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Devver , maker of developer coding tools and TechStars 2008 graduate, announced last Monday that it would be shutting down after being active for nearly two years. News of a startup closing up shop is never a fun thing to hear about, but fortunately many lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of the entrepreneurs. Today, co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff provided just such lessons with an insightful blog on the Devver journey and why he and co-founder Dan Mayer are choosing to move on. Sponsor An unfortunate truth about startup culture is that a lot of the most valuable lessons are learned when entrepreneurs fail to heed them. Some notice their mistakes early on and can pivot their products and business toward a more successful future, but sometimes they don’t realize their mistakes until its too late and there is nothing that can be done. This was the case with Brinckerhoff, Mayer and their startup, Devver, which they say failed to focus enough on one of the most important parts of building a startup: customer development. As Brinckerhoff points out in Monday’s blog post, the company assumed they had found their minimum viable product (MVP), and as a result focused more on product development than listening to customers’ needs. “You can teach a hacker business, but you can’t make him or her get excited about it, which means it may not get the time or attention it deserves.” – Ben Brinckerhoff “Our mistake at that point was to go ‘heads down’ and focus on building the accelerator while minimizing our contact with users and customers (after all, we knew how great it was and time spent talking to customers was time we could be hacking!),” writes Brinckerhoff. “We should have [been] asking, ‘Is there an even simpler version of this product that we can deliver sooner to learn more about pricing, market size, and technical challenges?’.” Both Brinckerhoff and his co-founder are “technical founders,” which means their specialities are on the development side, not the business side. The only other person the pair hired to help out, a fellow software developer, also fits into the technical side of the startup. Brinckerhoff says this may have been one of the hurdles that led to the downfall of the company. “Looking back, it would have been to our advantage to have a third founder who really loved the business aspect of running a startup,” writes Brinckerhoff. “Having solely technical founders is non-optimal. You can teach a hacker business, but you can’t make him or her get excited about it, which means it may not get the time or attention it deserves.” Brinckerhoff also adds that having a split team located in different states contributed to the company’s struggles, but it seems to me it was more of a hassle than a reason for failure. Split teams are actually growing in popularity and probability for success, as we discussed earlier in the year with companies like Blank Label and chocri . Devver undoubtedly had issues with its split setup, but its likely that it didn’t contribute toward its closing as significantly as the other errors. Regardless of this issue, its clear that the Devver team learned and shared some valuable lessons about the importance of customer development. As Steve Blank noted during his presentation at last week’s Startup Lessons Learned conference, startups shouldn’t be too eager to product management before customer development. Devver may have jumped the gun a bit in terms of over developing their product, so learn from their mistake and remember to develop your customers before throwing the kitchen sink at them. Discuss
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Learning From Failure: One Startup’s Story of What Went Wrong
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Yesterday I spoke with lean startup guru Eric Ries who is hosting the Startup Lessons Learned conference this Friday in San Francisco and at live simulcasts around the world. Ries says he considers entrepreneur turned educator turned public servant Steve Blank to be his mentor in the startup world, and Blank will be among Ries’ lineup of speakers at this week’s conference. Blank will give a talk he’s titling, “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups,” (or Customer Development 2.0 on the conference site ) which details the major differences between startups and large companies – a speech whose slides Blank posted to his blog via SlideShare late last week. Sponsor According to Blank, the line he draws between smaller startups and larger companies is based around the business model. Startups, he says, exist in the state where they are searching for a business model, and large companies are the result of finding and executing that business model. The reason he calls out accountants in the title of his talk is that as startups transition into larger companies, their less conventional methodologies become more traditional, and that’s when accountants are needed. Early on, startups, in his opinion, should rely on such metrics as customer acquisition cost, viral coefficient, customer lifetime value, and monthly burn rate. These