We have launched Akashvani, later we renamed it to toupp.com
This was an anonymous feedback sharing app. At that time there was a viral app so we copied that completely.
No business thought process,
No research or nothing.
We also wanted to become viral and successful.
What happened then?
No surprise, we launched and no one knew.
We didn’t go viral.
We have generated ZERO traction, literally.
Why?
Well, the learning is huge so the answers are many. Let’s explore some important thought process that we missed:
❌ Copied product is a less serious roadmap that lead to failures in most of the cases.
❌ Lack of vision brings no-excitement with the product you are building.
❌ Product development is one aspect but marketing is another and in fact major.
❌ You can copy development, but you can copy marketing.
❌ We forgot that they got viral, and going viral is not a specific framework, sometimes anything goes viral.
❌ It was viral, it doesn’t mean it was an useful product.
❌ Going viral is an exceptional marketing phenomenon that happens very rare.
❌ Fit to market and user requirement was never assessed as we were in hurry to just copy it.
❌ A research was very important to understand if such a product is a fit to a demography we are building for or if our audience is ready or not?
❌ If one product was already Viral and people are using it, why they will use my app even if they come to know? There was no philosophy to define why my app is a better alternative.
❌ It was just, COPY all feature, Push it on app store, let the people search and download and you will start generating traction automatically.
❌ But we forgot that world is full of people with same attitude, i.e. “do nothing and earn more”. Soon there were hundreds of such apps in the app store. Many were published ahead of us.
This list is long, we have learnt a big lesson…
We changed our mindset on how to approach to a product development and that helped us to apply this failed mechanism in consulting our customers as well.
In fact we now apply the same learnings while choosing our customers. We refrain from startups, who call them one but they are not actually more than copier.
A real startup means a business that is solving something and not the replica of already working business.
We are enlightened with that one mistake, we burnt our money and that helped us to save a lot for our customers.
We are glad that we failed 🙂
We now ask:
- The stage of the customer
- Their seriousness
- Philosophies
- Objectives
- Roadmap for 1-3 years
- Vision
- Problem that they want to solve
- How?
- Why?
And most importantly what’s their marketing budget and plan, without which no startup will thrive.
Do it bootstrap or funding, you must have to have 3X of the money in your hand than you are going to spend on product development.
#startupmistakes #startup #bootstrap #donotcopy #clickableprototype #mvp #startsmallwinbig
A fascinating discussion is definitely worth comment. I do think that you ought to publish more about this topic, it may not be a taboo subject but typically people dont speak about such issues. To the next! Many thanks!!