[0:00]So last year I became the lead software engineer in a new tech startup with two co-founders. We were building this startup for around six months, ending around December of last year, and today I'm here to tell you the story of how the startup failed miserably. So that you can laugh at me and hopefully learn something so you don't make the same mistakes as me. And so that you don't end up spending six months working 70 hours a week only to make $0 at the end of it. I will briefly tell you the story of what we were trying to build, what our idea was, why we thought it was a good idea, and then my theories on why it basically did not end up working and why people did not want this product. And I will sort of try to explain to you the brutal process of what you will have to go through if you try to build a tech company on your own. Just how difficult it is and just how many things there are to consider that you're probably not even thinking about right now if you've never done this before. And then I will tell you what I would do differently today, which I will be once I eventually try again with building a tech startup. And by the way, before anyone worries about me, I'm fine. I already have and already had a successful business that was making me and still is making me tens of thousands of dollars a month. So this was not the kind of thing that was like make or break for me where I have to succeed, where if I don't succeed, I'm going to be broke or anything like that. Like I'm doing fine, you don't have to worry about me, but this is the story of how this particular business completely failed. So I made a full video before on our process of how we built the product, the entire story and everything like that while we were essentially still working on this. So you can watch that right here for the full details, but essentially, the idea started when an old high school friend of mine invited me for coffee in Finland where he basically told me about this idea that that he had for this productivity app that would essentially solve the problem that a lot of us have on our computers when we're trying to work on many different things at the same time, which leads our computers to get very cluttered. We have all of new different things open and a million tabs open on our computers, so we would essentially build this almost AI powered productivity tool that would like automate everything where everything is organized and you can almost open these like folders, what we call boxes, where everything that is related to one particular project would open up at the same time and everything else that you don't need while you're working on that thing would close. And that would sort of be the value proposition. Initially, I was like, well, I don't really have time because I have this YouTube thing and everything like that. But eventually, after I finished unworking my course and things like this, and now I suddenly had a bunch more time, I decided that I was going to join. So we started coding the app. We coded the app for around a few months just between the two of us. Everything was going well, although it was taking already much longer than it was supposed to take. The common advice for startup founders is that you should build something as fast as possible to the point where you can actually give some very broken demo version to someone and sort of start to see if there is any demand for this product and you can start to see how people are using it, things like this. So that was already sort of the first mistake. We had underestimated how long it would take to build this app that we wanted to build, and he ended up being much more complicated as things usually are than we anticipated. At some point, we got a third co-founder to sort of focus on the non-technical sides of the business like marketing, things like this. And eventually, we did get our app to the point where we were able to start giving it to users. We had like a beta version that was honestly pretty good already, like it worked. There were some bugs, but that is completely normal. So we started giving it out to users and this is where actually our morale was at the highest. Because initially the feedback was actually really good. It seemed like everyone we were giving this app to was liking it. But this is where the second mistake comes in. The feedback we got was deceiving, and we were listening to it in the wrong way. If you ever build anything and especially if you're putting a lot of effort and especially if you then give that app to someone who is your friend or who has some reason to be nice to you, they are going to say only nice things about the thing, not because they actually like you, but because they want to be nice to you. And we ended up in this situation a lot where we were giving this thing to people, they were giving good feedback. And they were like, oh, if it just had this one thing, then I would definitely use it. So then what did we do? Well, we went ahead and built that thing that they were asking for. So we ended up with this massive list of features that we just kept adding to the app because we were like, oh, if it just has this one more thing or this one more thing, then it's going to be good enough for us to finally release it and then people are really going to love it. But really what was going on here is that people don't really even know what they want. It's sort of your job as the entrepreneur to figure out what the core problem is that you're trying to solve and make the simplest possible thing to only solve that problem and then give it to people and see if they use it or not. So the reality is that we simply made the app way too complicated. It had way too many features, which made it very difficult for people to start using it. A lot of people who downloaded it simply didn't even know how to use it because it was so complicated and there was so many things on the screen. Which to us because we had spent months every single day working on it, for us it was obvious, well, obviously you do this, but for someone seeing it for the first time, it was not obvious at all. So what we started noticing is that while we were ostensibly getting this really good feedback and people were excited and they were excited to try and things like this, after a few days or sometimes even the first day of people using it, because we were tracking in the analytics of how much people used it, people simply dropped off. They stopped using it. And right, well, why is this? They were asking for these things and we build these things, so why aren't people using it? And I think the core problem with this app was the the problem was not enough of a pain. Like it was not a painful enough problem for people to even bother learning