The story of my startup or the tricks to fail your startup
It was in 2011, and I was searching for an internship for my second year of my Computer Science school.
Some friends put me in contact with guys that had a project of a mobile payment company.
So I met these 2 guys (they were students in non-technical schools). I had a good feeling about the project and felt connected to it, but since I had no prior experience in Entrepreneurship, I was a bit hesitant.
So I chose to become CTO of a mobile payment company
Our product was a mobile application which allowed you to pay by scanning QRCodes.
We started working with a web agency to develop our iPhone and iPad applications. I was developing a quick backend for these apps.
After 2 month we ended up with a nice expensive demo unusable by end users
Still, this demo gave us the opportunity to join an accelerator in Paris: Le Camping.
We stopped working with the web agency. We still had a true product to develop, so we hired 9 freelancer developers ( yes exactly 9 people ).
My challenge was to manage these people.
I had 9 technical people that received technical instructions from me. At the same time, my cofounders gave them contradictory intructions, asking for more visual things.
I was also not that confident at the time: if I had doubts, I preferred not mentioning them on the moment but rather double-checking afterwards. On The other hand, my cofounders were way more confident (they were awesome sellers).
This created an imbalance in decision-making. With the help of others in our accelerator, we found a way to organise ourselves and better develop our product. We reduced the scope of our product and had a better communication.
After 7 months, we published a first version to users
This first version included 3 main features :
- offline payment in merchant store with QRCode
- online payment with QRCode
- payment between friends
It was a lot of features for a first version.
In general, users only got one feature and didn’t know about the others
This launch landed us 300k € of investment from business angels
With this money, we decided to stop working with freelancers and started hiring our own team.
During the following months, we hired a bunch of people: 1 backend developer, 1 android developer, 1 chief communication officer, 1 iOS developer, 1 UI designer, 3 sales, 1 UX designer, 1 chief marketing officer, 1 another iOS developer.
We decided to fire the backend developer after few months. The guy was nice, I tried to coach him and help him integrate with the team. It was a very difficult decision to make.
It was the first time I had to fire somebody: It was a very emotional day for me.
8 months after the launch: we released a second version... with metrics this time
Yeah, we were working without metrics on the first version :(
This new version made us realise that nobody was interested in our product
We received a lot of press coverage for the first and second versions: this helped a little for acquisition. But in fact, people didn’t really need our product, it was just cool. And we were losing money: we paid more fees on transactions than we received.
Our UX designer started to impulse a movement inside the company to make us rethink what we did. This was a very good idea. We were 8 people in the company at this time.
So we started to do something we had never really done before: talk and listen to users
Within a week:
- We brainstormed about subjects we want to work on
- We went outside, and talked to random people in the street, entered shops and talked to merchants and their customers for about 20 minutes per person
- We collected all the pain points of these people and started brainstorming solutions
- This brainstorm gave birth to 3 small prototypes
- We returned outside and presented those mockups to people
At the end of the week, based on all these feedbacks, we pivoted the company on one of the prototypes
In one month, we passed from prototype to fully functional MVP (compared to 7 months for the first product).
It’s was still a payment solution. On this MVP:
- we made money for every transaction (instead of a loss)
- merchants found it useful
- users were amazed by the experience
- metrics were far better than the first product’s
We got good retention on the new product but acquisition was very low
Something like 60/70% of users continued to make new transactions after the first one. But only a very few people actually installed the app.
So we decided as a team to stop coding and put everybody (including developers) on solving this acquisition problem. We tried a lot of things: hand out flyer, do quality packaging, …
Just before the pivot, one of my cofounder had to leave the ship. This locked all further possibility of raising money as he still owned many shares of the company.
After 2 years, the story ended up: we ran out of money, and had to fire everybody
It was still an amazing experience: I have no regrets, I learned many things, met incredible people (included my current boss :), some of my ex-employees are now good friends. I want to thank everybody in this adventure: my ex-cofounders, my ex-employees (that are now friends), the team from Le Camping accelerator (now called Numa) and all the people that helped us.
If you have questions or want feedback on stuff you do, don’t hesitate to contact me: I am super interested in this kind of stuff
Bonus: (if you likes details like me)
- On the way to the second version, we found a process to organise development. This article from uservoice helped us a lot : https://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs-product-management/
We were also using Hipchat for internal communication (yeah it was before slack was exist) - For our brainstorm sessions just before our pivot, we were inspired by IDEO process. We watched this video in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM
(Edit: You can find lot of design thinking processes here: http://www.designkit.org/ from IDEO) - During interview of people to collect feedbacks, we used the 5 whys method to find the root of their pain points ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys )
