Oh yes, we have failed! (and learned)
Today we Finns are celebrating failure, so what would be better way of starting our new blog than admitting all the failures we have done during our 2 years of startup life. For the ones that haven't been following us before, we are a Finnish, 2 year old startup based in Oulu. We are the team behind Savalanche, which is a webstore solution for bringing online stores into social medias (and soon into large online medias also). Check out www.savalanche.com for more information. But before starting the public humiliation, I have to say we did succeed to do something right:
We brought Social Commerce to Finland. In our knowledge we were the first company in whole Europe to establish a Facebook integrated webstore, already in 08/2010. Now there are around 100 Facebook existing stores in Finland, probably more than in any other European countries when compared to number of companies. We also were the first to establish a fully working store inside a banner and image (together with great people @ Thinglink). And there are a lot of new innovations coming, just wait :)
We succeeded to raise money two times, both from private and public sector. We can actually pay some decent salaries to ourselves and our families don't have to beg for food :). Being paid in something this great and interesting is like winning in lottery!
We made ourselves known in Finland. Now we get to talk to about any large company executive we want and they at least listen to us. Quite far from days when we got started, when "peep peep peep" was heard quite many times from the phone...
We have gotten huge amount of nice feedback and acknowledgements from our customers, partners, startup communities, friends and strangers. This is a good change to thank everybody involved!
Our number one failure is that we thought Facebook is a perfect environment for ecommerce. Just build a shop and you have 800Million customers waiting to visit your store? Well, that could not be farther from truth. The truth is that Facebook is not (yet) a replacement for your own online store. It isn't even a second channel. We struggled to make our customers successful at Facebook, but we failed. Why? 1) Facebook is really bad at discovery. The search is awful. Advertises work, but cost too much for small companies. Having a page with 10-100 fans where most are your own friends does not make a place for huge business. And we weren't the only ones that noticed this, just look at figures our biggest 'competitor' in US, Payvment, has: over 60 000 stores, around 500 000 monthly visitors -> how many visitors per store? They haven't published any figures, but my guess is that not many are doing good business there (would be glad to be proved wrong). What we learned and what actually works? Well, that's a topic for another post. I think we have found what really works in Facebook and for who, and that will be visible in our offering soon (The Reckless Love Store we did for Universal Music is just the beginning).
We failed to deliver the message to the public. As said in the successes, we are quite known in certain business areas, where we have a lot of connections. But for the public we are totally unknown. Our second major part of the offering was to make anybody a reseller for our merchants. But thats quite difficult when nobody knows us and the ones that hear, don't necessarily understand the message. We were too complicated in our words. But, to be honest, this was not the only reason why this business didn't work as expected. E-commerce is about trust and even small companies have problems with it. Not to mention individual persons selling stuff in their own Facebook page or blog. We are still hoping this will become reality in some years, but for now we at Savalanche are concentrating at bigger, more trustfull players in the field: media houses and content producers. This will be the main offering of us, we have some huge news and launches coming in few months that we are very excited!
We have also failed in keeping the communications and visuals up to date and always professional. Our documentation and presentations are always behind the implementation and our own state of minds. We are not yet new Apple, but rather very 'engineerish' people doing things fast and agile. We should concentrate more of the polished texts and visuals that our competitors have. We know we are the best in the field (in the humble Finnish way, you know!? :), but our web pages tell different story. But we are learning all the time and now we have the greatest front end developer Aki, who does remarkable job in the area, where we always chose the easy path!
We have failed to concentrate. We were doing too much on too broad area and for five person company it's not that wise to do. We wanted to sell Savalanche to everybody, talk with all possible partners and serve every customer as good as possible. In the future we unfortunately have to do picking. I don't like it at all, it's hard to say "no thanks" or "later". Part of this is forgetting some parts of our products for now and concentrate on ones that bring us further. Those will be the Shopping Malls done together with Media companies and our newly branded "Fan- and Campaign Stores" aimed for bigger brands. Fortunately in the future we will have great partners and customers that will serve you all together with us. None of our current customer will be forgotten, but rather given more possibilities to make real business with our platform!
We have always spoken about starting our own blog, but always we have failed to get it started. This must be 10th post I have written, others were left unfinished and forgotten. Hope this will not be the only post in this blog :)
Well, that was the beginning of this blog. It is good to start from failures, as this time forward everything we post is better news! As I hinted, there are some big changes and news coming soon and you will always hear them first in this blog. If you're also interested in social commerce area, subscribe to us and hear all the latest news fresh.
I wish you all the best failures today,
PS. And last failure: I personally always fail to write professionally without making dozens of misspellings and other errors. Hope you didn't have too much failures reading my post. Fortunately I'm better at thinking, innovating, concepting, hacking and writing good old source code, that my good friends mr. compiler, interpretor and debugger can read without problems :).
