Leed por favor este post de Brett Martin fundador de @Sonar que reproduzco a continuación.
La belleza y grandeza de Silicon Valley es su cultura de aceptación de los "failures", bagaje importantísimo e insustituible de experiencia y learnings.
Allí cuando fallas te pasan dos cosas que casi nunca pasan en otras latitudes:
1. Lo cuentas "urbi et orbi", con la cabeza y la voz más alta que puedas, sin complejos;
2. Tienes ganas de poner en la práctica lo que has aprendido lo antes posible.
Aprendamos tod@s de Brett.
Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup
Lessons Learned from the rise and fall of @Sonar
For those unfamiliar, Sonar Media Inc. was a mobile app
created to help make the world a friendlier place. Our mobile app
buzzed in your pocket when friends were near and ushered in a new wave
of “Ambient Social Networking”
companies. Downloaded by millions of people all over the world, Sonar
was promoted by Apple and Google in 100+ countries, won numerous awards
such as runner-up at TechCrunch Disrupt and Ad:Tech Best Mobile Startup,
raised nearly $2,000,000 from prominent angels and VCs, and was
featured on more than 300 publications including the New York Times,
CNN, CNBC, TechCrunch, and TIME.
And yet, we failed.
We did lots of thing right and lots of things wrong at Sonar. Below I do my best to share a few of our lessons learned.
The Search For Product/Market Fit
“Make something people want.” —Paul Graham
Listening to your users: False positives
We
launched Sonar with Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare support. Shortly
thereafter, users buffeted us with requests for Linkedin integration.
Ostensibly, they wanted to use the app to meet fellow professionals.
Eager
to please, we rushed to add Linkedin. The net effect? Nada. My guess is
that the people asking were not actual users, but rather people that
“wanted to be” users. We had mistaken noise for signal.
Lesson learned:
“I
would use your product if only you had X feature” is a dangerous signal
to follow. Users do their best to anticipate what they want before
they’ve seen it but, like entrepreneurs, they are often wrong.
Enterprise
companies should validate demand by asking customers to put their money
where their mouths are. Media and social networking companies should
double down on analytics to find, observe, and build for actual user
behavior.
Listening to your users: False negatives
One
of the most requested features was a “map like foursquare” for our
check-ins. Instead, we appended a simple “@Sonar” to content that users
shared from our app. Although we had designs for a map, we never got
around to building one. We were too busy building the future of ambient
social networking!
Mistake. People didn’t like
the bland “@Sonar” text string so they stopped sharing updates from
Sonar. Their friends never engaged with our updates in the first place.
Facebook noticed this and started hiding our posts. Instead of
optimizing for actual user behavior, we spent countless whiteboarding
sessions trying in vain to design an alternative.
Lesson learned:
You are probably not the Steve Jobs of ______.
Removing
friction from existing user behaviors (e.g. checkins) almost always has
a higher ROI than building castles in the sky (e.g. hypothesizing about
your API). Find all the dead ends/local maxima in your current products before building new ones!
Growth vs. Engagement
We
received conflicting advice from lots of smart people about which is
more important. We focused on engagement, which we improved by orders of
magnitude. No one cared.
Lesson learned:
Growth
is the only thing that matters if you are building a social network.
Period. Engagement is great but you aren’t even going to get the meeting
unless your top-line numbers reach a certain threshold (which is
different for seed vs. series A vs. selling advertising).
Things I Wish I Spent Less Time On
“Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.” — Steve Jobs
Events
I
realized the error of my customer acquisition strategy as I awkwardly
made my way through a small Meetup I had just pitched. It was 11pm on a
Tuesday, I was exhausted and still had real work to do once I got home.
Yet there I was, in a shitty bar trying not to skewer anyone with my
Sonar sign as I dodged person after person asking me to install THEIR
app.
Lesson Learned:
Events are for research, business development, and hiring; NOT for getting to 10,000,000 downloads.
Brands & Agencies
When
MTV, Kraft, Digitas, and the like reached out to us we weren’t sure
what they wanted. It took us at least 10 meetings to realize that,
rather than delivering us millions of their customers on a silver
platter, they were keeping tabs on us so that they could get access to
OUR audience if we ever took off!
Lesson Learned:
Be
polite, but postpone brand and agency “intros” until you’ve built your
own audience. If you build it, they will come (and pay).
Corollary:
Investors know this. You sound stupid when you talk about your
impending “big deal” with “XYZ brand” that’s going to drive massive
customer acquisition and revenue.
Side projects
In
the winter of 2011, we signed a partnership w/ Wired magazine to
demonstrate our technology by providing visitors of their Times Square
popup store with personalized in-store product recommendations.
That
“small side project” cost us 6 weeks of development and delivered no
appreciable benefit other than getting to hang out with the cool people
at Wired.
Lesson Learned:
You do not have 20% time. Identify your top three priorities. Throw away numbers two and three.
Competition
In
the run up to SXSW 2012 when the insider media had fabricated Highlight
as heir to the throne and some of our more fair weather investors had
written us off, my confidence was against the ropes. We reordered our
roadmap to rush out comparable features but were now BEHIND. I put on my
best brave face but inside my gut was rotting away. I still remember
thinking on the flight to Austin “fck, we had it, and now we are going
to lose it.”
