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The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

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Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#2

Post by zach »

Great postmortem. These kinds of high-altitude narratives, which describe the overall lifecycle and tell the key stories, are utterly fascinating, success or failure. When you're so focused on something, then discover parallel narratives to your experience, you gain perspective that's useful and even emotionally valuable.

They're very common within the game development world, after becoming a regular, beloved feature of Game Developer Magazine (now defunct). Here's a big list of them, perfect for a Saturday afternoon:

http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-postmortems/

Is there any collection of these kinds of articles for contemporary startups, or similar postmortems that are also worth reading?

Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#4

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

Not all startup failures are created equal, but when it comes to true flops like this one, one of the commonalities I've noticed is a general inability of the founders to step back and see the forest for the trees.

From http://alpha.flowtab.com/:

   We also set a major company milestone to reach 50 "Flowtab regulars" (defined by 2 or more orders in a trailing 30 day period) by March 1st 2013.
That's a really remarkable comment given that the venture was started in May 2011. With its $1 per order fee, this means that after nearly two years, the company's "major" goal was to acquire 50 customers who would deliver a baseline of $100 in revenue in a month.

Sadly, one of the lessons listed on http://alpha.flowtab.com/ is "Do things that don't scale."

Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#6

Post by jamessun »

While the story of the rise and fall of Flowtab was compelling, I thought Flowtab did a great job with http://alpha.flowtab.com. This site is a really effective way of telling their story and I commend them for including several "artifacts" (resources) for public consumption. It's never easy to admit failure...

Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#7

Post by chrissnell »

zach wrote: post #2

Great postmortem. These kinds of high-altitude narratives, which describe the overall lifecycle and tell the key stories, are utterly fascinating, success or failure. When you're so focused on something, then discover parallel narratives to your experience, you gain perspective that's useful and even emotionally valuable. They're very common within the game development world, after becoming a regular, beloved feature…

Back in the early 2000's, it was FuckedCompany.com. It was a daily dose of layoffs and shut-downs amongst (mostly) tech startups.

Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#8

Post by devindotcom »

"Flowtab wasn’t saving you enough time or energy to make it a compelling experience."

Serious question - was it ever going to? It always seemed like a backend-heavy way to optimize for a trivial inconvenience. I have to say, It seems to me this was a failure because it was just plain a bad idea. That makes for a pretty short story, though, I guess.

Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#9

Post by mtt05001 »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #4

Not all startup failures are created equal, but when it comes to true flops like this one, one of the commonalities I've noticed is a general inability of the founders to step back and see the forest for the trees. From http://alpha.flowtab.com/ : We also set a major company milestone to reach 50 "Flowtab regulars" (defined by 2 or more orders in a trailing 30 day period) by March 1st 2013. That's a really remarkable…

Agreed. I was the founder of Flowtab and I can tell you we always felt just one step away from success. We felt mobile ordering was inevitable and those who fought the hardest for the longest would win. I think different now...

Re: The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

#10

Post by mtt05001 »

I am the founder of Flowtab, and my goal in writing this story was to share what we learned and accomplished instead of letting it rot for eternity in Dropbox. Thus, we opensourced everything from our pitchdeck to source code on Flowtab.com.

Kyle Hill and I are already back at it. Together, we launched www.homehero.org a marketplace for senior caregivers, let me know your feedback!

- Mike Townsend

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