Inception of a Failed Startup | Swivel Chronicles P1
Here lies Swivel, you should’ve been great. 2020–2021
It’s better to try and fail than to never try at all.
… but tactfully, deliberately try the right things.
In this series I’m going to cover the life of my startup, Swivel. I’ll be reliving some of the highest highs and lowest lows of the rollercoaster ride that it was trying to unleash my vision on the world.
This first post will cover the initial romance, the honeymoon stage, before shit gets too real. So let’s get right into it!
Early October, 2020
Noah, my soon-to-be cofounder, and I chatted often about the dread of our monotonous days. Our desire to pursue something more. But I carry a constant voice in my head saying there’s fine line between those who talk about what they want and those who pursue it, and I know which side of the line I want to be on. Noah’s the same way. So it was only a matter of time.
During one of our routine conversations we discussed another thing we dreaded… dating apps. It was peak covid and we both had spent most of the past months struggling our way through the apps, as many do. We talked about how our app profiles just didn’t give the full picture. How given a little bit of face-time with someone, we actually COULD stand out from the sea of lonely men (sorry, other lonely men). So DUH! Let’s pursue OUR biggest problem.
But how? Well, giving people like us exactly what we wanted: a little face-time. Just a chance to be more than your 5 favorite pictures and a desperate paragraph about yourself.
Setting up our incubator
Noah and I put our resignation notices from our day-jobs that week. We made a sort-of blood-pact that we would figure out how to make this work. It was just a matter of time. So, let’s start figuring it out!
Noah’s a sort of miracle worker in the sense that if he wants something, he’ll make it happen. Somehow. Like literally the most impossible, unlikely things. That’s his super power. So somehow, in the matter of 2 weeks, he became my perfect cofounder. An unemployed, near-homeless, duffle-bag of possessions individual. With a ton of energy and ambition.
We booked him a ticket from London to SFO. I picked up a used mattress, threw it on the floor in my crammed bedroom, and we got to work that night.
It was the most “silicon valley” thing ever. We were all in.
Startup noobies
Noah and I had built things that resemble small startups in the past, but this was the first time I really felt like I was getting ready to aim for the big leagues. To pursue building something much bigger than myself.
It felt like I just stepped into a fighter jet, Noah was my copilot, and we were about to start figuring out how to fly this damn thing.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, we were naive, but not TOTAL idiots. We knew we were naive. But that excited us! It was time to figure out what exactly we didn’t know (a lot). We knew this was the start of a very long journey. But we had our backpacks packed and we were ready to hit the road full speed.
So we started planning out the next few months. Things like how would we get our first users, what would our MVP require, basic market research, and all the crazy things we would be willing to do to make it work.
Early brain-feed
We kept notes in Roam, and I still have them to reference!
Here’s some examples of the random, raw, thoughts we jotted down. It shows kind of where our heads were at at this stage:
October 17, 2020
The Facebook way:
Start small in one small area and then expand (i.e. London)
This was a big point we figured other apps were missing. They’d just launch to the entire world. Attempting to arrange dates between initial users in such a dispersed manner simply doesn’t work, for obvious reasons.
Community building
Having calls with everyone (individually) at first who want to participate so that the initial base of people know the goal (building a community is important)
We wanted to leverage our willingness to get down and dirty. Get personal with all of our early users. Build those early super-users.
MVP Struggles
definitely want to have as many cool/odd features as possible, (this is a very vague comment, but can speak to this), cool animation, things that happen when buttons are clicked
Probably the most noteworthy quote here. This quote was quickly followed up with a reply:
for the MVP? … we were going to start testing in ~3 days with google hangouts. Then, decided to improve on that. Now we’re 3 weeks in without doing any testing
When building a startup, there’s a constant force pulling on you saying, “this just isn’t the product I saw I was dreaming up”, so you think, maybe just a few more days before our next launch… And a few days turns into a few weeks. Then a couple months. And all of a sudden, you’re 6 months down the road and exactly 0 people have seen what you’re working on. We were aware of this trap. And we brought it up every day that we didn’t launch.
Early testing
While we did push back the date on testing OUR first MVP, we did find some other ways to test out the idea. We signed up for many video speed dating over Zoom events. And while we were matched mostly with people way above our age, all over the world, it was still a ton of fun. We took note of some of the struggles of video speed dating, and some of the things the hosts did to mitigate those. Things like icebreakers became obvious features to build.
Another difficulty thing we went through was calling up friends asking them what they thought of our baby and made sure to end each call with, “Ok, should we put you on our waitlist?”. Of course, pretty much everyone said “Yes!”. Spoiler alert, “Yes, later” is much different from “Yes, now”.
This early testing gave us enough (probably too much) confidence to keep pushing back our MVP launch, but it at least felt like things were happening and we were moving in the right direction.
Where are we and where are we going?
So now we’re about a month in. Our initial app looks “half way ready to give to users” (if that means anything), we’ve learned a ton about what’s out there, we’ve started building up a list of friends that we’ll test with, and there’s no real bumps in site.
This concludes part 1 of the Swivel Chronicles.
In this series I’ll continue to dig into how Swivel unfolded. Things like, our deeper vision (and what I learned about how visions grow), managing financials ridiculous ways to extend our runway, founder issues, life getting in the way, learnings about how people socialize/meet, FOMO, sleep deprivation, pivoting, and more. So if that stuff interests you, stay tuned!
The next post is live here.
