My first startup failed terribly

Qwiple - as an idea - was born in 2007. I started working on it in 2011 and closed it down in 2015. What went wrong?

2007 - The problem to solve

I had noticed a problem in the blogosphere. Blogging was too difficult. Sure, places like Blogspot or WordPress had made it easy to create a blog, but let's be honest, creating a blog isn't hard. Building an audience and staying consistent is.

Back in its prime, Digg.com was the place to find content. Getting your content on the front page of Digg was the goal for everyone, but the underlying problem was still there. Digg was just a link aggregator. The content still lived elsewhere.

Why wasn't there a place I could just contribute my thoughts to? Why did I have to create something just to post content every other month? I just wanted to enjoy blogging, not run a website.

I sat on that thought for years - 4 to be exact. It never left me. What pushed me over the edge was the launch of Stackoverflow.

The solution

In my opinion, Stackoverflow mastered gamification. They were able to convince hundreds of thousands of developers to not only create content for them but moderate it. All in the goal of reputation and badges. Couldn't the same thing be done for general content?

Enter my idea - Qwiple: Social Journalism

Qwiple was launched as a place that combined the best of Digg and Stackoverflow. If you had something to say then you could just create an account, post it, and move on with your life.

Popular content was featured on the homepage, Every week there would be new featured authors. The end goal was to even do revenue sharing. "Partners" would receive a share of the ad revenue generated from a blog post.

Essentially it was a blog that anyone could contribute to. (Keep this in mind)

The build

I spent every spare moment working on this. I would wake up at 4:30 AM and go to sleep at midnight. Every day.

Content, comments, reputation, awards, moderating, scale, performance - I was building an entire platform. Not just a blog. I had recently been part of two startups that had to rebuild entire systems because the original was not done "right". I was going to be different. Mine would scale from the start.

After an entire year of work, I was finally ready to launch. (Did I mention I was a solo-founder yet?) I think it was the end of 2012.

The entire time I was working on Qwiple I only focused on development. To be fair, this is all I knew. Business? Marketing? Community? I'll figure it out later.

Do you know what launched when I was busy making sure Qwiple could scale to hundreds of thousands of users? Neither did I at the time.

Launch day

I still remember how excited I was when I pushed that button to go live. Please don't misunderstand me. I wasn't delusional. I knew I was going to have a chicken and egg problem, but that was going to be easy after building the site.

I sent the link to my friends&family explaining what it was and asking everyone to just create at least 1 blog post over the next 30 days. I was able to get some seed content, but it wasn't enough. I struggled for months getting people to use it.

Who wants to read a blog with low-quality, sparse content?
Who wants to contribute to something that isn't getting read?

During this time something was gaining traction

Growing the business

I went to Fiverr. I was paying content authors to create stuff for me. I would think of a few topics and for $5 someone would write a 300-word article. Barely more than a tweet these days!

I started blogging more myself too. Under different accounts. I was doing whatever it took to make it look like there was something happening. Surely, if people think there are users then they will start using it too. Right? I was hopeful.

It wasn't working. Nothing was working. The only person who regularly posted content was my sister. No one cared about what I built. What I spent thousands of hours building. My passion

The end of it

One day I ran across something and it felt like part of me died. Medium.com - a place anyone could post content to.

What! Where did this come from? I had searched and searched. Asked friends, looked all around google, saw where popular content was coming from. This place didn't exist when I started. How? Why?

You see, while I was busy building the perfect platform they were building a community. That is where I went wrong.

I struggled for almost 2 more years trying to compete. In the end, it was pointless. Here I am, a solo founder, bootstrapping a social network, competing against a big team with VC money.

I shut it down and no one even noticed.

What I did wrong

There are too many things to list here, but there are a few important ones that stand out to me.

I didn't launch fast enough

I'm not saying that if I would have launched first that I would have won. I'm saying I spent too much time building things that didn't matter.

Did the site have to scale to support hundreds of thousands of users on day one? - No
Did I have to build every feature I wanted? - No
Did I even have to start with a custom backend? - No

I should have shipped smaller and more frequently

I built it in secret

Not once did I talk about what I was doing. My idea was golden. It was going to take off, and I was just one person with a mountain to move. I had to keep it a secret until I was ready to launch. That way no one would be able to steal my idea.

I should have talked about what I was doing and tried to build hype

I started too big

I wish I could make you understand just how much code I wrote for this thing. I believe it was objectively awesome. One of my more favorite features was a browser extension that, when clicked, would let you "respond" to anything you found online.

Did you read an article about homelessness in Seattle and want to write an op-ed on it? Click the extension, you would be taken to Qwiple and the page would be referenced complete with a screenshot and context.

I even made it so a company could advertise their logo on a tag.

Were these cool? Yup. Where they needed? Not at all.

I should have built only the bare minimum

What could I have done instead?

Remember I said It was a blog anyone could contribute to? That is what I should have built.

I didn't have to create my own platform.

I should have used off-the-shelf software and started my own blog. As an audience grew I could have invited others to post on it, and have the site evolve from there.

I should have tried to build something organically.

In the end, it worked out. I had fun and learned a lot of technology. As a bonus, every time I think about it I am reminded of what doesn't work and can adjust for next time.