Failed to delight. Post-mortem of Delight IO

https://medium.com/founder-stories/4de7ef031c3a

by thomaspun • 12 years ago

62 38 12 years ago

RyJones2• 12 years ago

I like this trend of discussing failure bluntly. So many of the startups I've ridden to the end just sort of faded away - get called into a room and laid off, founders lie to the pliant Seattle tech press about how great things are, company fades away, nothing learned.

SeoxyS2• 12 years ago

There are an alarming amount of typos and grammatical errors in this article. It detracts a lot from the content, and (sadly) hurts the credibility of the story.

A few writing tips:

1. When done writing, read the article aloud to yourself. This will help you catch a lot of errors which might easily be missed after having looked at a wall of text for an hour.

2. Always, always, have a friend proof read the article.

3. Sleep on it. When you're done writing, put it aside for a day or two, and re-read it when your mind is 100% fresh and you've forgotten the details.

alexshye2• 12 years ago

I know what you are saying, but as a new blogger, I understand how it can be difficult to get stuff out. If I had to choose, I'd rather more people write their stories, even if the writing quality isn't that good. In general, I can pick up what bloggers are trying to say, and over time, they tend to get better.

lennydizzy• 12 years ago

Can you please give some examples?

ronilan2• 12 years ago

Not in the article but still a good example:

There are an alarming amount of typos and grammatical errors ...

Errors are countable. Should be:

There is an alarming number of typos and grammatical errors ...

thomaspun6• 12 years ago

Thanks for the tips, Kenneth! Would you be interested in helping me review my future posts?

Yes I'm just starting to blog and I do want to get better by practicing. English is my second language although I've used it for all of my professional life.

loopdoend• 12 years ago

Try wordy.com. Even though I'm a native English speaker I use them to review my blog posts. Their pricing is reasonable for an on-demand editor and you can pick your editorial team.

SeoxyS2• 12 years ago

Sure thing - feel free to email me at any point and I'd be happy to help. My email is in my profile.

uladzislau• 12 years ago

I found fantastic proofreaders on Odesk, very affordable.

You can't go cheaper than Fiverr though, some gigs offering 2500 words proofreading for $5.

cordite• 12 years ago

Yeah, it seems a bit rushed. The "thou" was consistently used at least, but all these things distracted me from really reading the last third.

jonahx• 12 years ago

As a most picayune silver lining, one person, at least, enjoyed the title of your blog post, and even more so after learning your last name.

alexshye2• 12 years ago

Enjoyed the write-up Thomas -- thanks for opening up about what happened, and look forward to part 2.

I added this to a list of startup postmortems I've been keeping notes on: http://www.soulmix.com/remix/363

(I should probably disclose that I building Soulmix also :)

thomaspun6• 12 years ago

Thanks Alex. Glad you enjoyed it.

null_ptr• 12 years ago

Your product sounds very invasive. I assume production apps could still include your analytics code and screencap my screen, tap my microphone, and spy on me with my phone's cameras. Your features page claims "Record audio and video from front facing camera and play back along with the screen recording." What measures do you take to make sure users know when their actions are recorded?

tylerlh• 12 years ago

I had some experience working with this technology after it was acquired by another company. IMO, if you weren't making users aware there was no way Apple was letting you through.

thomaspun6• 12 years ago

We always have an alert box shown up when the audio and video recording is turned on.

Smirnoff• 12 years ago

> "3. Price your service to encourage engagement."

This probably should be changed to "Make the price transparent." I read their pricing based on credits and I still don't get it.

Honestly, I am still baffled by the fact that so many startups build software for developers/small businesses without selling their software first!!!

Make a prototype, go to customers, sell it, and ask for feedback right then and there. Ask for what they want, pivot (or add features) before you have written a single line of code.

thomaspun6• 12 years ago

You are right. We should have tried to sell harder before building. Lesson learned. To be fair thou, we did interview about 10 companies before even prototyping to get feedback. Two of them ended up paying after we launched.

noelwelsh• 12 years ago

"Customers pay for information, not raw data" is the key take-away for me. I think customers pay even more readily for action, particularly marketers as they are often incapable of implementing actions (i.e. programming). See companies like Intercom.io and Customer.io that are cleaning up because they let marketers actually do something with their analytics.

kjackson2012• 12 years ago

Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?

Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?

thomaspun6• 12 years ago

To be honest, I don't know if my honesty will hurt me later on. I didn't want to sugar coat the reason. Startups don't die until founders quit. You always have a way to make it work if you want.

We had founder issues early on and we parted ways after we shut down the first product. I then led the company to ship second and third products as a solo founder. I could have quitted then but stuck on for another two years. I wasn't ashamed telling people the truth because I know I have given my best.

RyJones2• 12 years ago

The lack of sugar coating is exactly what made this interesting reading.

e12e• 12 years ago

Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?

Maybe it's a January (new year and all that) thing?

pbiggar• 12 years ago

Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?

It won't hurt his chances at all. Startups fail, VCs know this.

As an example, I was in YC W10 with Thomas' batch, and failed/quit my startup over 3 years ago. I found no problem raising money again: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/circleci-raises-1-5m-from-e.... I suspect it will be easier for Thomas since he has more personal relationships with investors than I did when I started to raise 18 months ago.

tzakrajs• 12 years ago

What awful grammar and spelling. Color me unsurprised.

twfarland• 12 years ago

Agreed. Even the most world-changing idea would only be as strong as its presentation.

sgt101• 12 years ago

The thing about the company not failing, but you failing... The best bit of advice I ever got was "don't beat yourself up, there's a line of folks who will do that for you if you let them, don't do their job for them."

Remember, sometimes when an airplane crashes the wings come off before it hit's the ground. The wings failed! Of course, the fact that the bonehead flying it has put 4 the structural load on the wings that they were designed to support might* be what caused that to happen - but "stupid wings, if only we had made them out of concrete"...

Don't beat yourself up, learn, suck it up, move on.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Sounds like it was really expensive for a startup that should have been going for fit and then traction before monetization.

midas007• 12 years ago

First, folks give up way too easily. It takes time for things to hit even when everything's dialed-in.

Second, unless an app costs a ton of money to keep going, find a home for it. There's always some shop that will buy up your "failed" startup. Turning just it off is like killing a baby. So wantrepreneurs out there: try not to be so quick to strangle her in the bath water.

andrewflnr• 12 years ago

I was hoping for an article about the Delight language, http://delight.sourceforge.net/ . Python-like syntax, compiles to D.

Sujan• 12 years ago

I'm working on a mobile app right now and delight.io was one of the (many) services in my "try later, when we have a working app prototype" bookmark folder. Shame I won't be able to try it.

So maybe it's too late now, but I have some "feedback" or thoughts on the service and its offering.

- Pricing. Seemed really expensive to me at first, but thinking about it 3 hours of recording are quite much. Still, I never felt that the pricing was 'right'.

- Code vs. features vs. benefits. Oh great, I can paste some Objective-C to my app. I as a product manager don't care at all about that, developers do. I would care about what I can do with the lib, how the interface looks and how an intergration feels for the user. Can I comment the stream I get to persist my thoughts I have when watching it? How do I view them?

- Design and English. Bootstrap and unedited English are fine for a MVP or personal project. A real offering should have more. This certainly wouldn't have a been a dealbreaker for me, but still - it makes it much harder to just try a project.

- iOS only. I know you had to priotize, but for me this would have been a problem right now as we are Android first right now.

So I'm still very much interested in using a service like delight.io. A website that shows me how the recording looks for the user, what I as the customer see of the recording and how I can use it to gain real insight and generate change to my app could convince me.

thomaspun6• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

- Pricing There are definitely more testing to do. Our original thought was that even if you know which funnels preform worst, it will still take you hours to try to figure out what went wrong. With Delight, hopefully we could give you better hints to save you time and improve the app.
- Code vs features vs benefits. You are absolutely right. I should have added that as lesson learned as well.
- iOS only. Android makes it harder to achieve the ease of integration we had for iOS. Besides, we wanted to use the revenue from iOS to fund the Android development.

You can consider other alternatives but none of them has Android version.

Failed to delight. Post-mortem of Delight IO

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