My Startup Failed. Fuck.

Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close).<p>I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in your startup) to only find glory and success down the line.<p>Either way you failed but you should be commended for it.

If there's a common thread between endless startup failure stories, then it is "we talked to a bunch of people who <i>said</i> they'd spend money on this" and when push came to shove said people didn't actually spend money.<p>We're not failing, but even from a (modestly) successful startup perspective, the vast gulf between "people who like to talk to you as if they will spend real money" and "people who will actually spend money" is painfully apparent.

I'm sure it's painful, but thanks for sharing. I agree with cup, that reading about failures can be more valuable than reading about successes.<p>If anything, your story adds more fuel to the fire for the approach that @sgblank advocates[1][2]. Get out of the building, talk to customers, validate customer needs, etc. We've been doing this, but - to be honest - we haven't done as good a job as we could. Hopefully we will soon start another big round of Customer Development interviews, much more targeted this time, building on the feedback we got the first go-round, and moving more into what Steve calls the "Problem Presentation" phase.<p>It's a tough slog, but I continue to remain convinced of just how important it is.<p>[1]: <a href="http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifesto/" rel="nofollow">http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifest...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/" rel="nofollow">http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/</a>

<i>So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated!</i><p>Why was that sufficient data to justify spending months and months of your life bringing this startup to fruition?<p>EDIT: I did not intend to make a sly insult toward the author. I've seen people do startups with similar justifications and I am confused.

"Dynamic pricing" -- does anyone really like that? I've seen reports of online booksellers (no, not Amazon) giving people different prices based on the account they use. No one really likes to feel like a sucker.<p>EDIT to add: Some people might bring up airline tickets or hotel rooms. Limited analog inventory, not infinite digital inventory.

<i>More importantly though, people really didn’t really LIKE anything about our product. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. In fact, some people that participated in the sale didn’t even like our “dynamic pricing” system. They were trying to support the artist, so saving a few dollars didn’t excite them. They could easily have just gotten his music for free elsewhere.</i><p>i am one of those people. why do so many bands have such a minimal online presence that i cannot even buy a t-shirt? surely these days it should be trivial for any band to create a store with some basic items generated from a few uploaded images. there are people out here looking for something cool to buy to give back money for what we just heard... even stickers are nice.

Man, I feel your pain. I have developed the most awesome products the world has never seen 4 times now. We had a "build it and they will come" attitude too :(<p>We decided to ask ourselves one question: How to we validate an idea before wasting months on an idea that only we seem to think is cool?<p>So we are creating WillThisFly? to ask that very question... it's a site that allows you to try out your ideas and projects, get feedback and refine them before committing resources to it.<p>Shameless plug: <a href="http://willthisfly.net" rel="nofollow">http://willthisfly.net</a> (Just launched last night)<p>Only thing on there at the moment is WTF? itself.<p>All I can say is, it has happened to probably everyone at one stage in their startup career... don't give up, refine your ideas, create MVP's and keep trying...

A lot of comments have thrown flak, justifiably, at your landing page video; it is terrible. But the reason is not simply aesthetic, it's because you chose to present an image of musicians that relies on tropes which could only possibly be relevant to non-musicians, and even they would probably think it was not funny. Nobody who is seriously pursuing art thinks of themselves or their work in the way you portrayed them.<p>Your problem wasn't amazon payments, or flakey artists jumping ship. It was that your audience wasn't even on your radar.

Your startup may have failed for other reasons. Just saw the promo video on your website, am not impressed. It actually looked like a parody video. And the reference to drugs (are you saying that all musicians take drugs?). NOT impressed. Product with maybe a good idea but seriously poor execution/marketing. Be more serious when doing a startup (unless your intention is to be less serious, ala 9gag) or risk being a terrible parody joke.

Even the people at the very top of the value chain in the music industry --- the vanishingly small set of people who produce commercially viable music --- can't make the business work. So I'm curious as to why you'd have tried to start a company in music. Did you start before Dalton Caldwell's talk?<p>I'm just interested in how people pick the ideas they pursue.

"Zillionears | Sell your $h!t with Social Sales!" - Sorry but as soon as I seen your landing page title, I was put off.

I see this happen more and more that we talk to our potential customers about the idea we've been brewing and they say 'heck yeah I would totally use it', later only to find no interest in it. One thing I learned is, most of our ideas are pretty cool and most likely all the potential customers would agree when you try to validate but very few would actually hop on to try it. May be the implementation wasn't right, or may be its too hard to change the customer behavior to switch. Sometimes the customer was not serious enough when you pitched.

