Update (10/12): Looks like we’re delaying the launch just a bit!
This Friday my new startup Socialfly is going public, in some fashion at least. We’re still building the product (and hiring!) but we’ve decided to throw caution in the wind and launch SOMETHING to get out to people, something we’ll improve rapidly. On the eve of this something being launched, I feel like it’d be important to reflect on how we got here.
Initially, it was just a personal pain point - an annoyance in socializing that I thought I was the only one that had. I talked with people and started to realize they had the same problem - it’s hard to keep up with people, it’s getting harder as the way people communicate evolves, and no product seems to be built around this new reality. My co-founder Dick quickly saw the potential in the idea and we agreed it’d be a fun project. One boring day in January I did what I always do - put it into pixels. What’s one way I can solve this problem?
In spots like this, it’s hard to tell if you’ve got a feature or a product. Being a feature sucks, because the threshold to usage is often too high for users. If a user at all values their time, do you give them more value back for that time, and are you memorable enough for them to actually come back?
Initially, this answer was no. We thought it would be useful for us though, so we continued occasionally updating it for 3 months, going through about 2 or 3 creative destruction phases each consisting of finding the one need the current version can’t meet, going back and culling the complexity, going through ‘creators block’, and finally discovering and exploring a new possibility space.
In May, Socialfly finally met our threshold for being a product (still titled ‘Fatty Tuna’ though!) - it was valuable enough and easy enough for us to want to use it, and it had potential to grow. We brought on our genius engineer James, and the summer quickly passed as we tried to hit the moving targets of the Facebook API (including the new profile launch) and the iPhone SDK. Lots of hacking and cheap tricks were involved. However, our target product experience was not a cheap trick or hack - we wanted a professional, powerful app that showed off what was possible on these platforms.
September rolled around and we felt we had something. The first version wasn’t even done by the time V2 was designed, based on what we learned by using broken betas. We set up an office in my garage and began hosting design workshops with users. The reality of the pain point was clear, and our designs in how to solve them resonated with the potential users we talked to. The real insight we gained though was that we were the right people to solve it.
The biggest challenge we faced in our last startup was figuring out what a bunch of 10 year olds wanted out of an education videogame. This required extensive user testing and at the end we still weren’t confident we could predict the user’s interest level. With Socialfly, this just hasn’t been a problem - we know what we like and need, and we know there are lots of people out there just like us. Mark Leslie reminded us this was the value of ‘authenticity’ in entrepreneurship - going after an opportunity not because it is just an opportunity, but because your passion for it is authentic, and your knowledge of the problem is deep.
Now in October, we’ve hashed out our business case and are ready to test our assumptions. We’re at a point where we know we have a really solid direction we’re going in both in business and product. I’m a big believer in the ‘just point yourself in the right direction’ philosophy (this was hammered into our heads by Andy Rachleff back at GSB). As long as you’re good at self-correction and learning, a few key decisions make up for all the other bad decisions you might make. After a many week process of building out our business case, we’re now confident we’ve made at least one of these key decisions and we’re excited about the challenges ahead.
I guess that wraps up the reflection for now. This Friday, we’re going to find out whether we’ve gotten an fbFund grant - it’s a big question mark as to what level of interest and opportunity that will result in. Excitement is high.