Summary:
Founders often overlook crucial business elements when overly focused on technology.
Feedback alone is not enough to validate product-market fit; real buyer commitment is essential.
Adding features doesn’t guarantee user engagement without addressing the core product-market fit.
Hiring talent requires a supportive ecosystem rather than just financial incentives.
Valuable lessons can be learned from failure, shaping future entrepreneurial success.
Sometimes, founders fall so deeply in love with their technology that they become blind to essential elements needed for a commercially viable business. I’ve been there and learned valuable lessons from my experience.
The Journey to Viblio
In 2013, I left a stable executive role to pursue my passion for building a product company. Armed with a technical cofounder, we aimed to create an AI-based video tagging application to help users organize and relive their family videos. Our team grew to 10, and we launched our product within three years, gaining initial users.
The Hard Truth of Failure
Despite the promising start, we made the difficult decision to shut down Viblio. This was not due to poor execution, but rather three mistaken assumptions that misled us:
Feedback is Sufficient to Prove Product-Market Fit
We sought early feedback from potential customers, believing it validated our idea. However, while people thought our tech was cool, they showed no willingness to pay for it. Instead, we should have created a presell campaign to gauge real interest through buyer commitment.
More Features Will Drive Stickiness
We believed that adding more features would increase user engagement. However, our users uploaded videos and quickly disengaged. We were solving the wrong problem; we needed to focus on achieving true product-market fit.
We Can Hire Who We Need
In a competitive tech landscape, we assumed we could hire the right talent. Unfortunately, our seed funding was insufficient to attract top-tier machine learning specialists. We learned that having a supportive ecosystem is crucial for building a successful team.
Lessons from Failure
Despite shutting down Viblio in 2016, the experience was invaluable. Here are three key lessons I learned:
- Do more with less: We built our platform on a tight budget, highlighting the importance of resourcefulness.
- Prioritize ruthlessly: Not everything that seems necessary actually matters; focus on what drives results.
- Fall in love with the problem, not the solution: Stay passionate about the market you’re in to truly understand it.
Building a startup is a challenging yet rewarding journey, filled with lessons that extend far beyond success or failure.
Comments