Ouch. One thing that leaped out at me was your mention that the first beta was a disaster because it didn't comply with Amazon's payment-processor requirements, so you burned a lot of capital making good on your promises. This sort of thing is why I keep saying more startups need a legal person on board early on - and with a surplus of underemployed JDs around, now is a great time to work that into your team plan.<p>Lawyers are not just there to object to things and make life difficult for dreamers, they're there to spot major potential pitfalls like this and steer around them. Far too many entrepreneurially-minded people see contractual and statutory constraints as some sort of obstacle course designed solely to prevent competition or enterprise, and react to said constraints by simply wishing them away. I was impressed that your reaction to this problem was to pay everyone as promised and retool your application to be compliant with Amazon's requirements, rather than simply blaming them for your problems. A hard lesson to learn, but one which will put you ahead of the pack in future.

Maybe it is a marketing problem. The domain name is nice, but what does it tell about you, about your product, about people sharing the url ? For you it was probably a matter of being zillionears but for music lovers ? The dynamic pricing thing looks also fishy in the sense that no one except you are in control of pricing, or its algorithm. This gives the feeling to be exposed to be screwed, the artists and the potential buyers.<p>My feeling is that you conceived the startup guided mainly by your desires than the one of the artists, visitors and clients. Unfortunately your desires where not attractive for them.<p>Mistake n° 1 is the domain name which is the first message you give about your business and service.

Thank you for sharing your experience but to me, the whole post is about how you didn't <i>really</i> listen at all and built something that people didn't want, which ended up failing, yet you still learned <i>a ton</i>. I bet you learned something but did this experience really teach you a LOT? You don't mention any <i>other</i> learning experience in this post (you say you'll write more later) but somehow in the end, this failure was super insightful. I just don't see how... Sorry if that sounds negative. I wish all entrepreneurs success but the end of this article just fell flat for me.

Out of curiosity, what did you do wrong originally that was against Amazon's terms?

I wish you had read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It stresses the fact of build a Mean Viable Product very early on and testing hypothesis like "will artists pay for this service" in a real life scenario with an ok product. Aardvark did this in a really cool way (check Aardvark out).<p>Also, there is a notion amongst us entrepreneurs to persevere amongst all odds. This might be dangerous at times. There might be a massive market for your product yet you have approached it in the wrong way. The thing is, if you have no data, it is very difficult to know what REALLY went wrong. For example: Drew Houston from Dropbox early on stated that selling Dropbox through adwords was costing them something like 300 dollars per acquisition, once they introduced their double-sided referral scheme Dropbox started selling like mad. It was what Eric Ries calls a Pivot.

Reminds me of Pud's Fandalism which he created pretty quickly and ramped up traffic also quickly: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081</a><p>When it comes to commerce, I'm liking the model of first building an audience and then adding commerce.

Good post and you had me all the way up until you said "journey". I hate that word. Pre-internet Journey meant something now every man and his cat uses it to talk about the incites they had while doing something, it has lost its impact. However like I said I enjoyed the post until then.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out. I might just share two thoughts that occurred to me:<p>1. The site's tagline is "Sell your $h!t with Social Sales!" which I would think is kind of off-putting in the context of a vendor relationship<p>2. Your sales model appears to be in contrast to how supply and demand work. Your model is that as more buyers sign up, the per-unit price goes down. I understand your theory is this causes people to share it with their friends. But, people who are buying indie music not only don't want to screw the artist -- they're also not going to bother talking their friends into something just to save a nickel.<p>3. I think this would have made more sense for the artist if the price went <i>up</i> (slightly, like from $4 to $5) as sales went up, with the early people locking in their price.

I've been there done that, so I get the frustration you went through. Lesson # 1 What people say is cool doesn't mean that it's something that they'd use. Just because you say you're building the next Facebook will get you some "that's cool" responses but doesn't mean they'd actually use it.<p>One of the most useful things I do to validate an idea is to actually use YC's application- if you can't answer all the questions about your idea without any doubts, you're don't have a solid idea yet. And validating your idea means to follow up at the very least with the people that said it was "cool". Forget the stealth startups, be completely transparent in what you're building and have beta users follow you from day 1.<p>Good luck with your next thing!

