommerce, without the ability to move into a different industry - you're right, the product wasn't viable in this market.
DeleteWhat a great article, thanks for giving back to the community such an invaluable report. I loved the journey and experience, a little hilarious and sad here and there. But I have no doubt the lessons learned in the process are such a success and have armored you for your next BIG success.
ReplyDeleteI guess the main highlights for me were Timing and getting to fail fast by gunning for revenue chop chop.
Thanks a mill for sharing. I enjoyed your sarcastic "failure boy" speech at sw7 last week. Looking forward to seeing you again. :)
Simon B
Thanks Sir Bwe, my absolute pleasure... nothing wrong being the poster boy for startup failure if it helps the industry a bit and helps other founders avoid some of the things I didn't :)
Delete