this new tool to solve this problem of having too many things open on your computer. Like it's a problem all of us can understand and recognize in our lives, like right now, I have freaking 10 tabs open on my computer as I'm filming this video, but it's not enough of a problem where I would go out of my way to seek out and learn some tool to solve this problem. So that's another lesson here. If you're building a startup, if you're building a business, you want to make sure that the problem you're solving is a real problem, that's actually really painful for people, so that they will be willing to actually get some new tool, or especially even pay for a new tool to solve that problem. So given that this was still a free app, we never charged any money for this app, because we were going to have a paid version later on after we perfected the first version yet. Given that people were not even using this free version, we were like, well, no one's probably going to pay for this thing. So eventually we just sort of left it. And by the way, the app still exists. You can download it down below in the description if you want to use it. There's still actually some people who actively use this. So at least that makes us feel good. At least there's some people in the world who have found enough use in this app to keep using it every single day. But for most people, that simply wasn't the case, so we decided it's probably not worth the effort to keep working on this. All of us probably have better, higher leverage things that we could be focused on, like I still have my YouTube business. I have a second YouTube channel as well that's already making more than $10,000 a month as well. So I have all of these things that are already generating all this cash flow, so it's much better use of my time for me to just for now focus my attention on that, and then only once I'm at a point where I really had a good problem, a good idea to focus on, and I have the time for it, that is when I'm going to try again with a different business. And a few things that I will do differently next time when I will try to build an app on my own. Number one, I will absolutely not build a productivity app. One thing about building a business that I've learned is that you only want to get into business in something if you have some unfair advantage in that thing. The thing with something like a productivity app, anyone has the ability to understand and to build a productivity app, which leads to the fact that there's a million bazillion productivity tools out there. Because when you're thinking about building some kind of app, usually the first thing you think about is something related to productivity, like automating some things or something like that, which makes it a great thing for beginners to tinker in and things like that.
[8:07]But for a serious business, it's very, very difficult because you have so much competition. But if you think about something very, very specific where you specifically have experience or some expertise that most people are not going to have, that's going to be a much better area for you to build a business. And in the future, I'm only going to build things related to these kinds of things where I have some unfair advantage. The second thing is build something that we can launch in one month. The thing with this app is that it was so technically complex to achieve the thing that we were trying to build, that it just ended up taking so long for us to even get to the point where we were able to give this to people and determine that in the end it wasn't a good idea, that we simply wasted so much time, where if we had focused on something where it's simple to build, it solves a real problem, but it's simple to actually build some kind of working version of it, we could have realized in like two weeks or one month that actually this doesn't make sense and then we could have moved on to the new thing.
[9:03]And that's very, very key when you're building a startup, especially if you don't have a lot of resources, you want to ship fast. This is what people say. Ship fast, see what doesn't work, see what works, see what doesn't work, and if it doesn't work, just kill it and move forward. Because usually, when you're building a business, the first 10 ideas are not going to work, but then there's going to be that one that works. So the faster you can get to the point where you try these 10 ideas first, the faster you're going to get to your first success. And the third reason is I'm only going to focus on some problem that I personally know. Because an entrepreneur, you have to solve a problem. But understanding what is a real problem can be really difficult. You might look at some industry you have no idea about, like in the background there's a bunch of banks out there. You might think about, okay, how can I build an app to solve a problem for banks? The thing is, if you're not a banker, if you have no experience with working in a bank, it's unlikely that you're going to know the real painful problems that bankers have if you don't have any experience. And it's very, very unlikely that you're going to know exactly what is a good solution for for some banker if you haven't been a banker yourself. So for me, next time, what I'm specifically going to do is I'm only going to look at, what are some problems that I really understand? And sort of this ties in with point number one is with having an unfair advantage. If you yourself have experienced that problem, you have an unfair advantage with solving that problem, because you actually understand that problem, which makes you so much more equipped to actually build a solution for it. So I'm only going to look at spaces that I have experience in and build something related to that. It doesn't mean that my next idea is going to succeed. It's still probably going to fail, but at least it's going to have a higher likelihood of success. And if I keep trying enough times, then eventually I'm going to succeed, as happened with my YouTube businesses. I actually had several YouTube channels before the first one succeeded. That is just usually how it works. I hope you can learn something from this video and have some ideas on some insight on what you could do better than me if you're building a business. If you yourself are looking for business ideas that you can build with coding, I actually made a list of the five ideas that I think have a lot of potential. So I recommend you watch this video right here. And previously, I actually interviewed my startup mentor, my startup coach on sort of philosophy of building a startup with coding. So if you want to see that video, you can watch that right here. So watch one of these videos next, and I'll see you in the next one.
