Building a two sided marketplace is an incredibly hard problem at the best of times. Just look at Uber; investors have poured billions of $$s into it with no profit in sight, despite interest rates hovering around 0 for more than a decade.
I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
51–60 of 229 posts
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#52I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
I do the dirty tasks for a non-technical founder. Everybody he hires for a task does heavy corner cutting. Technical debt is enormous. Details are not taken care of. I like the guy, so I help him ignoring cost of opportunity. I do all the plumbing and fixing the tiny details and changes at 2 am. But that’s not sustainable. That’s not the way to build a business with prosperous future.
Do you have a stake in the business?
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#53Sorry to hear - this must be immensely stressful for you, but I definitely appreciate reading about the failure.
This quote really spoke to me:
> I also learned the level of commitment it takes to bring something from 0 to 1. It's really, really hard to build something from scratch. And it takes an insane amount of irrational confidence.
I've found the same: working at a very early stage startup gave me a new level of appreciation for people who make any new business work, whether it be a deli or a unicorn. It's very, very difficult.
Unfortunately, starting a software business by trying to build too much before shipping is very, very expensive. In my experience, people talk about MVPs as an obvious destination - "in order to prove this out, we obviously need the ability to make payments, the ability to list excursions, ...". In reality, I think finding an MVP is a skill more akin to archaeology: everyone one of those "obvious features" should be scrutinized closely. Is there a way to manually do this? Does the manual version have little enough friction where it will actually allow me to test my business hypothesis?
I also think "building the real thing" is often a trap: "real software" grants you scale but makes it difficult to build a real relationship with your users. At the birth of a business, a close relationship with your users where you can get great qualitative feedback about their problems is far, far more important than scale. Your solution is probably wrong and your understanding of the problem isn't nuanced enough to build the right thing: you can just hope that you're in the ball park enough where people want to help you get a run.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#54> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work. If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-foun…
Not really I know of a non technical founder who spent $300k on developing their website/app. I was a user of that platform, and while it wasn't fancy, could have been better, and someone eventually did do it better, it did what it was supposed to do. They had first mover advantage and funny enough it got bought out by that same company that did it better for $20-30m. Sure being a non technical founder is harder, but it can be done.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Flutter and cover all 3. Okay Flutter Web is pretty bad, but if you are cash strapped and need to move fast, Flutter is the way to go. I expect more and more startups to embrace Flutter, it is easily currently the best solution on the market (for 99% of app ideas). Yes native will always be better, but if you are a startup, your focus should be building an MVP and getting to product-market-fit as fast as possible…
Curious, why not React Native? I never heard anything bad about it in Android and iOS (except maybe the resource usage) and at least Microsoft is putting RN as first-tier framework in Windows nowadays.
Honestly, for me the Development experience on Flutter is better by a factor of 10. I have only used RN in small quantities, but when I used it, I always had some problems. Be it with Flow itself (just give me TS), or with Metro (crashing for no reasons), or stuff constantly breaking with any RN/SDK update.
With Flutter everything just works. I love Dart and the Dart analyser. The documentation is phenomenal and the speed at which I can pump out an app is crazy compared to other solutions.
Don't get me wrong, Flutter has an abundance of its own issues (iOS jank, Flutter web, too many state management solutions) but it still at the end of the day it does the best possible job.
If I have a random app idea which needs to be tested and deployed quickly, I am using Flutter 10 times out of 10.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#56Shameless Plug. How do you sell before you build if what you're building is a game?
I created https://diffudle.com/ a few months back without knowing what marketing, Idea Validation etc means. Wherever I posted, the overall sentiment was positive but the traffic to the site was still very low. Its peak was 1000 users but generally it hovered around 100 users a day. This is not enough to even sustain itself.
Lately, people told me that the game is not "that fun", I'd be very happy if I got this feedback earlier. How do I derisk this?
At least I coded it myself so saved 200k there :).
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#57That's why you use OPM and OPI.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#58Thing I learned through experience and also from other people is always do the bare minimum when starting a project like this.
You should be able to get away with low code/templated websites for most cases. No need to build mobile apps unless it's absolutely necessary, like when it wont work without native apis.
Also Rob W says dont start a marketplace if you dont have one side already figured out
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#59The first heading reads “marketplace for last-minute tours and activities”, followed by a paragraph that says “industry where 80% of bookings were still done using pen and paper, months ahead of time” How is something done both “months ahead of time” and “last-minute”?
That looked to me as either 1) poorly catering to 20% of the industry or 2) a founder who can't write. I wholeheartedly wish it would have worked out for them, but there are probably reasons that it didn't.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#60I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
I can't help but agree. Technology is hard to grasp without study. Study takes time, which founders don't have. People with technical expertise are expensive. If you don't have the expertise yourself, you have to hire it.
He's got 200k and he's bled 125k of that just to make his MVP. That's utterly insane to me.