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30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

truffles.me.uk

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Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#61

Post by ams6110 »

bricestacey wrote: post #58

Another idea is to market to teachers. Scan in homework, grade/annotate on the computer, and send results to student and parents. Then, teachers wouldn't have to lug all that paper around, parents are involved in the feedback loop, 9 month sales window, doesn't require institutional commitments (any teacher could use it).

I would pay for that! The amount of paper that my kids bring home from school every day is staggering. If I could go online and see scans of all their work (along with all the school newsletters, PTO flyers, lunch menus, etc.) that would be wonderful.

Of course you'd need to figure out how to make it easy for the teacher to scan/upload of stacks of different sized, often folded/wrinkled paper.

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#62

Post by fedd »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #23

Great article. I don't think we can repeat this enough: Hard work != value. Clever code != value. Writing something hackers think is cool != value. Sometimes I think the hardest part of startups is re-aligning our value system from what we've learned in school and society into something that's actually useful for startups.

> Writing something hackers think is cool != value

unless your customers would be hackers (i am telling this to myself, to reassure myself)

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#63

Post by dav-id »

ebiester wrote: post #50
gabrielroth wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re your point one: This service wasn't for help with what an American would call term papers. It was for help with exams , which you have to write yourself (unless you hire someone to impersonate you, which I'm sure is not unheard of in big classes but is certainly riskier).

You're right, I misread that. At that point, why not just go to the professor or TA during office hours? Maybe other Universities work differently, but each class had office hours where I went to school, and most students didn't take advantage of that. And who writes out example exam questions anyway? So yes, I stand corrected, Customer development would have uncovered those problems.

Personally I had my best exam results when I did exactly that, I wrote as much as I could for each historical exam question. I would research from book, lecture notes etc.

However, I wouldn't pay for this service when my lecturers and teaching assistants would do this for free and as they were the ones setting the exams I would prefer their advice than that of an unknown person.

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#64

Post by chipsy »

adrianbye wrote: post #46
hezekiah wrote: post #44

You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses. You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that ha…

this can be dangerous thinking. sticking with a project that has no momentum for a long time can be a huge waste of time. better to focus on finding momentum as quick as possible either in the current project or abandon and find new one. there's a lot of interesting things to do in the world

Agreed. Better to go out and find the zeitgeist than to wait for it to come to you. For a first failure without mentorship I would actually consider this a pretty fast one. :)

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#65

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ebiester wrote: post #50
gabrielroth wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re your point one: This service wasn't for help with what an American would call term papers. It was for help with exams , which you have to write yourself (unless you hire someone to impersonate you, which I'm sure is not unheard of in big classes but is certainly riskier).

You're right, I misread that. At that point, why not just go to the professor or TA during office hours? Maybe other Universities work differently, but each class had office hours where I went to school, and most students didn't take advantage of that. And who writes out example exam questions anyway? So yes, I stand corrected, Customer development would have uncovered those problems.

>And who writes out example exam questions anyway?

As a maths/physics student (though I did various other courses too) I pored over past papers, in part as an indicator of the papers to come (though they always caught one out) and in part for practice at recapitulating proofs and writing answers under time pressure. I certainly didn't spend the course working toward the exam but it would be silly not to attempt past papers on a course that has run unchanged for previous years.

Most of our papers had example answers with them though.

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#66

Post by pigbucket »

Completely missing from your postmortem (from which I learned a lot and for which I am very grateful) is the fact that the service you offer, to judge from the demo alone, is frankly not very good. Perhaps your analytics show that few visitors bothered to look at the demo, so maybe the point is moot, but I think the demo is awful, and if I wanted to take over this business, I would completely redo it, or remove it altogether (sometimes it’s better not to show the product!).

I’m not talking about the implementation, which is great. I’m talking about the actual advice given in the demo, which you are offering as an example of the kind of thing students should be willing to pay for. The first comment is, essentially, use “and” instead of “&.” The second is, in effect, “make this bit a separate paragraph, and tie it in better.” And so on. The advice is generic or, when concrete (as in the case of “use and”), banal. There is very little of it. And there is very little of value in it. And since it’s a bit of a struggle to read the handwritten text of the sample essay, it’s even harder to tell if the generic advice is relevant--except in the case of the advice given for the conclusion, which is so general as to be universally applicable, which is not to say it is good advice.

I got a sense from your postmortem that you in part want to blame your lack of success on students not being interested enough in their own studies to pay for your service. I’ve taught thousands of students, so I know well how few are willing to write out practice exams, and how few of those are willing to seek out feedback. But a very small percentage of a very large number can surely translate to a modestly profitable business (especially, in this case, if you had plans to expand into the huge American market and into the college essay review business, which is what my crummy site is trying to do). God knows it’s hard to get students engaged, but the ones who visited your site were looking for something, and I don’t think they found something worth paying for.

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#67

Post by robjohnson »

Thanks for providing so much detail into the inner-workings of your venture. Most people wouldn't have the guts to put themselves out there like that. If you think about wealth in terms of 'prevention of loss,' you've just made everyone on this forum quite a bit wealthier.

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#68

Post by hristov »

I think he just misjudged how most students study. In law school almost all of my exams were essays. The fact is that most people did not study by writing practice essays.

To answer an essay question well you need to be able to do two main things: know the information the question asks for, and present that information in writing. For me and everyone I studied with the first part was crucial and the second not that important. Everyone trusts their own writing skills to write a proper answer once they have all the info.

So when people study, they concentrate on memorizing the information, not on writing the answer. People just assume that come exam time you will be able to write the answer.

Of course it would be very nice to be able to write a bunch of practice answers, but usually there is not enough time to study, you always feel like you do not remember all the info that you are supposed to remember, so you spend most time trying to remember more things.

Re: 30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

#69

Post by archangel_one »

hezekiah wrote: post #44

You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses. You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that ha…

No, I think he was right. After that year he still has zero revenue - not a single person has actually signed on for his service. I think he has made a wise decision by realising that the market that he expected is simply not there.

I wouldn't have expected that it takes several years for most startups to see revenue. Profitability, sure, that's a harder thing, but for something like this you would surely expect to have a few customers after a year if it was going to work?

Persistence is a great thing, but surely there has to be a point where you realise that you're selling fridges to penguins and therefore it's time to try something else?

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