types of measurements become de-emphasized in larger companies which focus on balance sheets, cash flow statements and income statements, Blank says. Parallel ways in which startups transition into larger companies include customer development giving way to product management, and agile development becoming engineering. Early-stage companies, searching for a business model and for customer traction, will test hypotheses, discover their minimum feature sets, and pivot their focus if things don’t work out, he says. Product management takes over once a viable model is found. One of the major stepping stones toward becoming a successful larger company, Blank says, is discovering the winning model or process and focusing on making it work over and over. Entrepreneurs begin their startups with a hatred for processes, but learn to love and implement processes as the company grows into a profitable business. Passionate focus transitions to focus on the company’s mission, and ultimately to the execution of that mission. Blank wraps up his presentation by drawing the same lines between two types of education, business school and entrepreneurship school. Business school, he says, is far better suited for teaching students to run larger companies, while startups need founders with better entrepreneurial training. These ideas merely scratch the surface at what Blank is likely to dive into during his 45 minutes presentation Friday afternoon, so be sure to check out the event if you’re in San Francisco, or find a live simulcast to attend in your area. Photo by Flickr user dux_carvajal . Discuss
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Steve Blank On How Startups Evolve Into Large Companies
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Back when I was in graduate school getting my masters in journalism and mass communication, I worked on various “lab projects” which were challenges faced by media organizations that they wanted to tackle but didn’t have the means or the resources to do so. So basically, the students at my school were a think tank for the local media. One of the first issues we were tasked with investigating was finding a new way to allow comments for online news stories to be more efficient and less offensive. Sponsor The problem faced by most online news sites is that the anonymous nature of the Internet makes it very easy for vulgarity and off-putting comments to be posted, and for some sites, these types of comments pervade their site. Many of today’s popular sites with comments have integrated systems to where readers can vote down bad comments while promoting good comments, which helps the bad stuff to be filtered out. Others have tried blocking fowl language with asterisks or by deleting the comment automatically, but this has only lead users to find unique ways of spelling their beloved curse words. Some startups, like Disqus , have made it much easier to manage comments, and identity tools like OpenID and Facebook Connect have helped to lower the amount of anonymous commenters on the web, but anonymity is a fundamental cornerstone of Internet culture. Or is it? In a recent New York Times article about how many news sites are starting to remove anonymous commenting, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post said she thinks that anonymity is losing its once exalted position atop the foundation of the Web. “Anonymity is just the way things are done. It’s an accepted part of the Internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments,” says Huffington. “I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.” Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures says there is plenty of room for innovation within comment boards. Wilson uses Disqus on his blog and has some suggestions for features they could include to make the commenting experience better, but he believes one of the ways to innovate in the space is to introduce game mechanics into commenting. “Game mechanics will reward the kind of behavior the community wants and will punish the kind of behavior the community does not want,” writes Wilson on his blog. “The anonymous commenter who has valuable information but can’t publish in their own name will be rewarded. The anonymous commenter who leaves a hostile name calling piece of crap will be punished. And the comment thread and community will be better off for it.” Entrepreneurs that strive to create a truly innovative product usually first start with a problem that needs solving, and comment systems are certainly a problem that needs solving. Therefore by some transitive property, innovation in the commenting space seems to be an open door of opportunity for startups to walk through and offer a solution. Are there other companies like Disqus that may be looking to disrupt the traditional comment system, or do you have an idea for making the process more user friendly? Let us know your thoughts on the state of comments and how you would change them in our very own comments section below! Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb. Discuss
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Comment Innovation: An Open Door of Startup Opportunity?
