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.
Comments
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.