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My startup story

43 点作者 dirtyaura超过 12 年前

11 条评论

il超过 12 年前
The lesson here is that the worst time to raise money is when you need it. Your answer to "What will happen if this round doesn't close?" should be "we'll keep growing at 20% a month instead of 50% a month if we got funding" rather than "we need this round to come through to keep the company alive".
mrkurt超过 12 年前
&#62; Then in the fall of 2011 we failed to close a major financing round from the US. We basically had a deal with a top-tier San Francisco based VC. Our guys flew over to meet them at least two times. We (as a company) spent a lot of time on that financing round. We thought we would be able to close the deal, but something totally different happened. They stopped all communication with us. Suddenly. No explanations. No apologies. Nothing. We were in trouble.<p>Stuff like this is why I'm thankful for YC. Understanding the mechanics of raising a round has been <i>incredibly</i> helpful when evaluating what's actually going on. 2009 me would have thought two meetings with a VC was basically "a deal", 2012 me is much more capable of realistically evaluating progress towards a term sheet.
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jyu超过 12 年前
First thing, awesome job going out and launching, and trying things. It's not easy, so congrats on getting the experience under your belt :)<p>So a few other things. You keep on stating the reason for the service closing down was lack of funding / designer / focus / marketing money / etc. The real reason your service went down was lack of product / market fit.<p>Your products and pivots got stuck in a zombieland. You didn't hit some crazy traction that shows that you're onto something big. But you also didn't fail so hard that it is obvious that you need to kill it immediately.<p>You also got some misleading signals from business partners/advisors, and some early interest from investors. Funding events, getting partnerships with the NBA and soccer teams, advisors are all multipliers that help you if you have solid user engagement. So when you have a viral coefficient greater than 1.0, you'll actually get huge bumps by having all these user acquisition channels available to you when you have partners like the NBA etc. Inherently your product is social, and I'm surprised to hear that lack of marketing money is a reason you list for shutting down.<p>Measuring product / market fit used to seem arbitrary to me. One of the most helpful things I've heard is the "very disappointed" framework that Sean Ellis uses. The idea is that if 20% of some user group would be very disappointed if they couldn't use your service any more, then you've nailed it. You're onto the next phase of scaling out and reaching out to more people like that core user group. If you're not at 20%, then keep tweaking different pitches and user groups and refining your product until you do.
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billirvine超过 12 年前
I ban the word "pivot" from my startup. Seriously. It costs $10 to say that word.<p>Next, you and many others interpret "Lean Startup" wrong. It's not a race to launch <i>something</i>, it's a race to a GREAT PRODUCT. And "lean" certainly has nothing to do with how much money you don't have.<p>As has been mentioned here, your product failed, and your management failed the product. It had nothing to do with finding money. Sorry to be harsh (seriously), but these are important distinctions.
evolve2k超过 12 年前
Is it common in the valley for VC discussions to just go stone cold of they for some reason they decide they no longer are interested? What sort of courtesy do most large VC's have at the we're no longer into you point?
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kateho超过 12 年前
It's a real shame to hear this story. I met Toni back in 2010 at a mobile event called MEX and thought the concept was super exciting. It's a shame this happened... I hope the team go on to do bigger and better things.
stevewilhelm超过 12 年前
"The idea was to connect all sports fans by creating a group video chat service where the fans could be together while watching football at home."<p>I am curious: how many of the team were football fans, and did they actually use the service on a regular basis?
lnanek2超过 12 年前
Interesting, just saw another startup with the app version of this, AppTheGame, demo'ed recently. Will be interesting to see if SV &#38; mobile first can do a better job than Europe &#38; web first.
alexro超过 12 年前
It always saddens me to think that our world isn't capable of keeping up many great but small products.
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djt超过 12 年前
Why did Tuomas leave? That seems like a pretty big problem just 12 months in.
goggles99超过 12 年前
You could not live up to your "hottest startup" (often a curse) hype. You were over-rated... end of story.