From Hot → Not in 2 Easy Steps

Brian Forrester
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

We launched BuddyUp in 2013, the summer before my Senior year. The concept was simple: fill the void left by Facebook by offering a private social network for university students. We evaluated the market and decided to position the product as part of a student retention strategy, helping universities reduce their dropout rates.

Over the course of the next 4 years I grew the company, employing dozens of people — designers, developers, sales people, account managers, marketing gurus, QA people, brand ambassadors. We outgrew office after office. Together my co-founder Steven and I engineered a great culture, developed cutting-edge products, generated meaningful revenue, raised capital from high-profile investors, made front pages, grew a user base and sparked acquisition interest from some of the hottest companies in the industry.

Then failed.

There are lots of reasons we failed. More importantly are the reasons we didn’t succeed: Thinking Small and Lack of Product/Market Fit.

Thinking Small

We tried scaffolding our way to self-sufficiency by chasing ‘easy money.’ Although our core passion was students we decided that selling ourselves to universities would help demonstrate early revenue (and thereby help us land additional investment). The plan was to earn enough revenue through enterprise sales that we could pivot (like MailChimp) and start building what we REALLY wanted to build: a direct-to-consumer social network. I remember thinking ‘how hard could it be to land 10 contracts for $50,000?’

It’s fucking hard.

We compromised our vision. We failed.


Product/Market Fit

Our second death blow came from what legendary VC Marc Andreessen considers “the only thing that matters” — product/market fit.

Making it further than most, we successfully ✓ built a product that people actually used and ✓ generated significant revenue repeatedly. Unfortunately, in the time allotted by capital we failed to find a true product/market fit.

If you haven’t read Andreessen’s 2007 blog post, it’s internet gold: http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

He suggests that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this “BPMF”) and after product/market fit (“APMF”). In the case of BuddyUp we assumed every university with a dropout problem would feel compelled to consider our solution. We assumed product/market fit and ignored evidence to the contrary.

Oregon State University’s online campus (Ranked #5 in the U.S.) wrote us a $50,000 check before we even had our shoes on. Had we known that we were still looking for a product/market fit we wouldn’t have tried to scale our sales efforts so aggressively. Instead we would’ve sat down, listened closely and delivered OSU the product they so desperately wanted. Not to mention online learning is booming and it would have been much easier to gain market share by focusing on a narrow vertical. But nah.

We didn’t prioritize finding product/market fit. We failed.


Reflection

The past 4 years have been a wonderful opportunity to learn and to hone my chops as an entrepreneur and learn about myself as a human being. This article might be about failure, but there were a TON of things we did right to stay alive for 4 years and achieve the traction we did. I’m proud of myself and proud of my team.

Thanks to this experience I’ve established relationships all across the world, benefited from SO MUCH MENTORSHIP and experienced the joys of growth as well as the pain and heartache of failure. I’ve learned that intelligence, a good smile, hard work and willpower will get you far, but not all the way. You still need a great team (which costs money), a great product (which takes time) and to find a product/market fit (which takes both). Oh yeah, and there’s zero room for compromise or half measures.

I am deeply grateful to everyone who gave me the opportunity to serve and I am excited for what comes next.

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Brian Forrester

Written by

Tech entrepreneur | Currently @NurseGrid | Former CEO @BuddyUp | Portland, OR

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