The Doom lies in yourself, not in your name
That’s a Tolkien quote. You’d be hard pressed to find a line more applicable to start-ups than that. Except perhaps for “not all those who wander are lost”.
Two things have just happened. 1. Jelly, a start-up founded by Biz Stone (the twitter guy), with over a million users world-wide, has just shut shop within 2 years of going live. Oh that’s relevant because Jelly (a crowd-sourced search engine) was fairly similar to what Dekkoh does (though our objectives differ). 2. I’ve just watched the finest ever South African team (full of superstars) lose a nail-biting world-cup semi-final to New Zealand (no superstars, just good all-round cricketers) in the most heart-breaking fashion ever. And so this post is an analysis of doom, and how some ventures are doomed to fail, which is rather poignant given that Dekkoh is now 17 days away from launch.
Background: Jelly was a crowd-sourced search engine intended to let a user ask a question and get an answer from someone else, anywhere in the world. Basically, you could just take a picture of anything and ask a question about anything. No limits, no filters, no restrictions. It was based on the fact (or hope) that people want to help people, and more so online. Dekkoh is based on a similar assumption. When there is already a big player in your field, you tend to take their presence as validation of the market you’re entering, and when that big player fails, it sends shockwaves throughout that market. What then do you do when that leader, a giant backed by inter alia Greylock, Spark and even Bono & Al Gore, calls it quits? All of this is before you’ve technically even entered the market (did I say Dekkoh is 17 days from launch?).
Dekkoh is based on the belief that certain people know certain things best, and these people are willing to help certain other people. We’re targetting certain kinds of locals, trying to incentivise it for them to share their local knowledge on Dekkoh, with people in their locality who need it specifically. And because it’s based on this neighbourly spirit, we’re calling Dekkoh the India’s friendly neighbourhood search engine. So there is similarity to Jelly, our goals are different, we’re far narrower and focussed, and our target audience is much much smaller for whom we’re definitely solving a pain point (stay tuned for what & how Dekkoh is & works in the next post).
Looking at why Jelly failed: they couldn’t get enough people to seek help online. True, there were lots of people willing to help the ones that did, but very little of the interaction was meaningful. Most people took pictures of rocks or lizards and asked what they were, some others posted questions (with pictures) to the tune of “how do I get this stain out of my underwear?” and “is that fungus on my big toe?” In many ways it became a forum for the ridiculous. Conventional wisdom would suggest that we re-think our decisions in the light of this.
But we remain 17 days from launch. About 421 hours to be precise. Just as I’m sure South Africa will come out all guns blazing in 2019 England.
