Did either of the founders have experience in the news industry before starting the company? From a brief search, it doesn't look like it. And from the way he's writing about journalists it sure doesn't sound like it either.
I'd say that that doomed the company from the start.
Doing a journalism startup just doesn't seem like a good idea if you have no understanding or experience of how doing journalism works.
Neither of us did, no. Actually, we didn't start a journalism startup, we were doing a Disqus clone for newspapers. We migrated to the NewsTilt idea after Sequoia told us they'd never fund something relying on newspapers for success.
I see why you would think needing journalism experience is important. Of all the errors we made, I don't find that to be a significant one, hence not really mentioning it in the retrospective. I personally still believe that journalism is too set in its ways to save itself, and that it's white knight will come from outside it.
The journalism experience is important because its a proxy for having that deep abiding passion for the industry that you admit you guys didn't have.
The problem wasn't that you guys didn't wake up and go to read BBC news in my opinion. The problem was that you guys didn't grow up wanting to be newspaper reporters and then start Newstilt after you went into journalism and learned that dream was endangered by the industry's collapsing business model.
I once worked on a multi million $ ecommerce platform startup where none of the founders had experience with ecommerce or retail at all. The story is familiar - they blew resources on building the MVP product assuming they knew all they needed and did a huge successful launch with big name sellers seeding the marketplace. But the numbers dropped off and the sellers became more difficult to retain. They learned some hard hard lessons with a $1m product build that fell flat on its face - for primarily reasons that were completely obvious to anyone in retail. The team was distributed across continents and they couldn't iterate very fast at all. They wasted the rest of their cycles and investor cash fixing these problems until they went broke and collapsed. It is sadly a pretty common scenario
Much of what you cite as an error is the direct result of not having understood journalism out the gate. It sounds like you spent a lot of your early resources trying to understand journalists and the news reader audience - after you built the product. Had you known more about the field when you began, how many of your core problems would have been solved in the design phase?
On the flip side, my two partners and I started up an e-commerce platform and did fairly well. Started on less than a quarter-million in 2003, and we switched ideas the first several months from one commerce idea to another. We had no idea what we were doing, learning while we went along. It required my partners saying "yes" to customers, me saying "no" to my partners, and a lot of back and forth. But it worked, and was a REALLY good system and service.
Unfortunately, it all went downhill 4 years later when backstabbing wenches pull the rug out from beneath us.
Well, clearly I have some experience now. I've immersed myself in this world for the last few months. That's not long, of course, but I basically did this for 100 hours per week. I may not be an expert now, but I think I know enough to have an informed perspective.
Comments
Did either of the founders have experience in the news industry before starting the company? From a brief search, it doesn't look like it. And from the way he's writing about journalists it sure doesn't sound like it either.
I'd say that that doomed the company from the start.
Doing a journalism startup just doesn't seem like a good idea if you have no understanding or experience of how doing journalism works.
Neither of us did, no. Actually, we didn't start a journalism startup, we were doing a Disqus clone for newspapers. We migrated to the NewsTilt idea after Sequoia told us they'd never fund something relying on newspapers for success.
I see why you would think needing journalism experience is important. Of all the errors we made, I don't find that to be a significant one, hence not really mentioning it in the retrospective. I personally still believe that journalism is too set in its ways to save itself, and that it's white knight will come from outside it.
The journalism experience is important because its a proxy for having that deep abiding passion for the industry that you admit you guys didn't have.
The problem wasn't that you guys didn't wake up and go to read BBC news in my opinion. The problem was that you guys didn't grow up wanting to be newspaper reporters and then start Newstilt after you went into journalism and learned that dream was endangered by the industry's collapsing business model.
I once worked on a multi million $ ecommerce platform startup where none of the founders had experience with ecommerce or retail at all. The story is familiar - they blew resources on building the MVP product assuming they knew all they needed and did a huge successful launch with big name sellers seeding the marketplace. But the numbers dropped off and the sellers became more difficult to retain. They learned some hard hard lessons with a $1m product build that fell flat on its face - for primarily reasons that were completely obvious to anyone in retail. The team was distributed across continents and they couldn't iterate very fast at all. They wasted the rest of their cycles and investor cash fixing these problems until they went broke and collapsed. It is sadly a pretty common scenario
Much of what you cite as an error is the direct result of not having understood journalism out the gate. It sounds like you spent a lot of your early resources trying to understand journalists and the news reader audience - after you built the product. Had you known more about the field when you began, how many of your core problems would have been solved in the design phase?
On the flip side, my two partners and I started up an e-commerce platform and did fairly well. Started on less than a quarter-million in 2003, and we switched ideas the first several months from one commerce idea to another. We had no idea what we were doing, learning while we went along. It required my partners saying "yes" to customers, me saying "no" to my partners, and a lot of back and forth. But it worked, and was a REALLY good system and service.
Unfortunately, it all went downhill 4 years later when backstabbing wenches pull the rug out from beneath us.
How would you know this if you have no experience in journalism?
Newspapers may, as an institution, not 'save journalism,' but I'd bet my money that whoever does will damn sure have had experience in the field.
Well, clearly I have some experience now. I've immersed myself in this world for the last few months. That's not long, of course, but I basically did this for 100 hours per week. I may not be an expert now, but I think I know enough to have an informed perspective.