Two mistakes I don’t want to do again
From 2012 to late 2014 I ran a small startup with two co-founders. Our product was a subscription service for children’s books on iPad. We raised a small seed round, built the product, grew it to a few hundred subscribers, but eventually failed and shut down the company.
This blog post is meant as a reminder to my future self, as I don’t want to redo any of the mistakes I did.
We did a lot of mistakes of course, but there are two that I think are unforgivable, and thus deserves to be mentioned and warned about.
Mistake 1 — Not solving a proper problem
Most of our mistakes boils down to not solving a real problem. If we had gotten this one right, our chance of finding product-market-fit would have been much better. Had we done that, all other mistakes might not have mattered at all.
Our product wasn’t crap. A lot of parents and kids liked the app. It was nice to have a lot of books inside one app. Some were quite good actually. And it was safe place for the kids at a fairly good price.
However, we were actually just yet another kids app, with a slightly different business model and more content.
We weren’t solving any big pain points, just a little scratch. After we failed, I promised myself that I’d never start a company again unless it’s solving an actual problem.
Mistake 2 — Being easily copyable
If you’re creating an entertainment app for the App Store you’re almost destined to lose, at least statistically. It’s only room for ten apps in the top ten list, and you’re not only competing against the apps that are released similarly as yours — as you would with physical kids books for example — you’re competing against all other kids book apps that have ever been launched and still exists in the store.
With so many alternatives available, you better have some way of keeping the customers once you’ve gotten them.
Call it network effect, competitive advantage, protection strategy or whatever you want. Just something that makes it hard for other companies to copy your product and steal all your customers. Because they will if they can.
In future venues, I’m going to think very closely about this before I jump into something.
You should too.
