I Coulda Been a Con-Tinder…
And the dangerous “fail fast” startup crutch
Fuck.
I don’t really curse, especially when I write. I think it’s lazy. There are always better words to describe how you feel.
Fuck.
I watch from the sidelines as Hinge plays the Rocky to Tinder’s Mr. T. They aren’t winning yet, but they are starting to land some punches. You ain’t so bad, Tinder! You ain’t so bad!
Fuck.
I come to grips with the fact that this was a big time growth market that wanted the product I was building.
Fuck.
I realize that maybe — probably? — I folded my dating app Find Your Lobster too soon.
Fuuuuuck.
The Lobster.
Find Your Lobster grew out of a web app I built in 2011 called 3degrees. 3degrees helped users meet friends of friends with common interests through Facebook. We got some early traction, but the majority of our users just browsed their friends’ single friends. For hours. So, we pivoted.
Our new product, Find Your Lobster, was a mobile dating app with problems from day one. I wasted 5 months trying to get people to do what I wanted them to do on 3degrees when all they wanted to do was date. Once we finally pivoted, we were short on cash. I skimped on development, hoping to get something minimal out and raise on the back of early traction. I convinced myself this was the “lean” way to launch.
When I told my Dad experienced people were too expensive and I’d be hiring a cheap dev shop with limited app experience to get something out quick, he warned, “if you think experienced people are expensive, wait until you hire inexperienced people.” I didn’t listen.
In theory, our users saw 10 single people every 24 hours, all friends of friends. If there was mutual interest, there was a match. If you answered 3 funny questions about yourself, you got 10 more matches immediately. If you paid $0.99, you got another 10. If not, you waited 24 hours.
Functionally, the app was a disaster. It simply didn’t work. But people kept downloading and checking the app every 24 hours, persevering through the constant crashes.
I began frantically searching for money so I could make the thing run on more than duct tape and bubblegum.
And Then There Was Tinder.
The best founders I’ve seen are nimble and calm as the world crashes around them. Actually, they’re better in these situations. Chaos and change breeds opportunity and they capitalize on it.
Tinder turned the mobile dating market on it’s head. Comical growth and adoption, revolutionary user experience, and the eradication of stigma for an entire market happened seemingly over night. Woah. I took a deep breath and tried to navigate the new landscape to find cracks and opportunity.
We couldn’t scale like Tinder, so what small problems could we solve better than them? I told anyone who would listen that unlimited matches would eventually lead to the paradox of choice. Also, Tinder didn’t really have a personality. It didn’t market itself heavily towards relationships or hookups, so I thought it would eventually take on the personality of it’s UX. Quick, cheap, easy, fleeting. All great characteristics for apps, all bad characteristics for people looking for relationships. There was my opportunity. Focus on friend of friend, limited matches, and relationships.
Unfortunately, Tinder also changed the funding landscape. Why would investors fund a company that made users wait 24 hours instead of giving them hundreds of matches immediately?
Each day without funding and quality development felt like a year. The Lobster was hopeless in its current form. We couldn’t raise, couldn’t convince quality talent to build for free, and I was broke and living back in my parents house.
I pulled the plug.
The Real Competition.
Towards the end of our Lobster run, I became aware of Hinge, a DC-based startup that had independently taken a similar approach.
Hinge was smartly choosing battles it could win. Only available in DC when I first heard of them, they slowly began spreading from city to city, edge of the wedge-ing their way across the country on the back of friend of friend dynamics with a promise of “more than a hookup.” I admired the strategy from NYC.
I kept tabs after shutting down the Lobster, watching as Hinge closed funding and growth accelerated. I even took some weird solace in the fact that at least I had been on the right track, and that while I hadn’t executed I’d read the market correctly. I rooted for them.
Then I saw this.
Hinge was down to nothing, too. Dead in the water. Their app was buggy, their funding was running out, their user base was small. Where I quit, they found a way to roll the dice. It smacked me in the face like a pillowcase full of doorknobs.
Fuck.
Startups don’t fail. Founders quit.
Sometimes quitting is the right move. It might’ve even been the right move with Find Your Lobster. Who’s to say I would’ve ever got the app working?
But I think the startup culture may have swayed too far towards the fail fast/lean mentality, and I may have let it influence my behavior. I’d proved my hypothesis with 3degrees as well as with the horrible Find Your Lobster V1 that people downloaded. I didn’t need a lean product or to seek out failure. I needed to take a leap and dig my feet in. I needed to place my bet. I needed to have faith in my vision. I didn’t. Hinge did.
I knew Tinder wasn’t the end-all be-all of mobile dating apps. But I quit because I was out of money and had no one to build the thing.
Looking back, all I can think is — that’s it? That was my big, bad problem? I couldn’t find a developer who wanted to build this product with me? I couldn’t find someone to raise money from… anywhere? As a CEO, that’s pretty much my entire job.
I could’ve found a way to keep grinding, but I chose to quit.
Win slowly, win eventually, win ugly. Just win.
Lean and fail fast are good… to a point. Once your customers tell you they want what you’re building, get talented people and build the thing. Commit. Lean dips your toe in the edge of the water. It certainly has its place. But at some point you’ve got to jump in.
Once your idea is validated, win slowly. Win eventually. Win ugly. Win late. But if it’s important to you and important to your customers, make sure you persevere long enough to win.
Sometimes the best characteristic of a startup is alligator blood — just keep hanging around until you get it right.