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For most startups in the early-stages of development, much of the building process includes repetitions of prototyping, testing, receiving feedback and iterating the product several times over. The toughest part of this process isn’t building or making changes, it’s getting that valuable feedback on where your product could be improved. Concept Feedback , a simply named online service, wants to help your startup with constructive criticism from its quickly growing community of over 5,000 designers, developers, marketers and entrepreneurs. Sponsor The process at Concept Feedback is pretty simple: users can upload their concept work for the community to view, other members comment and provide their opinions and feedback for the concept, then the original user can upgrade their product, and even resubmit for further feedback. Companies can choose to post a “premium concept” which will be more visible on the Concept Feedback homepage and for which they can offer cash rewards for the most constructive comment or piece of advice. Most of the items are site are full web or logo design mockups, but there were a few rough wire-framed sites scattered through the concepts. Other, less popular entries, include films, posters, business cards and a whole lot more. For a small startup team looking to get some fresh sets of eyeballs on their latest project, Concept Feedback could be an excellent resource to do so. With most of the feedback based around design and aesthetics, startups may still need to look elsewhere for direct usage and feature feedback for their product. The truth is, with this type of feedback, you want people taking a deep dive and playing around with your product for some time before providing their opinion; Concept Feedback seems geared at providing mostly visual feedback, so usability and functionality reviews are much less common. There are several ways of gathering feedback from actual users of your site; one such service we mentioned in January allows companies to automate phone surveys and displays the results as charts and graphs. But if your goal is to show off the latest design iteration of your site, Concept Feedback is a great place to unveil it and receive some educated opinions to make it look its best before launch day. Discuss
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Get Quick Impressions of Your Latest Product Iteration with Concept Feedback
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One of my favorite blogs to peruse now and then for amazing advice on web design is Webdesigner Depot which produces excellent in depth guides for various design related issues. Monday they produced an excellent in depth post that provides a step-by-step breakdown of best practices for creating a screen-cast for a Web page , a feature many startups like to include on their homepage to familiarize new visitors with their product. Sponsor This article focuses on the creation of live screen capture videos of someone demoing the website, but I think a lot of this same methodology can go into creating any sort of introductory video a company uses to explain their site. The first step, as with any project, is to plan, and the first questions you need to ask yourself before you even start to storyboard include “What do we want to accomplish with this video?” and “How detailed do we want to get?” Once you figure out the content, length, tone, and medium of your video, then move on to storyboarding. Storyboarding is an important step in creative processes such as these because it is much easier to visualize the end product before putting any real technical effort in. Filmmakers don’t just storyboard as a way to outline their plot, they use it to do early edits to the film before wasting any time shooting stuff that will never make it past the cutting room. By getting a storyboard of your production down, you may realize it’s too long, too boring or not informative enough; you can determine these flaws by showing the storyboard to anyone unfamiliar with your product and then use their feedback to make alterations. “The more detail in your storyboards, the easier the editing stage will be,” writes Stu Green, author of the post on Webdesigner Depot. “Your storyboard will help you stay organized throughout the whole process, and if you ever get lost while producing the video, the storyboard will get you back on track.” If you plan on doing a straight screen-capture demo, don’t just wing it; make sure you script out what you’re going to say as you demo the site. Additionally, spend a few extra bucks on a nice microphone to record your voice – quality audio goes a long way in video production. Of course there are options that don’t include a voice-over, but as Green points out, having one provides that human aspect to your video that will better connect with viewers. Green provides a healthy list of options for software to record you screen-capture videos with, including Screenium , Jing , CamStudio , iShowU and Captivate . One nice option that I find is overlooked these days is the screen capture abilities included with the standard version of Quicktime on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. For a low budget product, Quicktime can get the job done, but if you wan’t something a little more pro looking, one of the aforementioned applications will help also. As the article continues, Green goes over techniques and methods for creating an interesting and captivating video, including things like pacing, editing techniques, and how to promote the video on the website. But if you’d rather not go through all this trouble on your own, there are a number of production houses that specialize in these types of videos. One I always come back to when talking about these types of videos with friends is Common Craft , which you may know for their “In Plain English” series of videos. While they make videos to explain complex ideas “in plain English,” the artists at Common Craft also will create custom videos for companies. A visit to the homepage of Dropbox displays a video explainer of the product created by Common Craft in their easy-to-grasp paper cut-out stop-motion style. Other clients of theirs include Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meetup and Intel. Another production studio that makes similar videos is Epipheo Studios , which I learned about through watching a video explaining how Yelp’s review filter works. Epipheo is also responsible for some of the Google Chrome OS and Google Wave videos you’ve seen, as well as videos for doubleTwist, and Zoho to name a few. Videos such as these can go a long way in helping to rope in new visitors to your site. These can also be useful for an early stage company looking for a quick and unique way to explain their concept to potential investors, though I sometimes think it is better to be able to explain things through words as well. That being said, don’t rely too heavily on these videos as pitch material, but rather as a link you can forward to hopefully garner interest in your idea. Be sure to check out the full Webdesigner Depot article by Stu Green , as it is brimming with useful information regarding screen-cast production. Discuss
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How to Create a Killer Explainer Video for Your Startup
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