My Failed Startup: A Quick Retrospective on Throwdown

This article is in progress and will be updated.

In 2011, I founded a startup called Throwdown. We offered a mobile app that helped consumers achieve personal goals through social challenges, while allowing brands to market goal-relevant offerings to them.

Throwdown was envisioned to be a mobile app that helped consumers track and accomplish personal goals. An example is helping someone run a marathon for the first time. The hypothesis was that the consumer would likely need to purchase goods and services to accomplish the goal, such as running shoes and equipment.

Throwdown’s customer would be a lifestyle brand, such as Nike — paying to sponsor running challenges. Nike would capture leads, increase brand exposure, and engage the running community.

By subscribing to a goal, a user would be presented with algorithmically driven “success maps” (trained by steps taken by successful users). Graduating challenges would help the user work towards her goal, such as Run 5K, Run 10K, Run Half-Marathon, and Complete 22 mi long run.

Some MVP screenshots (will update once I find better images):

Lessons Learned

Below are some takeaways when I first shut down the project. (I will add/update these insights now that I’ve had several years to reflect on the experience.)

• Finding the right people is REALLY important but REALLY hard: When I was starting, I feel like this was half the battle. I believe if you can assemble a team of tenacious problem solvers, they can solve just about anything. The challenge is convincing someone to join your delusion with only sweat equity and a dream. Oh, and obviously the recent, insane demand for engineers doesn’t help.
• I thought I got Lean, but I didn’t: MVP is one of the most abused terms in product development. People say they know what it is but hardly have the discipline to practice it — I didn’t. Throwdown’s MVP should have been no tech, it should have been me focused more on creating and running challenges for a single goal in a single category. Heck, email would have worked as our tech (NOTE: since writing, I could now use a social platform such as Instagram or Reddit). What did we do? We built a pretty full-featured iPhone app. You can even create your own challenges and issue them to your friends (waste of time)!
• Didn’t focus ruthlessly: No, no… not eating challenges, fitness challenges, running challenges, travel challenges, movie challenges. ONE THING — AND NAIL IT. (did not do this)
• Didn’t get it in writing: My co-founder and I reached agreement in-principle about equity split. That is until we spoke again months later and it was as if that conversation never happened. Rookie mistake, I hear you laughing, but others are also making this avoiable mistake.
• Talked too much, should have spent more time proving it: A la “onion theory of risk”, I should have spent more time proving my assumptions weren’t bullshit. I should have let traction growth speak for itself. But I spent a lot of time evangelizing and selling instead of doing. I was just another dreamer trying to talk my business into existence.
• Too slow to market: I accepted a part-time team member. For me, the jury is still out on if a part-time entrepreneur can work. It might be possible for some cases, such as team players with smaller roles, but I now believe you have to be fully committed, driving product to the market so you can learn. If the goal is to find product-market fit before cash runs out, then everyone has to be working with the utmost sense of urgency. You can’t be the only co-founder feeling an existential urgency, while your other co-founders are satisfied working on an interesting side project.
• I definitely over-engineered it: I had a moment of realization as I was debating my technical co-founder on the merits of OAuth 2.0. Why was I even focused on that? What I should have focused on was the business’ need for releasing features quickly to test ideas. He strongly advocated building the tech stack from the ground-up (i.e., he wanted the stack to scale, a problem we would never have). I should have persuasively articulated why we should focus on speed-to-market. That might have resulted in him deciding that we could leverage a BaaS (e.g., Parse was an option at the time), or something better. One of my biggest mistakes was that I spent too much time on product development instead of customer development. Why? Because it was fun and creative, and I was focused on the wrong thing.
• Tech wasn’t my silver bullet: Tech was a small piece of the business and I lost sight of the big picture. Other functions were critical to building the business and I had to think beyond product and do things that don’t scale. Creating a billion dollar business by just coding at your desk and never “getting out of the building” is survivorship bias and it deluded me.
• My execution sucked because I didn’t understand the user as much as I should have: It’s tempting to be an arm-chair product person. It’s fun. We can analyze, debate, and sound smart from the comfort of our desk. It takes a tremendous amount of courage and work to meet users in the real world to understand their underserved needs deeply.
• My execution sucked because it was tempting to build something and try to make the user use it: With all the entrepreneurial insights available these days, it’s surprising to see entrepreneurs still believing, “Build it and they will come,” or, “We’ll get more traction once we release feature n.” Unless you are making scientific discoveries or creating radical technological breakthroughs in your basement, you might want to build an application that people want. If I indulge in building something just to build it, I’m an artist, not a problem solver. I am talking about solving people’s most painful problems.

My biggest lesson learned? The idea was fine, but I learned (the hard way) that it is all execution. This experience has deeply influenced my approach to problem solving and building products and businesses that people need.