The Adventures Of A Bad Startup #1: Burn All The Things!
An incredible dive in the magical universe of a startup that methodically failed everything, narrated by its desperate founder which is doing the V2 and won’t let go, you hear me?
In 6 months we’re billionaires, guaranteed.
So here goes. About three years ago, while seeing — hearing- fighter jets over Paris during the 14th of july, we thought of a pretty cool social network idea which would allow people to know what’s happening around them, in real time.
’Cause no, at the time, none of the big networks would place information on the map, and give you a solution for these kinds of situations: “allright, i’m half-naked at the beach, but i reaaaally need to know what’s happening in times square, like right now”. We’re before Periscope, for those in the back.
The first thing we thought was “that’s too obvious, someone must have done that already”. But it turned out, no one had. Of course, there’s a truckload of services out there if you want to date the geeks in your neighborhood, but realtime, geolocated info? Still nope.
So we did it. We talked about it a bit, to our clients at Yodog — yeah we do video production on the side so as not to die from hunger — to family, to buddies. Love Money. And when i say “talk about it” i mean we had a 7 pages pdf that would roughly describe the project, the team, and why it was awesome. No demo, not even a screenshot.
And it worked, it worked like hell! We thought we would get 10 or 20k (that’s in Euros), enough to build a small prototype, and ended with 150 000 eurobucks. Infinite money cheatcode.
I’m not going to tell you all about it now, first because it’s a long story but mostly because i’m too lazy to write fifty pages right now. Instead i’m gonna skip 30 month. See you after the funny picture.
OK so next time we’ll be billionaires, guaranteed.
Two and a half years later: everything failed miserably. We have 3 users, no monies left, a pretty powerful app, but also very complicated to maintain and even more to use (usually not good).
And competition does exist now. As i mentioned earlier, there’s Periscope, with which you can record and broadcast video real time — that’s in itself more than what we did since we only handled texts and pictures. Facebook reacted with a similar service, organized around a map, very close to our ‘Mapsearch’ feature, and i’ve lost count of the services using Instagram, Twitter or Facebook’s API to deliver data on a map.
So, today, we need to take a decision. We’re stopping Castr. Well, we’re stopping this giant turd that is our first version of Castr.
But that’s ok! Because we don’t actually stop. I’m not gonna talk about pivoting because i don’t know if that’s really what we’re doing, but basically, we start Castr 2. It’s gonna follow the same premise and allow you to talk with people around you, but in a different manner, and a very silly tone. I will talk about it again.
So this article is not meant to be an infomercial, but rather the starting point of a diary of sorts, narrating how we managed to be so dumb and fail in so many ways, in the hope that it helps the next loser that will start his business thinking “In 6 months we’re billionaires, guaranteed”.
And there IS a ton of things to say, because when you fail a company, there’s usually not a specific reason. It’s more about a lot of very small mistakes that, put together, will be the cause for your demise.
On the other side, a lot can be said about what did work, things to learn, and, i’m not gonna lie, i will use the opportunity to show you what we’re working on right now (and why it’s gonna be really cool this time).
Oh, one last thing: without going into too much details right now, there is something very alienating about creating your startup, or entrepreuneurship in general, and it’s that it SUCKS YOUR SOUL. You live, breathe and sleep startup, and it ends up creating a huge void inside you when you realize, sporadically, that the world is still turning around you, and that somehow you’re not a part of it anymore.
So to compensate — a little bit — the readers that will happen to read this, and i’m guessing they are being fed those fucking startup articles all day (10 ways to improve your productivity), i will be taking a few paragraphs to talk about a piece of culture completely unrelated to everything else. Take it or leave it. This week: Das Boot.
♩ ♫ Culture corneeeer ♫ ♪
Yeah, Das Boot is a west-German 1981 movie set in the insides of a second world war German submarine. That’s what I chose. Running time is 3h29 for the director’s cut. You get it, it’s the movie you got when your buddy told you about it, and then gets forgotten somewhere on your computer for 2 years because you never dared playing it. Well, try it, it’s a masterpiece.
The movie describes precisely and exhaustively, with a thousand details, the claustrophobic daily routine of these young german soldiers, who really did not have a clue, and are now sitting there pissing themselves with fear while waiting for english depth-charges to blow the ship hull, then party like there’s no tomorrow when they realize there is still a today at least, at the bottom the sea, in the permanent stench of oil, sweat, and madness.
My girlfriend fell asleep in about 15 minutes. Me, 2 hours.
But i watched the end the next day, at least! And yeah, it was great.
Have a nice week people.
Cheers
Barth Picq
Oh, if you do wanna check out what we’re up to now, feel free to have a peek at the new website with a couple neat-o-screenshots. Big fun. Big french fun actually.
