Lessons from a failed startup
Explore the terrain first

Thursday 9 June 2022 at 18:00 CEST

In failing to build a company, I have learned many things. Core to all of them is that a company is not a product. Ideas change, products change, people change. We “pivot”, rapidly, relentlessly, sometimes ruthlessly.

Managed well, change is a catalyst. Managed badly, it can be catastrophic.

In this series, I try to explain the various ways in which I failed to understand this, and how I would endeavour to do better next time. You may notice that the style of these posts is more instructive than usual. Remember that these are mostly addressed to my future self, and as such, I am telling myself what to do; you, my dear smart aleck, can do whatever you want.

A map is not the territory. Just because you know where you’d like to be, that doesn’t mean you know how to get there.

So start exploring. Figure out what you don’t know, and make plans for how you’re going to figure it out.

At Prodo, we started out working on intelligent analysis of code to detect common problems—the sort of thing that’s usually caught by a code reviewer, but is mostly a waste of their time (and the reviewee’s, as they’re blocked waiting for review). If we were honest with ourselves, we might have come up with a list as follows:

• very little sales experience
  • practice selling
  • make a few sales before we start the business
• customer base is interested in solutions but entrenched with established players
  • figure out what it would take for someone to switch away from GitHub
  • investigate embedding a product into GitHub, rather than making a whole new thing
• no real expertise in how to apply ML algorithms specifically to code
  • explore the state of the art
  • read a lot of papers
  • make some small models that demonstrate potential
• unsure of the adoption of code review across the board
  • survey a lot of companies to understand their review process
• … and so on

If I’d seen that list, perhaps I’d have hesitated, and asked a lot more questions. Perhaps I would have pushed for a different make-up of founders, or for more practice before we started.

If you can’t see a potential path from here to there, you may not be ready to start a company. That’s alright; you can start exploring now.

More in the series

1. Introduction
2. Focus on the problem, not the solution
3. If the company goals change, the company should probably change too
4. "Do research" is not a corporate strategy
5. Your corporate values transcend your product vision
6. Trust your gut, understand your heart, and open your mind
7. Go to therapy with your co-founders
8. Explore the terrain first
9. Unless someone cares, don't waste your time
10. Code is a liability; ship without coding, if possible
11. Do less, and do it better
12. Agile methods are tools to try more ideas in less time
13. Until you have traction, money is a trap
14. If you don’t know how to do it, that’s your biggest problem
15. Roles can be fluid, but they must be defined
16. Camaraderie is helpful, but no substitute for working together