3 Lessons From Our "Failures" at Startup
Lessons Learned After One Year of Founding the Company and Being Interviewed by Top Accelerators.
The big picture above is how we started the company — in a small basement in Seattle. We turned the small kitchen into our working space so that we could balance our life and work, yes, just by simply combining them together. We are the lucky ones, but also the miserable ones. We got invited to the interview by those top accelerators/investors including Y Combinator, PearX, and Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator (ERA), but got rejected by all of them afterward.
We started two cool AI projects together in the last year but decided to put them on hold for a while (maybe later we will pick them up again). These projects remained unpublished, buried in our GitHub directories for a long time, but the lessons we learned from them are invaluable. We love all of them as we love our kids.
Lesson 1: Less is More
Probably you've heard about this thousands of times, feeling like a cliché. But here we want to share some very painful lessons we learned from past failures. This may not apply to all startups, especially hard-tech businesses making cool things, so we only talk about our case as a consumer-facing product.
During our first product, we made something which was to use AI to create a virtual space, and we also wanted to shape it into a developer platform inviting many developers to develop AI tools for creating virtual space. It sounds very confusing, right? Yes, it does. During our interview with the founder of Twitch, OpenAI’s Interim CEO Emmet Shear at Y Combinator, he asked one simple question that none of us could answer.
“YouTube’s fundamental unit is a video, Twitter’s fundamental unit is a message post, so how about yours?”
And we got rejected, and the reason was the same as you imagined: he did not understand what we were doing. We then realized how important it was to keep our ideas as simple as possible because at the end of the day, as a consumer-facing product, we need to talk. We need to talk with many stakeholders, including our users, investors, and also our team. How could we expect our users to explain our product to their friends by saying, "I found something really cool, it's a developer platform for inviting developers to develop AI tools for creating virtual spaces." That just wouldn't work. We are living in an era where people may have limited attention, so we would keep our product as simple as enough to make our users easily understand and use it.
Because at the end of the day, we need to talk. Talking with many people. I personally love one sentence said by our marketing executive Roman,
“In the design field, if you don’t know what is a good feature to be added, then start by removing one.”
Lesson 2: User is always the first
Another cliché? No, it is not. Let me share with you that all those failed projects made the same mistake: not getting to users as soon as possible. We were overly confident in our technical abilities, but we ended up building something that people didn't actually want. If there was a time machine, I would tell our team one year ago to build a great relationship with our users first and then develop along with the users, instead of the other way around.
In the last two projects, we think we eventually built something that “we” want instead of what our “users” want, and we failed to target the right problem that people really face. Back then, I constantly asked myself, "We can use AI to create virtual spaces, so then what? What is that for?" Hard to say, so probably we were on the wrong track.
Lesson 3: Short-term rewards.
This eventually is not a cliché! But can be a bit counterintuitive as well. I know many successful entrepreneurs said time was your friends, that was very true, and we are not short-sighted. However, to be honest, starting up a great company was way harder than we thought in the first place because
"The worst thing is NOT having negative feedback, BUT having no feedback at all. "
That was one of the most tortuous things that a homo sapiens could go through. We are living in a biological nature that needs Dopamine, especially TikTok’s short videos raised our bar on that, developing us strong Dopamine-resistance nowadays. So, please do not hesitate to give yourself rewards, even a small piece of milestone achieved deserves it. That may be one of the greatest ways to keep delivering a great product after decades.
Final Remark
In the title, I said the word “Failures,” but there is never one existing, just like you would never lose your money in the stock market if you don’t sell it. Bad dad joke, but that is very true. Our world is dynamically changing, we would never know how today’s so-called “failures” would shape our future, and
" If failures really exist, that is what makes our company great. We love them."