Product Hunt is a celebration of products but the reality is, most will fail. Lately there appears to be several public postmortems of founders sharing their failures.
I have tremendous respect for those that vulnerably share their mistakes and lessons learned. Although people, technologies, and markets change, we can learn from these stories.
Here is a collection of fantastic postmortems I've saved over the past several months:
Everpix - Out of the picture: why the world's best photo startup is going out of business
Flud - Why Startups Fail: A Postmortem For Flud, The Social Newsreader
Sonar - Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup
Plancast - The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast
Flowtab - The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story
Formspring - Formspring - A Postmortem
Wesabe - Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
Gowalla - Play by your own rules
EventVue - EventVue post-mortem
PlayCafe - 10 lessons from a failed startup
Untitled Partners - Lessons from a startup failure
Teamometer - Startup lessons learned from my failed startup
Outbox - Outbox is Shutting Down—A Note of Gratitude
This is a pretty cool site. Plancast lists lots of events – with a heavy emphasis on tech events – and people can add themselves to the attending list. Which helps with us spreading the word too. Really looks very well put together and simple to use. I’m a big fan of clean, simple UIs, and they did a great job.
So check out Plancast, and if you’re attending Pitch '13, count yourself in at http://plancast.com/p/id6t
"What's wrong with texting? It's not inconvenient..."
It's like asking Instagram 2 years ago: How is this different from Hipstamatic? Didn't Flickr do this? Can't I already upload pictures on Facebook? What's wrong with using Photoshop? It's not inconvenient...
Here's our attempt to tackle all of these questions at once:
We're not a check-in service.
Forecast (R.I.P.) offered a future check-in. For almost the entire life of their company they didn't offer any options to include your friends or make plans (no invites, FYIs, or specific details).
BONUS ISSUE: Forecast only let you share with your Foursquare friends, which is not a large enough pool to represent your actual social crowd.
So it was a limited tool with a limited crowd. (Read: destined to struggle).
GonnaBe...
1. uses Facebook Connect – which comprises nearly 100% of most users' actual social groups. Eventually we may allow other means to log in to GonnaBe, but for now we'd rather keep our users safe from fake accounts, stalkers, etc.
2. allows users to enter the details of their plan (time, location, place) and share out to anyone they'd like (GonnaBe followers, Facebook, or Twitter). It's as open or as closed as you want it to be. (And FB/Twitter friends who see your plan can opt in, without owning the app or even having a smartphone).
We're not a game.
Foursquare began as a game layer to make your social life more fun & interesting. Badges, mayorships, points, etc. – it was all about bragging rights and a little friendly competition. Eventually they wound up getting business involved (kind of) and now offer user review data to challenge Yelps of the world.
BONUS ISSUE: Foursquare is for the present, which is not very useful in planning. It's a location information utility at best. At worst, it's an aggravating way to see where your friends are NOW, that would've been helpful for you to know AHEAD OF TIME.
GonnaBe...
1. is based on the future/intent space, where users can actually get value from the data to make decisions on their activities to come.
2. is meant to give you control over your social life – not make it more fun. It's a data-sharing utility that is much more similar to Twitter than Foursquare or other social apps.
We're not an "event app."
We're a platform for your social life data. Plancast emerged almost 4 years ago based off of a brilliant insight that people wanted to plan via social networking. However their service quickly became an convention, meetup, event-based app where people would post plans 2 or 3 weeks out. Mark Hendrickson's postmortem explains all of the difficulties they had with this angle of service – and rightly so. No one wants to commit to a plan weeks out. Period.
BONUS ISSUE: They never had a good mobile solution (at their time of death/rebirth, I believe their app hadn't been updated in 1.5 years) nor did they have seamless integration across social channels to make it easy to share, spread, invite, opt in, etc.
GonnaBe...
1. deals with short-term plans and scan-ability
2. is about being in-the-know (so you can choose what you want to do, be spontaneous, etc.) and empowerment (so you can share your plan far more easily than via text, email, or FB event).
Facebook Events suck.
But we're thankful that they exist. Facebook has shown us the way – as it has for many other major platforms today.
Once upon a time, somebody said, "hey, know that Facebook status update feature? Let's do it better, and make a platform for it." Twitter.
Once upon a time, somebody said, "hey, know that Facebook feature where you can share pictures from your phone? Let's do it better, and make a platform out of it." Instagram.
Once upon a time somebody said, "hey, know that Facebook feature where you can share links you like and "like" things? Let's do it better, and make a platform out of it." Pinterest.
Once upon a time somebody said, "hey, know that Facebook feature where you can 'Ask a question' to your friends? Let's do it better, and make a platform out of it." Quora.
Once upon a time we said, "hey, know that Facebook feature where you can make an event and share it out to your friends? Let's do it better, and make a platform out of it." GonnaBe.
Why isn't Facebook doing this? Because they're not supposed to. They're the juggernaut and we're the nimble innovators. Yes,they should be in this space – and they will be when the market is proven. We'll let you know how that goes.
The top-level goal for most people is to convince others they are the individuals they want to be, whether that includes being happy, attractive, smart, fun or anything else.
Mark Hendrickson on social networks | The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast
“Most social networks feed primarily on vanity, in that they allow people to share and tailor online content that makes them look good. They can help people communicate to others that they’ve attended impressive schools, built amazing careers, attended cool parties, dated attractive people, thought deep thoughts, or reared cute kids. The top-level goal for most people is to convince others they are the individuals they want to be, whether that includes being happy, attractive, smart, fun or anything else.”
[Mark] Hendrickson nails it. Social networks cater to our emotional desire need for validation. It’s why, as my follows argue, that we strive to get As on our report cards, go to church or value trophies so highly.
I argue that modern society’s emphasis on validation has skyrocketed though, thanks to the rise of social media. We have entered the Age of the Validation Society.
Likes, Retweets, Comments & the Rise of the Validation Society
From Techcrunch: The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast
An interesting, fairly objective post-mortem from the creator of PlanCast on why his social network failed to reach critical mass. Like a lot of folks, I wanted to like PlanCast, but I just didn't have enough plans that were worth sharing with the world.
Robert Scoble über Plancasts vergebene Chancen: "6. You never really got to the business model. That should have set off red flags for me. Yet no one else knew about my travels. I'm in Europe right now, which meant I spent more than $4,000 on travel and you couldn't monetize that at all? Nope. Why? Because you never made deals with AirBNB or Kayak or Hipmunk or other travel sites."
