Explain why your startup failed in 2-3 sentences!
Could you summarize your failure and/or what you learned from this experience in few words using tags or just two sentences.?
Could you summarize your failure and/or what you learned from this experience in few words using tags or just two sentences.?
cause i thought "if i built it then they will come".
how wrong i was
I'm sure this will fit in here: https://www.failory.com/
Personally I think my failure is due to the lack of good marketing.
I think technically the product I made (https://sheetsms.xyz) is good but there is no users and no market fit or I did not find it.
I am a developer so it is hard for me to understand how marketing works.
I think next time I need to find someone to handle the marketing side because even with a good product without marketing it is impossible to win!
Just checked out your product! Few things I could spot were
Thanks a lot for your feedback.
What do you mean by bad UX experience ? Could you give me advice on how to improve it ?
What did the market research process say about sheetsms?
I look for competitors and I did not find the exact same product.
I guess that sending texts using spreadsheet is a needed thing so I went for it and started coding but maybe I did not do enough market research !
What would be your advices for a good market research ?
What if instead of "I guess that ....is a needed thing". You put "based on my customers' interviews, IH most upvoted questions and facebook posts and comments ... I assume it's a needed thing"
This is the key here. Talk to people who you think might need this service (fwiw, I don't understand what the need is, but I might not be your target customer).
Reach out to 100 people in your target segment. You'll probably get ~10 responses and try to talk to all of them. Don't ask leading questions, but rather understand how they do things today, what's annoying/difficult/tedious, listen to their emotion as that mention certain things. This will at least help validate or invalidate your idea.
Understanding that a problem exists, and is painful enough, is required for your product to mean anything to anybody.
You must be right but it sounds really complicated to get users feedback as I don't really have any.
What about your competitors! and other users that using different approaches. For instance, Cars and trains are not similar, however, both can be used to commute to work.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
One of the first paid app attempts I tried actually made decent sales the first few months in hindsight but because it didn't immediately cover my living costs I moved on because I didn't know how to market or do anything much beyond releasing. To be honest, if this community was around at the time it would have helped a lot as back then I didn't have any peers that were encouraging that you could make a living from things like this. I also have several apps that I never launched because I was being too much of perfectionist.
We didn't have enough effective sales people, also we were dealing with an industry where people mostly scared by technology and are not willing to change their opinion, at least from our research.
I reckon that a good sales department would have made the difference.
Just curious, could you please specify your market?
We are in the hospitality industry and we are based in Sydney Australia.
You can have a look at what we do at www.orderly.cc
I visited your website for 20 sec and then came here to write this comment. I did it this way so to keep it rational. What would a user get as a first impression when visiting your website. Well, For me, you are solving the ordering problem :
Create a provider list easily, add your products and make orders. Even though I'm not an inventory management/orders management expert. But it looks 'Deja vue'.
You might consider solving a pain point problem that your competition didn't and explain it in one sentence on the first page IN BOLD AND STARING. Also, If you can afford it, get a marketing expert for one hour. But first, check your competitors reviews and their users' feedback(Look for negative reviews only).
That’s a good point, even if we don’t really have big competitors here in Australia I’ll have a more in-depth look around.
Thank you for all you feedback, were really helpful 😊
In my opinion, there are two possibilities here:
Innovation is not part of their DNA. Check what happened to Kodak, Nokia...
You didn't answer their paint points. It should be a must-have not nice to have
The point is that it would be a must-have as it would save those businesses a lot of time and money, but apparently their answer was: "why changing something that has been working for year(despite being outdated and time consuming) when I can still do it the old way?".
In short is really hard to change people mentality even if you're offering something for free.
Sometimes, especially if you're offering it for free!
Many companies are still using desktop old excel dashboard. They don't want to use SaaS or any new solution. Why? Because they don't want to train their staff and don't want to invest in skilled workers. Why? because they don't have the budget or/and they don't see the ROI. Others, don't want to upload their data into the cloud(old school yea). Well, market research allowed us to tailor a suited solution to these customers or make a decision to not deal with them at all.
It failed before I could even launch. A bigger, more established competitor launched their own product for the niche I was looking forward to exploiting, charging so low I couldn't hope to compete.
This question made my heart palpitate. I started to think what would happen to cause my startup to fail. If I fail to do proper marketing and sales, I'll fail. I believe in my product and I saw other manually doing what my system does and they had demand, so my product is simply better! This shouldn't happen!
The customer was not the decision-maker.
I built Eventli (https://eventli.simplestweb.in) for personal use.
I could not put in the time and effort to make it public.
It's all about one dirty scarry word - Marketing
Even adults have the scary ghost that we should defeat. Let's leave our comfort zone. My personal one was, as a tech guy, I was scared of talking to people or maybe It was pride.
Well, with some help, I overcome it and now, It's exciting for me to talk to new people and listen to their stories(all kind). To summarize, the comfort zone is the most dangerous place to stay in.
The team broke up
You can view the ashes of the MVP here
http://kcdirt.x10host.com/Project3/galaxy3/index.html
However any suggestions would be welcomed