WhiteAlbum: An obituary

What we learned when a product didn’t work out.

By Tim Morgan, Mint Digital’s CEO

Since WhiteAlbum was shuttered a few people have asked me about the decision, and what led to it. There’s no denying the product had what looked like a very successful launch, with lots of publicity and some glowing reviews. I can appreciate that, viewed from outside the Mint bubble, there might appear to be a disconnect between that launch and the product’s subsequent closure mere months down the line.

I talked to the founders about the notion of publishing a ‘post-mortem’ of sorts, which is something we tend not to do very much — not because we don’t want to, but if we pondered over every product we shut down (of which there have been over fifty) we’d never get any work done. However, I thought the case of WhiteAlbum provided an interesting opportunity to share the thinking behind closing down a product, and the kinds of things we try to learn in the aftermath.

When start-ups shut down, any post-mortems are usually intended as a point of learning reference to others about ‘what went wrong’, or why something failed. The trouble I have with these is that in my experience nobody really knows why something failed. They might have an opinion, but they don’t know .

Of course, the same is true of success. Most successful entrepreneurs, in my opinion, don’t really know why they succeeded — but they sure like to think they do, and it’s generally because they themselves are awesome.

I prefer to see success and failure as more ethereal than that. They are undoubtedly reliant to some extent on your actions, but there is no precise correlation. The factors that determine your success or failure are as much out of your control as they are within.

And that is a realisation that is both comforting and terrifying.

For this reason, if I was forced to assign a death-related term to this kind of debrief, I’d be more inclined to plump for ‘obituary’. That’s because this is my point of view of what happened at WhiteAlbum. It’s not necessarily the opinion of the founders, Greg and Will, and it’s certainly not as scientifically, demonstrably proven as a post-mortem.

Before I get to my thoughts around what worked and what didn’t with WhiteAlbum, I’ll start by taking you through its inception.

The birth of WhiteAlbum

The first I heard of WhiteAlbum was in a hotel in Dorset during Mint’s annual company wide retreat to the country. Greg mentioned towards the end of the week that he’d had this idea for reproducing disposable photography, but in digital form. He wanted to recapture the delayed gratification of taking photos and then not knowing what they looked like until you got them developed.

My initial reaction was: “This’ll never work.” I believe that technology changes life permanently and for the better, and to me this idea sounded like a step backwards. However, having spent some time with Greg he convinced me that it was worth testing the appetite of the consumer to see whether this was something people want or not. We thought that without too much investment we could get an alpha version of the app into people’s hands and see how they responded to it.

The product development phase

The trouble with products that combine the digital and the physical is that you can’t really test them without making them. The test is as much whether people like the finished physical product as it is whether they like the concept, and product development (physical product development, that is) is neither cheap nor easy.

So next we spent time prototyping the physical product (boxes, print finishes) and tried to find a reliable supplier/printer of these services. Meantime we put a holding page up to gather an early group of user testers who could try the product for free.

The launch of WhiteAlbum

On New Year’s Day 2015 we launched WhiteAlbum. By this point I had been user-testing the product, and I loved it. The more time I spent with Greg the more I liked the brand and the lifestyle element of it, and when my first set of prints arrived I was really pleased and excited.

A few weeks later we officially launched via Product Hunt and gathered quite a lot of press. We had thousands of users immediately and I wrote a blog post about how WhiteAlbum had passed the first test of “definitely being a something”.

We need to raise money

After the success of the launch we took the decision to to raise a round of seed finance for WhiteAlbum. This was partly carrot and partly stick. The founders felt that they would have a better chance of fulfilling the potential of WhiteAlbum if they had their own funding, bank account and P&L responsibility.

Meanwhile Mint felt that, like DeskBeers and Boomf before it, we couldn’t afford to fund the growth of WhiteAlbum and concurred that external funding would give the product the best chance of fulfilling its potential.

Things start to wobble

We started planning to raise money (gathering data, putting together a deck and drawing up a list of potential investors) in around March 2015. It was roughly the same time that trading took a turn south. Suddenly the growth and popularity of WhiteAlbum seemed short-lived, and we were unable to sustain the early momentum.