Now that you have learned how <i>not</i> to build product, I suggest you take a one month break, and go build something else.Don't build the product without knowing what the market wants. In your case, people wanted an easy way to support their artists.Don't market a product in such way. In your case, learn the basics of online marketing, and pay someone to build a good landing page for the product.Don't take it so personally. Shit happens. It failed. Who cares? The more value you put on failure, the less value you put on iterating. That's where success comes from.I do have to say that your landing page is pretty crummy. That contributed in a huge way towards the failure.

Keep Moving Forward. Pick up the pieces, mend the broken bones, take a vacation, regroup, do something else that you love and are passionate about. Failure is part of life. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right? Just keep at it.

I love the honesty and the spot on diagnosis.<p>For a site that resonates with artists, check out Reverb Nation:<p><a href="http://www.reverbnation.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reverbnation.com/</a><p>A sample artist page here:<p><a href="http://www.reverbnation.com/evangibb" rel="nofollow">http://www.reverbnation.com/evangibb</a><p>Instead of buying their music, the site is focused on you listening to it via the embedded player and then going to see them live. You can even buy them a gift card so that they can buy advertising. They're growing like crazy with a marketing budget close to zero.<p>Thanks for sharing your hard learned lesson. It reminds us all to get out of the building and talk to users.

I would be interested in:<p><i>Once he found out about the dynamic pricing he tells us “I think I am just going to release with another platform.” FUCK! Are you serious????</i><p>What other platform(s)? What were differentiating factors between those, and your service? Do artists suffer any particular trending pain-points in alternate services?<p>1,700 or so artists could probably provide great feedback into what they actually want in a platform, vs building it in a vacuum.<p>Thank you for sharing!

Music is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest industries to be successful in. Props to them for continuing to press on, hoping for a break and smart enough to throw in the towel and move on.<p>Also, happy to hear you didn't mortgage your life savings and burn out in grand fashion. You're wise beyond your years.

I'm sorry but let me offer a different perspective.<p>Your startup failure was good. It hit quick. You learned. You moved on.<p>If I had more time I'd tell you about all those failed startups that suffer a really slow death. Like the YC startups. Pretty much all of them are failed. They haven't seen the light yet. You have. Be grateful.

You done good. It's not supposed to be easy. You get an A for effort, and next time when you place your 120% into something you'll thank your younger self for getting the early learning phase out of the way when you were young and had unlimited energy.<p>Do take a break. A year sounds about right.

So did mine, largely because I was not able to commit to it for a variety of reasons that wouldn't be unfamiliar. I like reading the success stories, but I get pretty down thinking about my experience -- not the doing, but the way it ended up going down.

"we felt like we had already gone too far to quit" -- the bane of many a startup that should just pack it up / pivot / rethink things the moment this thought crosses their minds. If you're already thinking you've gone too far, you've gone too far.

Best advise I can give here is to do what Steve Blank, Martel, and many other advisers/founders/etc say - If you can get a check for the product. Then you've sold it. Then there is demand. Until that money is in your hand, you just have an idea.

It was a very successful failure. You are much more likely to succeed given what you learned from it. I'd say that it is a blessing in disguise and very much appreciate that you shared the experience with us.

You have a tangible yet unmarketable product. Rather than abandon it completely, would you consider open-sourcing it? Any contribution to the open source community is a positive use of time (in my opinion).

You actually have spoken to 1700+ artists? See if you could learn a few things about the market, and do a "pivot" as so many start ups have done. AirBNB started out selling air mattress...

Welcome... do it again.

Great story &#38; thanks for sharing this. I was curious about why you chose to go with Amazon Payments... why not PayPal, or your own merchant account?

Someone should make a new Amiestreet. The business model worked (dynamic pricing) and the company was acquired, then it went away...

Fast iteration is cool assuming you have customer validation plans. In this case, it didn't sound like one existed.

Really seems like this was a great idea but somewhat poorly executed with the presentation on the site.

&#62;Hit me up on twitter! I just got on there.<p>This is not something I would be telling tech-savvy people.

Knowing when to quit is like trading with bitcoins, you never know when to sell.

Hate the F word in the title, that word is for your mouth, not for writing on the public network so all can see(including my kids), unless, you have a 18-year-old warning on your homepage.

"Fall down seven times, get up eight times..."

seems like it shoulda really taken off for independent artists.

gg go next

Definitely a great learning experience. I myself had my own business. Made enough to live comfortably, but in the end, the IRS made me pay back every red cent in back taxes, and then some when it came to a screeching halt.

Read the whole thing… still no idea what "dynamic pricing" is.

Can you go indept about what you did wrong that allowed payment processors to freeze your accounts? What about your software didn't comply with their terms that it had to be rewritten?