Singulution: Story and lesson learned from a startup failure
A point of sale & business management solution for multi-location vendors. What could go wrong?
Singulution is one of Silicon Valley’s infamous startup failures. The startup was launched in 2017 by a software engineer, Hunt Burdick, who worked in Silicon Valley at the time he decided to build Singulution.
Singulution connected all the vendors that were spread at different locations on a single platform. The company aimed to provide a modern application to merge critical business functions and work as a sales & business management solution for the end-users.
After 10 months and burning $30,000 — the founder failed to validate his business idea and became bankrupt.
In an interview, the founder self-reflected on the reasons for failure and updated that he did not conduct proper market validation first. He concentrated too much on his own thoughts of what people needed and overlooked market analysis and customer feedback to understand what they actually needed. By 2018, Singulution was eventually absorbed into another startup called E-DealerDirect.
The startup was happened to be a bad market fit. The founder, Hunt Burdick, ran out of money before he could manage to reach the stage of launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). He says, “I kept it a secret and made it too monolithic. The number of features and the complexity of the system made it difficult to get to the MVP stage.”
Hunt focused largely on building an advanced technical infrastructure, rather than working on the core functionality of the product first and releasing the first version to obtain customer response. Because doing that could have given a number of benefits and would have defined the viability of Hunt’s idea.
To me, the Singulution story is one of a company that could have generated huge revenue but lacked the right strategy, mindset, and customer perspective. To become a successful startup, if you’re in need of the correct approach, consult for free with Psmorfia. The developers can help you kick off your project with MVP development and validate its usability.
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