After 2 days in ‘private beta’ and 9 1/2 days of development, we’re launching Swooper. It’s a website where you can choose from 7, beautifully simple and open source, emojis to react to the trending news.
Just post a news link and see the reaction of friends, followers and the community. That’s it. It’s a really simple and fun way to feel the news or filter the news by reaction.
Here’s the rub
We’re actually the team at Mailcloud and Swooper isn’t what Octopus Investments, Bessemer Ventures or our other investors had in mind when they invested $2,8ml in us to build an enterprise quality (and generally better) way to email a year ago.
We’re closing the Mailcloud app, developing our server side cloud tech and working on Swooper.
Email is a hard technology, maintained and advanced by the tech giants. Every so once in a while there’s a Mailbox, Sparrow or Accompli that captures the imagination — but they’re few and far between. Casey Newton wrote a nice piece about this in The Verge and here’s Mailbox’s recent announcement.
As a team of 14 engineers, we’ve spent the last year developing and shipping Mailcloud product but to no avail. We all know that startups are uncertain and if your product isn’t working, you have to make bold changes — as equally uncertain as they may be.
For those of you reading this and thinking ‘Hey, maybe I’ll start a company in 2016', please be warned.
There are very few companies that reach ‘Unicorn’ valuation of $1bn or more. Those that do are like;
- 0.0001% of those companies started each year
- Started by very well connected founders, investors and advisors
- In the heart of tech ecosystems like San Francisco, Boston or London
- Actually raising debt more than equity to get them to $1bn valuation (a nice problem to have for early stage startups granted).
Here’s the research on unicorn founders by aileenlee
The sad truth is that most startups fail and it takes persistence, determination, focus and nimble feet to succeed.
Thanks to Rich Waldron for putting this so perfectly.
So here’s Swooper and we hope it’ll bring you a smile. We’re not having a meltdown, our therapists say we’re fine. We just wanted to build something fun before the holidays.
If it gives you a smile, please recommend this post by clicking the ❤ button so other people can read it too.
If Swooper takes off, then maybe we’ll write an awesome, inspiring mission statement to change the world and help people connect and express themselves in better ways. We’ve got lots of great ideas for Swooper and a big vision, but for now, it’s just a Ryan Hoover style experiment.
Here’s his first tweet about Product Hunt after he left Playhaven to try something new.
How Mailcloud failed
I was standing outside my startup 2 weeks ago, smoking a Marlboro Light and reading a hopeful Medium post by Ev Williams.
I scrolled to the end, then looked at my largely useless Apple watch. It was only 3:42 in the afternoon but it was already getting dark and cold.
I read another post by Benedict Evans. I looked up at the night sky and sighed a long sigh and thought to myself…
Wow. That Ben Evans is really smart.
What do we do now?
We’ve spent over $1ml here at Mailcloud since February 2014.
We’ve raised money from awesome investors, Mike Butcher wrote about Mailcloud in Techcrunch and we got featured on Product Hunt twice. We had 50,000 BETA signups and hired 14 amazing engineers to build a better way to email.
And yet, every version of the product we’ve shipped has flopped with users where every version of Outlook, Slack, Inbox has gotten better.
Where did it all go wrong? … We probably started a year too late.
At my last startup Zaggora, I bootstrapped to $40ml in sales 18 months from launch, hired 50 people and sold 1ml products to customers in 130 countries.
Was it luck?
That success is largely why investors backed me and the team to build Mailcloud, it’s why they came on this journey.
Our Mailcloud app clearly isn’t working, we’ve shipped different versions with many different features over many months and nobody really cares.
Christian Hernandez told us email is really hard and Simon Levene said it never makes any money.
Embarrassing.
We’re all tired.
Startups are really hard, bhorowitz and Hunter Walk were right.
Fuck.
The spirit of a startup
You always need self belief and a little luck.
If you work hard and have a great team dedicated to solving a real problem in a creative way — there’s still no guarantee of success.
Startups are highly uncertain, but you know what, they’re also highly flexible — especially before product market fit.
People come to work in startups to have a big impact, to make a difference, to get things done fast and make meaning. Right Chris Sacca?
But often times it’s difficult to stay excited, hopeful and motivated when every month you have less money and no visible progress.
Paul Graham taught us that startups need to make something people want, do it fast and keep it simple. I loved this tweet from Sam Altman.
Too many startups live their lives on staging, where everything works on localhost. We’d been doing the same.
So, we decided as a team to start from scratch and build something new, build it fast — in like 10 days fast. To give ourselves a fresh start. A roll of the dice. We know we can do this. If you believe in yourself, you’re always half way to success — no matter what your account balance.
But what about the burn rate?
I knew we had to make changes.
Startups go bust because they run out of money. Also, times are changing and 2016 will be much more volatile than 2015.
It’s never easy raising money for startups and it feels like its harder today than it was a year ago. Undoubtedly, startup valuations are cooling.
Marc Andreessen said so on the Twitters and we had an email from our investors Reshma Sohoni and Carlos E. Espinal at Seedcamp to all their portfolio companies saying so too. Of course, it’s largely because everyone says so that it becomes so, but that’s for another story.
Our burn rate of $140k a month was way too high — even if it fit Fred Wilson’s formula of $10k per month per employee. But we didn’t have a product yet. We’d doubled the size of the team to make the boat go faster. If anything, we were going slower.
Of the 14 engineers in the Mailcloud team, we had to let go of 7, leaving 7 that remain. Halving our burn.
How Swooper started
We then had an honest team huddle and thought about why we all came here. What did we want to achieve with our lives and what could we build quickly.
It went something like this.
This lasted about 2 minutes before we pulled ourselves together.
We thought
What can we build that’s;
- Useful
- Solves a problem
- Brings people a smile
Dave McClure also says you should probably piss some people off-in this case, probably our investors.
We also wanted to ship something before Christmas so when our families asks what we do, we can show them. This beats spending an hour explaining how the cloud works.
It was Antonio, one of our brilliant backend developers (and Reddit devotee) who came up with the idea for the emojis.
Thanks
So thanks for reading this to the end, we really appreciate that.
After 9 days of development — and a little break for the holidays, here we are presenting Swooper.
We hope you like it and we’d love to have your feedback. Good luck with everything you’re doing in your life.
Sincerely,
With thanks to the brilliant believers in our team, Wojtek Turowicz, Naeem, Antonio, Wojciech, Mark and Tim.
Please recommend this post by clicking the ❤ button so other people can find it. But only if you like it. You can also say hi on Twitter @Swooper