Oops! Highlight never went anywhere but
we definitely wasted a ton of energy and sleep “responding to the
threat” when we should have been figuring out how to make our own
business work.
Lesson Learned:
Be
steady at the wheel. The only way one startup can kill another startup
is by getting into the other’s head and leading them off a cliff.
If
you don’t believe me, try this proof. Are your competitors releasing a
bunch of the same features that you have on your roadmap? Yes? Do you
know what consumers want*? No? Great, then neither do your competitors.
Get back to figuring out what users want!
*Hint: If you did, you would already have traction.
Selling the company
When
the ambient social networking space iced over in the spring of 2012,
Sonar’s controlling investors decided it was time to “flip the asset.”
They connected us with a daily deals company looking for “Big Data”
solutions. We stopped working on the app and devoted all of our
resources to repacking our backend technology to solve BigCo’s problems.
Instead of pairing down expenses to extend our dwindling runway, we
piled on hires and ramped up our infrastructure.
The
daily deals space imploded but we spent nearly nine months, dozens of
meetings, and several hundred thousand dollars “selling” Sonar into a
company that nearly went bankrupt.
Lesson Learned:
Companies
don’t get sold, they get bought. The best way to get bought is to build
something of value. That’s hard to do when you are trying to sell.
Misalignment
We
built Sonar out of an incubator that I helped launch in 2010. To be
absolutely clear, the incubator was instrumental to getting Sonar off
the ground and helped us considerably along the way. Unfortunately,
there are a number of structural issues facing incubators and the
operators they employ. I address some of these below.
The
decoupling of responsibility from control created ambiguity and
confusion, tension and frustration for all parties. From day to day
decisions such as negotiating an employment contract to company defining
ones such as when to sell the firm, alignment was a constant challenge.
Occasionally, we were simply at odds.
Perhaps the
most detrimental aspect of the incubator model was not its potential for
hinderance but its facility as a crutch. As someone responsible for
building and running a company that I ultimately didn’t control, it was
far too easy to point a finger.
In my opinion, the
most tragic example came when our incubator sat on a financing that
would have rebooted the company. After nearly a month at loggerheads,
our would-be investors gave us 48 hours to “take it or leave it.” In
hopes of saving the company, I made an ultimatum: we move forward
together or I would have to walk away. No one budged, time elapsed, and
our term sheet evaporated. I resigned as promised, blaming them for
killing my baby.
Lesson Learned:
As
John Burroughs said, “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure
until he begins to blame somebody else.” Avoid bad relationships like
the plague but when you inevitably find yourself in a difficult
partnership, don’t waste precious energy wailing against it. Make it
work or move on quickly.
It’s All About People
“The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.” — Jack Welch
Be practical about team building
We
lost our first would-be hire, a fantastic Google engineer. While we
were debating his contract, he was taking a job elsewhere. Conversely,
we hired another, much less proven, engineer on the spot. While he
ultimately wasn’t a great cultural fit and we definitely waited too long
to part ways, he was instrumental in getting V1 out the door.
Lesson Learned:
If
you are an experienced entrepreneur with lots of options, by all means,
hold out. For most first time entrepreneurs, holding out risks never
getting off the ground.
In the beginning, established
people probably won’t work with you. Prove yourself by finding diamonds
in the rough, like yourself. With their help, you can level up your
organization and convince the big fish to join.
Culture is your cofounder
We
built an amazing team at Sonar. Everyone was extremely smart,
passionate, dedicated, and hardworking. We celebrated milestones with
tequila. We hung at the beach. Even when times were tough, everyone
pushed as far as they possibly could, and then some. I have big love for
all of my former colleagues and am confident they feel similarly.
That
said, our culture was more of an emergent property than a deliberate
choice. Sure, we had brainstorming sessions and posted goals prominently
but most of our culture we absorbed from the people with whom we were
surrounded ourselves.
Lesson Learned:
Think
of culture as a cofounder that is present when you are not. You are
decisive, communicative, and respectful but its your culture that helps
everyone know how to act when you are out of the room. Give that voice
clarity and authority.
The trick is to avoid hollow
words. Since a startup’s culture ultimate mirrors that of its founder,
maybe the best thing that you can do is work hard to get clear on who
you are. Write that down and share it with your team. If you’ve been
honest, every action you take will reinforce your values.
Onward
“What
we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we
want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.” — Rainer Maria Rilke via Tim O’Reilly
Startups
don’t die when they run out of money, they die when their founders let
go. I ultimately stepped away from Sonar when I came to the conclusion
that, despite all that we had invested, everyone stood a better chance
starting anew. It’s difficult to accept, but sometimes you have to
concede a battle to win the war.
I am indebted to the
hundreds of people that invested their sweat, money, love, and/or time
into Sonar, be it three years of labor or a casual phone call. Special
thanks to my amazing team, faithful advisors & investors, and
supportive family & friends. Finally, huge shout out to the millions
of users that gave Sonar a shot. Your stories about meeting your
boyfriend on Sonar made it all worthwhile.
We started
Sonar with a belief that everyone has the potential to be amazing and
that technology can unlock that potential. My experience at Sonar has
only strengthened my conviction. I can’t wait to bring everything I’ve
learned to bear on what’s next.
Let’s do this.