When I coach startup founders, I walk them through a very simple 4 step process when we meet:<p>1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that altered your priors?<p>2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you should be solving?<p>3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem?<p>4. How do we overcome those blocks?<p>Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you <i>done</i>, it's what have you <i>learnt</i>. I do not give a shit about anything you've done if it's not in the service of learning.<p>I also run a retro every 3 months with founders where we ask the following questions:<p>1. What would you want to tell yourself 3/6/12 months ago (essentially, all the lessons learnt in italics) to save the maximum amount of pain?<p>2. When did you learn each specific thing?<p>3. When was the earliest you could have learnt that thing?<p>4. What changes can we make going forward to minimize that delta?<p>Extremely simple things but extraordinarily powerful when applied consistently over a long enough span of time.
This is interesting and they make some good observations but I can't help but think the deck was stacked against them because they are trying to come up with a technical/business solution to what is fundamentally a political problem.
Thanks for writing this!<p>> Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult.<p>Isn't the real problem that supply is artificially constrained because house prices and the economy are interlinked in a way in a special way in the UK economy, such that the majority of home owners don't want it changed (because more supply == downward pricing pressure)<p>I think the only entity that could meaningfully change this situation is government, and well it's easier to not upset your donors.<p>Edit:
To be fair to the author, they do mention artificial supply constraints but I think my point stands - it is there by design, too much inertia forcing it to be that way that won't be changed by streamlining the bureaucratic elements
If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) single-family home.
> Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult.<p>It's true that planning departments are very expensive, don't do much positively, and still seem to allow awful-looking things to be built, and I'd probably happily do away with them, but the fundamental driver is the incredible onboarding of people from overseas for years that crushes the combination of the existing population and the new people into a number of dwellings that isn't that dissimilar to the previous year.<p>You can't take on a net number of people each year that would require a new city the size of Nottingham to be built to accommodate, and say "well, it's all the planning process' fault."
I looked for a source for this statement in the article:<p>> Granting permission takes the median hectare of land from £20,000 to £2.4 million - a 139x uplift.<p>I couldn't find one. However, I did run into some interesting viewpoints by a certain Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics... "one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists"<p>He has this to say about "Green Belts":<p>> Britain imposed its first Green Belt in 1955 and now, if re-zoned for building, farmland at the built edge of London has an 800-fold mark-up. There was no secular trend in housing land prices in Britain until the mid-1950s, but after Green Belts were imposed real prices increased some 15-fold. More than houses because you can substitute land out of house production. There is a similar pattern in Canada, New Zealand or the West and East coasts of the United States where policies restrict land supply.<p><a href="https://www.newgeography.com/content/006358-lse-economist-paul-cheshire-urban-containment-and-housing-affordability" rel="nofollow">https://www.newgeography.com/content/006358-lse-economist-pa...</a>
I wrote something similar to this last year - it was an incredibly cathartic writing experience. It's extremely weird to realise that you're hung up on a business venture from years before, but made a lot of sense.<p>FWIW I am never doing a 3-way marketplace again, hellish.<p>If anyone is interested - <a href="https://edjs.dev/blog/my-first-startup/" rel="nofollow">https://edjs.dev/blog/my-first-startup/</a>
well written. I think your fatal mistake even though you folks are smart was not understanding the complete value chain of your business.<p>What I mean by understanding the economics of the value chain is you've to understand how your customers make money, how their customers make money & how their suppliers make money. From there - you can workout your value proposition - are you saving your customers money (means there's a cap on how much value you can extract) or are you allowing your customers to make more money (how much value you can extract is kinda uncapped - depending on mechanics)<p>The other mistake - which you correctly kinda alluded to is not understanding the incentives / dynamics of the industry. UK land is tricky since most wealth / power is packed into UK land. hence your part about emotion etc.<p>final mistake was equating success to raising money. Profit, if not revenue growth is the only measure of success. Raising money is not.
> We want to stress from the start that the ultimate failure of the company lies with us.<p>This statement discounts how much random chance contributes to success & failure. Could the world's best founding team find and build a successful business in that field? Maybe. And even if they could, is it failure to be less good than the best? Not at all.<p>> Stay lean until you have proven revenue.<p>They raised a pre-seed round and used it to search for business opportunities. This seems like the normal way of doing a startup.<p>> TIME AND MONEY SPENT ON NON-ESSENTIALS - These included an office, website and branding, a trip to America, contractors, and unnecessary employees.<p>Having an office can boost energy and productivity. Taking a trip to US to connect with new advisors, investors, and other founders seems like a pretty normal thing to do.<p>I think these founders are being too hard on themselves. They got an amazing education in entrepreneurship. They don't need to feel bad about it.
Nice writeup, wish more startups who didn't succeed did this though understand not easy thing to write so kudos.<p>One factor to success is timing, as someone who lives in UK around London and is seeing (slowly) greenbelt getting developed on perhaps the market might be moving towards you in the next 5 years.
A good question to ask before starting a startup is : "Do I see myself working 10 years on this problem?". Looks like they ran out of steam, rather than out of runway.
Very interesting read, I wish more startups did postmortems like this. It seems like the authors managed to build a set of tools that provided real value that ultimately did not make commercial sense, but would've been interesting to see if this learning:<p>> Scout was our most-used product. Its users weren’t our target market, but some were. We had vague ambitions to use it as an inbound marketing tool, but we never capitalised on it. This was a missed opportunity.<p>was applicable in a conservative industry like real estate and government as lots of open-core companies operate on this model (e.g. free open-source software and marked-up hosted solutions).
One of the key takeaways belies the entire premise: if you want to build a housing fix for the UK, build it in America?<p>After identifying a very real, pressing problem, they made a business to solve it. They were then more focused on building that business rather than fixing the actual problem. It seems like the takeaway is: don’t worry too much about the problems where you are, instead move to the US and write software.
Very thoughtful writing and great to see someone cut it early instead of continuing without a clear path.<p>> If I were to start a startup again, I’d take more time and be more intentional in talking to potential customers before needing to raise money.<p>From the outside, this pretty much hit the nail on the head.
A lot of time & effort went into that write-up.<p>I realize what I'm about to say will get backlash ... but I can't help but think is the time to write this postmortem indicative of how the business was run.<p>Meaning, who benefits from the output of this postmortem? Seems like mostly strangers (who might not even live in UK).<p>What other time/effort/resources was spent on things that weren't directly engaging with their customer ... because it seems extremely clear without knowing much about that market that this isn't a technical challenge per se - but a regulatory / social problem and the modest amount of capital they raised won't even scratch the service on solving this problem.<p>Note: not intending to be negative. It just seems like the elephant in the room is that the team was so ill-prepared and not understanding what actual problem they are solving - that my heart goes out to them.
> In May 2023, Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis.<p>I mean, they took on a heck of a problem. At least they tried, but I suspect it was an upward battle from day 0.
I think the problem with startups (from a business perspective) is that they're ego-driven and instead of looking at the business reality in an objective fashion they mostly try to "revolutionize" and "make a difference".<p>It isn't as sexy as doing the next Facebook or disrupting global healthcare but just copying an existing archaic & expensive product and doing it better can yield a great and stable business. There's a plethora of software products (offline & online) which cost way too much and work like crap - all you need to do is do it better for a more reasonable price (where those old companies have a big headcount and lots of mouths to feed producing a hard price floor for them).