How many times have we heard the story of a Stanford undergrad who built a website/app that reached a million users, got funded by guys like Sequoia Capital, and sold to Yahoo! for millions of dollars before they turned 30?
These are the great Blockbuster stories swarming the web, but what about the unsuccessful ones? We don’t get to read a lot about them, right?
We know as a fact that many of these well-renowned entrepreneurs failed at some time in their lives, but we don’t know the story behind those failures. So let me tell you our story.
Me and my other two co-founders at Toplist are true believers that if we hadn’t failed with our first project, we would have never developed a product like the one we are launching early next year (which we are really proud of).
In early 2012, we came up with the big idea: “Let’s build a website where users will shuffle around cool products curated by their own interests.” We wanted to turn this simple concept into a big project driven by the fact that there was already a successful gadget called StumbleUpon for web discovery. So, we thought we could build a “Stumble and Buy” for product discovery.
With this thought in mind, we decided to put all our efforts into this project and launch it as soon as possible. It wasn’t easy. At the time, we were still finishing college, and the three of us had our own jobs. We knew that building this would be hard, but we were up to it.
We defined the functionalities of the website, how would it work, and what kind of experience we wanted to share with users. We spent almost six months working late hours and building the project that would rocket launch us to the big headlines. When we finished, we took a look at our work and decided that we had effectively built a beautiful “Stumble and Buy.” The product was great. Users could interact with products in many ways, and the options were endless. We built an amazing database that made the content really entertaining, and everything we had done by that time had a lot of sense. In fact, it was so great and the options were so limitless that no one understood what it was for.
After launching the site, we noticed people weren’t using all of the great features we had built for them. They weren’t fully engaging with the amazing products we had curated for them, but worst of all, they were not coming back to use our great service.
At the time, we didn’t understand what was wrong. We had done an amazing job, and everything worked as it was supposed to. But then, we started reading more. We weren’t much involved in the tech startup scene, and it was kind of an unknown world to us. We were corporate guys working in banks and big international companies. We didn’t know what it meant to be an entrepreneur, but we sure did learn a lot.
We learned that trying to build a product with a lot of functionalities is a big mistake. When you are building a first-time product, you have to put your effort into only one thought: What is the simplest way I can represent my concept?
It’s all about thinking big but starting small. Instead of focusing on the product itself, we should have put more energy into the general concept and finding the best way to represent it. One thing is certain, though. It wasn’t a cheap mistake, but it was definitely a valuable investment.
The real meaning of all this is that screwing up really opens your eyes and let’s you focus on important things. In our case, we now know that the best way to build a startup is to represent your concept with the simplest and cheapest MVP you can achieve. And then you can go about tweaking the product based on that work.
Building our MVP led us to funding and gave us a shot at the major leagues. It was difficult to pivot the idea because we were so in love with our first concept, but we did come up with a much better one.
The cool thing about our journey is that we haven’t been successful yet. So if the time does come, we’ll look back, and all of this will make perfect sense. We are sure that we are the tip of the sword, and we remind ourselves of that every day. And you know what, it’s just a matter of knowing how much can you take, how many times you will get up, and how insistent will you be.