August 3: I Failed. Do, Learn, Adapt and Repeat Differently.

I am mothballing my ServiceChat startup experiment.

After six months, I have to admit to myself that ServiceChat has no legs. People who I thought should be interested are not and actually trying to find people interested is proven too difficult for my abilities. The lack of interest is itself great feedback – if you struggle to find 10 customers how impossible will it be to find 100? So as it stands, I don’t have a marketable product, nor even one I can get customers to use. So I’m done with it.

My enduring philosophy in life is failing fast – not only because it costs less financially but also because it costs less emotionally. I want to fail fast because it means I can get to the next thing sooner – and with the learning I make from each ‘failed’ idea – I increase the probability of future success.

Here is my check in:

Sad that ServiceChat is not going any where and that I am mothballing it. Nothing ever truly dies. But for now – learn, adapt, repeat.
Sad that I have unanswered questions – for example why could I not get people interested, what was truly incorrect about my choice of customer segments.
Glad that I now know a lot more where my strengths are and I can better make decisions about how to address those areas I suck at.
Glad that I am much clearer about what my passion is. Without this, I will fail on any startup before I even begin. I really didn’t know this before. Now I know that all the ideas I care the most about are about harnessing diversity and connecting people so they can be better informed, make better decisions and generally be happier and more joyful.
Glad that I learned that I need to experiment more about what idea I want to build a startup business around. For this I need to take a fundamentally different approach (more lab like and less startup like).
I’m grateful for all the help, concern and love I’ve had this last 6 months.

I’m out of ServiceChat. I’m in with life.

Improve On

Do more research about competitors, partners and the problem.
Get MVPs out faster. Find more creative ways to test the idea out – without necessarily coding a damn thing!
Understand the marketing channels from day 1 – it is by far the most important thing and the riskiest one for me. I assumed that good ideas would naturally float and become viral – they don’t.
Fail faster than 6 months. Ideally 6 weeks.

What Next?

ServiceChat was based on monetising ChittyChat for business. ChittyChat as a free tool was mildly successful with absolutely no marketing. I will work to reinstate it with the enhancements I made whilst focusing on ServiceChat.
I see a need for a more usable answer to public group chats on Twitter using hashtags. The current solutions are crap. The tech that drives much of ServiceChat can help me build something for me to use twitter hashtag chats better. I will experiment with this.
Bizbuzz is providing interesting insights into how people connect with business and the deep lack of consumers connecting with each other. This is an exciting space to explore – I will continue to mine this for insight and blog about what I discover.

July 12: Traction not tractors

By: D. Miller – CC BY 2.0

Traction is vital, getting early customers to commit to using what I’m offering is very important. Both are vital and important for my finances and startup growth, sure – but mostly for my sanity.

I’m a maker and an artist. I make the art that is in my head. Many of the things I make are because I had a problem and I expressed a way to solve them. When I bring them to the market (as ineptly as I do) and expect some meaningful response, I am investing emotional energy into that. I care that I get a response – much more than the nature of that response. I can handle praise and rejection but much less so, apathy.

So my new strategy of trying to be found by prospective customers is off to a slow start, but a start nonetheless. Here is my check in:

Mad that I am really struggling to keep my schedule on track, my options for being flexible are limited when I start late and end later. If I start on time (9.30) , I am actually far more flexible to do other stuff (like going to the beach!) because I would have made some progress.
Glad that I can changed most things to get back to routine – this is a really valuable thing about working for myself.
Glad I had another idea and my technique for welcoming them and giving them a slot to explore them is successful at keeping me focused on finishing
I’m grateful for having different onion skins to other people and having mine not constrain me from being myself.

I’m in (onion skins and all).

Improve On…

Being a better marketeer – better meaning braver, more authentic, more dedicated, better organised. Avoid the schmoltz.

Being a better researcher – everything – my potential customers, competitors , collaborators.

Today

The trello board says it all. basically as much of the stuff I have on there as possible. Mostly blogs. But absolutely must…

Write ServiceChat blog post on ‘I am the greatest customer service expert in the world’.

Do some promotion work on Twumps and ServiceChat and get at least 20 unique visitors to each today.

The Trello board…

Ask yourself if you are doing everything^* you can to be successful

^{* – whilst remaining congruent with your values, fair to those you love and kind to yourself}

July 9 – Back away from the code, slowly.

By: Pascal – CC BY 2.0

Every passing day re-affirms my fear. I have to back away from the code, close the IDE – quit doing what I love doing and start doing the other thing.
You know – the other thing, the hitting-the-phone, sell-your-vision, learn-the-problems, discover-your-customers, dine-with-rejection-and-unreturned-emails thing, you know Customer Development!

Now, I have a world of love for Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Steve Blank and the other luminaries of the startup world. But they really could have done a better job of communicating how bloody tough it is to get to talk to customers, to handle the silence and the find the courage to carry on until you find the data you need (some might argue that the lack of feedback is plenty feedback – that is a different story).

This afternoon, I had the pleasure of 30 minutes of conversation with Kevin DeWalt, a really awesome and interesting guy with plenty of experience of creating companies and helping startups. He graciously offers 30 mins of free help to founders and startups via his site. I’ll blog more about that on a later post. Anyway, Kevin was really pragmatic and his view was really similar to @saintsal’s (from a couple of weeks ago). I have to spend most of my time out of the building, pounding the phones, the emails, knocking on doors (virtual and otherwise) and really get to meet prospects, so I can learn.

The last couple of weeks have presented some opportunities that I fully intend on exploring. So , what is my strategy?

I won’t be chasing customers. I tried that and they weren’t interested in talking to me. My new strategy is to help them find me – well at least this is my strategy for the next 3 weeks.
This means interviews, blogs and asking powerful questions about how all the businesses I am coming across do customer service. My intention is that these questions will attract the right people.
So it’s not so much ‘build it and they will come’, but more ‘ask it and the right people will answer’.

With this in mind, here is my check in.

Glad I have a plan, being lost is no fun when you got somewhere to go.
Glad there are people like Kevin DeWalt, Flavio Martins, @saintsal and Ian Golding who are open and invite you to seek their collaboration. Of course it is mutually beneficial – but their openness to connect is amazing.
Really mad that I’m succumbing to carbs – the sugary kind.
I’m grateful for the ability to reflect on my thoughts and the brilliance of others.

I’m in.