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Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

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Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#81

Post by conductr »

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #69
pairing wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the common advice I've seen for being lean but step #2 is really hard. How do you get people to put in orders on a brand new webpage? It's far from trivial to get an audience for your landing page and kind of goes against lean to throw 5k in ad money to validate something. Who has that kind of money to throw around?

step #2 is the absolute hardest part. If you can't figure out #2 then why invest in staff, logistics, a refrigerator...? The idea is to only focus on traction(#2). If you can't get traction then you don't have anything.

I agree but I can't help but think a subscription model would have benefited this service. Require people to buy 1 meal a week/month, try to automate it, reduce friction from the user's process of meal planning; these are things that may have actually gone the extra mile for the user + increased orders.

Granted they may have tried this

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#82

Post by theseoafs »

sgdesign wrote: post #78

Something I see missing from a lot of these startup discussions are the ideas of identity and community. Sure, "solving a problem" is important. But Nike isn't solving a problem that other shoe companies haven't solved a thousand times over. The reason they're successful is that buying into their brand makes you part of a bigger community, and that community has a positive identity attached to it. Same thing with a s…

> Or did you just try to "solve a problem"?

This comment misses the point. The first goal of a startup should be to solve a problem. Companies identify problems and offer solutions to customers. If you've started a company without having identified and solved a problem a lot of people face, you've already failed as a business. Trying to organize a "community of passionate members" should be considered incidental, particularly considering that the overwhelming majority of successful companies (particularly young ones) have no organized "passionate" community whatsoever. You don't need to spend your free time hosting events to rally people around your brand identity if your product is legitimately good and useful -- and if your product is legitimately good and useful you'll attract brand loyalty organically anyway. Trying to do this in the opposite order by attempting to bind people to a brand that hasn't proven its worth and doesn't actually do anything worthwhile is going to be futile.

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#84

Post by benihana »

sblank wrote: post #76

Hmm. Was this written in 1999? Or perhaps the notion of the Lean Startup is not understood in London? Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist. Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them.…

The author mentions that Lean Startup was one of the most important books they read.

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#85

Post by Scoundreller »

danielweber wrote: post #67
briholt wrote: post #21

I can't help but have a very negative reaction to this, not necessarily at the author, but at the startup ecosystem as a whole. These are posted as "lessons" as if they were difficult to learn, when this really should be labeled "things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." Of course you should be self-critical of your product, of course you should test with real customers,…

The fact that people lie to you when doing market research isn't incredibly obvious to a lot of people. That seems to be his biggest problem: he thought there was a market because people said they liked the idea. I loved this post (gets one of my rare upvotes) because the guy does a great job taking apart everything he did wrong. Maybe these lessons should be obvious, but empirically they aren't: people keep making t…

> The fact that people lie to you when doing market research isn't incredibly obvious to a lot of people.

Thank you for saying this. It's something that's only cemented in me over the past few years to connect the similarity between "anonymous" survey data and what gets posted on another anonymous posting place, 4chan.

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#86

Post by michaelbuckbee »

tchock23 wrote: post #63

It's a bad idea for founders to be doing their own market research. The prevailing advice from "startup gurus" like Steve Blank is that you must "get out of the building" and talk to customers face-to-face. Here's the problem with that advice (as Dinnr found out): 1. Very few people will tell a founder their idea is bad right in front of them; and 2. Founders suffer from the worst case of confirmation bias ever. They…

It's for reason #1 that for all support and followup emails I sign my emails as coming from "Developer Support", despite being the founder.

I've gotten some great feedback from customers 'venting at the support guy' that I don't think I would have if they knew I was actually the founder.

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#87

Post by [deleted] »

twic wrote: post #42
l33tbro wrote: post #39

Post mordems like this make me sad. Not for the founder's bank account per se, but for the fact that he has all the wrong takeaways from his startup experience. You started off well. You did the market research. Great. You've clearly gotten people interested in the service. Even better. You demonstrated in your post that a clear-headed approach was taken and you objectively determined people would want your product.…

All the marketing in the world won't make any lasting difference if the product doesn't create value for customers. This product didn't.

[deleted]

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#88

Post by pbreit »

Count me among the many wondering if the correct lessons were learned. I still have the feeling that the basic concept is OK and that the execution was lousy. He needed 10 very good, easy-to-provide/make recipes at a decent price point. And then market/sell the bejeezus out of it.

Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr

#89

Post by ams6110 »

l33tbro wrote: post #39

Post mordems like this make me sad. Not for the founder's bank account per se, but for the fact that he has all the wrong takeaways from his startup experience. You started off well. You did the market research. Great. You've clearly gotten people interested in the service. Even better. You demonstrated in your post that a clear-headed approach was taken and you objectively determined people would want your product.…

I believe this idea would have worked if you had decent marketing.

I'm not convinced. I am surprised to hear it has worked anywhere.

I'm not a gourmet cook by any stretch, but I do cook most of my own meals. I would never buy fresh ingredients online. Shopping for the ingredients, perusing the choices and selecting "the best" unblemished fruits, vegetables, and meats is part of the experience of cooking. I don't want to have someone else or some robot do it and dump it on my doorstep. When I don't care, I just go to a restaurant, which will be cheaper and faster than a service like this could possibly be.

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