startups, VC, failure
When Startups Fail: Christopher Herot Talks Frankly About Zingdom’s Shutdown
Wade Roush 12/17/07
(Page 3 of 3)
fixed the problem. And the good news about Flash is that you didn’t have to install any software to run a Flash application.
But at the time there wasn’t any good way to do automated testing of Flash applications. The whole thing about agile development that makes it work is not just embracing change but doing frequent builds and just pressing a button to run all these automated tests to make sure you didn’t break anything. We weren’t ignorant about these agile methods, but given the choices we made about Flash, it was harder to adopt them.
X: In your post, you also admonish companies to “iterate in the marketplace, not the conference room.”
CH: I almost cry thinking about the time we spent agonizing over some feature of the product that we would finally get to market and then the customer would yawn. The guys at 37 Signals wrote a book about their development process and one of the pieces of advice I remember from it is to “make every feature fight for its life.” We put in way more features than our customers could absorb. In hindsight, we would have been better off to go to market sooner with a smaller number of features and waiting until customers asked for the others.
X: What personal lessons are you drawing from all this? Would you think twice now before joining another startup building Web-based software?
CH: Not at all. I’m already talking to some people about another one. But I think the hardest thing to remember is to trust your gut instincts. If you are sitting there in a meeting and everybody else seems to think that some product or feature is going to be a big success and you just can’t imagine why anybody would want to use it, go with your instinct. Stand up and say “This is not going to work.” Or go and work for somebody else. More often that I would care to admit, my instincts were right. Every time something hasn’t worked, I can think back to a point where I said to myself, “I know this isn’t going to work.” But the people around me thought it was a good idea.
X: Okay. Well, thanks for talking with Xconomy, and for writing your post. It seems to me that there’s this phobia of failure among entrepreneurs and investors in New England, and it’s never going to change if people don’t talk about it.
CH: Ask me in six months whether that experience worked out.
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12/17/07 6:26 pm
Wade:
This is a great example of transparency, and reminds me of another startup’s efforts to tell the whole story. Redfin.com, a real-estate startup, revealed the costs of their startup efforts to the world recently, providing many nascent business startups a chance to see the cold, hard numbers instead of hype and obsfucation.
Thank you for this excellent interview. I cross-posted in my blog at the Innovators Network in hopes that some of my readership will visit your sight for more revelations!
Best wishes for the holidays,
Anthony Kuhn
Innovators Network
12/18/07 8:49 pm
Chris & Wade,
Thanks for sharing the real story and the reflections on about how to build a company. Chris’ list of lessons learned at the end of the blog, in particular, is excellent advice for entrepreneurs, new and old. I hope the sober message is actually encouraging and helps others build better companies.
Sincerely,
James Geshwiler
Managing Director, CommonAngels
2/17/08 12:57 pm
Here’s another example of technologists building a business solution in a vacuum…Herot and Zingdom’s key assumption was flawed:: “”instant messaging and “presence” would be a key thing that people would use in business applications”"
Anyone in the corporate world would tell you that adoption rates for zingdom’s solution would be slow to nil because that (zingdom’s solution) is NOT how business users communicate (again a failure in the understanding of the business domain)…This was designed to be a biz solution, NOT building font technology.
The company claims to have used extreme and agile development practices, yet failed the fundamental step of capturing biz requirements. Herot reminisces that he approved feature requests which he knew were “lipstick on a pig”, but his failure to prioritize requirements (which includes rejecting useless features) shows lack of leadership. Ultimately the investors pays for this mistake by not getting any return on their capital.
The VC’s should have insisted on the market validating the biz’s critical assumption before continuing to pump $30M into a venture and the company iterating its product strategy as if they were nightly builds. Ultimately if the VCs do not take action, the market always does it by not accepting the solution.
2/27/08 11:05 pm
While some might espouse this as just desserts, I would thank Mr. Herot for his honest and frank conversation. There is little offerings of how a business fails, except what I have read above.
What I would have offered was a more immediate marketing of there system. Followed by a slow build up of embedded corporate partners. I hope whatever Mr Herot’s next venture brings he succeeds.
When any of my friends have embarked on a career in software, some engineers some artists, they have all experienced what I call the silicon valley triangle. A project heads out never to…
That will not happen with Zingdom (Mr. Herot’s IP), it will pop up here and there, in this and that. Remember Gary Kildall, we will always see c: etc. in the background.
I too hope to someday find “angels” to fund my visions. Until then the lowest hanging fruit of the VCs will more than likely succeed due availability and pervasiveness.