A pivot

Whilst planning the fundraising deck and contemplating the trading of WhiteAlbum, we felt that a disposable camera app — although a cool idea — was not the billion-dollar opportunity we all thought it might be. But we did identify an alternative that might represent just that. We updated our investor materials accordingly.

Starting again

The problem with this approach was that it actually cast us back in time. The thing we had data for related to an app that we were admitting in our deck was not the real opportunity. The thing we were seeking funding for didn’t actually exist at all. Savvy investors would say, “Come back to me in six months’ time when you’ve built out the new product” (which we named WhiteAlbum+).

The vicious circle

Except we didn’t have six months to build out the product. We had run out of the funding that we were prepared to invest in WhiteAlbum and we couldn’t afford to invest the amount it would have taken to get the necessary traction for WhiteAlbum+.

On reflection we can probably condense this story down to some moments where things went wrong. This is my list:

1. Product/market fit. Maybe I was right with my gut instinct. Perhaps we should never have contemplated a disposable camera app. We once considered a music app that forced you to listen to entire albums, and I remember thinking “cool” and then “but no”. Perhaps the market for retro/limited apps (where the limit here is the inability to pick and choose your photos before you print) is one of novelty only, rather than the longer-lasting returning-customer type of market that’s required to raise money against.
2. Physical product development. I wonder whether we could have come to the conclusion about demand and the disposable camera opportunity earlier. The main reason we didn’t was a tremendous amount of time invested in the physical product and the supply chain related to it. Had we been able to condense this period we might have been able to launch earlier, get through the cycle earlier and have enough left in the tank to build WhiteAlbum+.
3. Marketing expertise. It’s very common when a start-up fails for the reason to be “well, marketing”. Indeed I recently read something that suggested 95% of startups fail because of marketing (or lack thereof). I can’t believe that’s true. If you read “marketing” in this instance to mean “insufficient numbers of people buying the product”, then yes, I’m sure that 95% stat is true. If you read it to mean “this product would have succeeded had it had more marketing expertise/competence”, I will eat my marketing books if that 95% stat is true. I think lack of consumer demand is not the same as lack of marketing expertise.

However, I do concede that in the case of WhiteAlbum we did not spend money on marketing experts or any paid customer acquisition methods, and that that might well have been the reason why the numbers went south after launch.

Lessons learnt

So, all that being said — what can Mint as a company (and Greg and Will as the founders) take away from this?

1. If this was a failure of product/market fit (and if I had to choose I would say it was) then perhaps that’s a danger inherent in today’s ‘early adopter’ markets. I’ve often wondered how many people back something on Kickstarter, say, because it looks cool rather than there being a compelling product/market fit. Do lean methodologies of testing appetite ahead of launch lend themselves to fake results manifested by lots of press and attention in the early stage — but little longevity beyond that? I don’t have a definitive answer to this, but that’s the thinking I’m leaning towards at the moment.
2. Perhaps physical products start better with a third-party manufacturing relationship already established. Starting from scratch is time-consuming and risky, since you’re investing in something before being able to ascertain demand.
3. I’ve spoken recently about how we don’t always necessarily know to what extent we’re willing to financially back a product. In the case of WhiteAlbum, perhaps we shouldn’t have taken on such a project without a bigger initial budget with which to see it through. I’m loathe to say this, since it can kind of be applied to any business: “We failed because we didn’t have enough money!” However, sometimes it’s true. I’ve observed many times in the early stages of start-ups that lack of capital can be decisive in terms of either kicking on or not (although it’s rare for founders to reflect on this as a key reason for success!). Lack of funding curtailed our investment in marketing, and also our ability to ‘go again’ with WhiteAlbum+.
4. Still on funding: the amount we were looking to raise ($500K) potentially put us in a funny spot with prospective investors in terms of ease of putting us in a ‘stage bracket’. This was probably amplified by the pivot mid-stage. Perhaps we should have tried to raise a lower amount and started from scratch with WhiteAlbum+.

I’ve written recently about the risks inherent in pursuing what we refer to as ‘internal ventures’. I suppose WhiteAlbum is an example of a venture that didn’t work out, and that’s a shame for both us as product developers and those users who really liked said product. But as with everything we work on at Mint, the team — which worked harmoniously throughout — learned a lot and I’m proud of what we achieved during what was a fun ride. I think the experience will continue to be beneficial to everyone who was involved.