Springboard

Love this site! Thanks to Stuart Battersby of Chatterbox for crafting today’s post, which we can surely all relate to and make good use of…

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Failing sucks – we wanted something that we cared about to happen, to work – it didn’t. Shit .  I’m not arguing that failing at something is damn annoying, but it’s not true that it’s totally bad – there’s usually some unintended good output or maybe something that was learned so that next time we can do it better.  @positivefail (or positivefail.com) is here to try and get people sharing some of these experience.  In a nutshell you tweet what the failure was and what you learned from it with the hashtag #positivefail.  If you can tolerate my mind ramblings (and potentially take them with a pinch of salt!), read on and I’ll give you a little context to it…

@positivefail, or something like it, had been on my mind for a little while before making it (free plug: it looks awesome because of Xiaoying).  I’m Stuart, a co-founder of Chatterbox which we formed last year after I completed my PhD.  At this point I had a decision that I needed to make – I could go and find a job, it may end up being a really cool job and I’d have a nice income. Sorted.  The other option probably couldn’t really pay me and had no guarantee of working, however it did sound bloody interesting, was based on something that I (and my co-founder Matt) had worked hard on so far, and if it worked it would really work!  As I spoke through my options with some people a common theme popped up: what if it all goes wrong?  At first I was mildly annoyed at the negativity I was getting (granted, not everyone was negative, but it was present).  But maybe that was the wrong way to think?  I was only viewing the really bad side of the potential failure.

I think the points are that 1) people can be really put off from doing something due to the fear of failing (I nearly was) and 2) I think we can be overwhelmed by the blatant negatives involved with the failure.  These are both inherently connected problems. I think that, in taking on or doing something moderately risky, one needs to not shy away from the fact that it *may* not work out as we hope.  We can easily see the wonderful & beautiful goal of it working, but preparing yourself for it not to is essential too.  What could be taken from the process that went wrong this time that has made you stronger and more informed so that next time, it could go better?  Look at the longer term picture, not just the short term.  And further, if we can see that we’re not the only ones who feel like this, and that many others do, then it may be that little easier to see those positives.  Right now Chatterbox is growing well and fingers crossed this will carry on, but there is always the chance it won’t and I have to be real about that.  It’s early days, but through the process already I’ve learned, for example, much about developing a relevant & targeted product, the value of effective networking, experience building scalable business models, how to programme Django, and more.  Along side this I’ve met some awesome people in the London startup community.

Now clearly my context, and this blog, is geared towards the start-up world.  But surely the problems, fears and goals that I’m talking about aren’t just limited to this context – there must be many things in life, both work and personal, that are scary.  The reason I wanted to make @positivefail was to help people to share those experience and let others who are considering doing something make a more informed decision.  It seems to be going fairly well, I had a lovely comment from the great @stringfellow who said that the actual act of trying to summarise the positivefail in 140 characters made him find the positives he didn’t know were there.  Unintended, and nice .  Of course, it’s not just @positivefail that is doing this – there’s a great London meet up (I fully intend to make a visit soon!) called FailBoat who have some great speakers and networking to try and stop people being ashamed of the bad days.  In speaking with Jon Bradford at Springboard I was also reminded of talk by Jon Callaghan of True Ventures in which he openly said that as a VC they invest in failure.  By taking the longer term view of the teams they work with, failing once allows them to learn and so next time they’ll be armed with all this knowledge to go and build the most awesome startup ever.  Cool stuff.

So, where to next?  Of course check out positivefail.com and head along to the likes of FailBoat London.  In the meantime, chill it’s an exciting world out there!

Today’s post brought to you by Springboarders George, Mat, and Diego of Kicktable (aka “the Belgians!”). Yes, these guys

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Follow your intuition, look at the data, fail often

A weekly blog post about an insider glance of a 3-months journey into a startup accelerator.

We are finishing week 2 of Springboard. We are in the “shape” phase: the objective is to refine the value proposition of our business idea.

Are we building something unique? Which problem/need are we actually solving/fullfilling?

The best way to figure this out is to confront smart and experienced people with our vision. This is what we have been doing for the last 10 days in what looks like a speed-dating for startups: 20 min with a mentor, 10-12 mentors a day. Mentors range from experienced startup entrepreneurs, VC’s, angels, industry specialists, etc. We have now talked to 90 different people. Here is some of the comments:

• “Aaah the Belgian team, I’ve heard about you guys; I really like what you are doing!”
• “Can you really build a multi-million dollars business with this simple idea?”
• “Very well executed, are you looking for funding?”
• “What you are trying to do is very difficult to scale and it is a crowded space”
• “If I were you, I would repackage the technology as an app and sell it for $1 on the app store”
• “This is a very exciting project and website”

Mmm well, okay.

Every day, people compare the “up & downs” that make the journey of an entrepreneur to a roller-coaster. To extend this simple analogy, you can look at Springboard as a big amusement park where every day you embark on several roller-coaster trips.

When talking to 90 experienced people, you obviously receive a ton of ideas that are as smart as they are conflicting. Most “eureka” moments are followed by identification of big holes in the idea. It’s then very easy to feel lost:

What direction should we go in? What should we focus on? What should we do?

After 10 days, the main lesson is the following: nobody knows! This is our business, our vision, our users. These are the only things that really matter.

So here is the approach that we are going to follow for the next weeks:

• Stay close to our passion and intuition
• Look at the data and understand them. What are they telling us?
• Go out, talk to users
• Test many things, fail fast, fail often

Let’s keep the ball rolling,

Stay tuned, it’s still the beginning,

Passionate love,

Kicktable team.

You might think every day is Google Day here in Campus – but this one really was!

We were joined by awesome Developer Advocates Sam Dutton, Richard Hyndman, Ade Oshineye, Ilmari Heikkinen, and Head of Campus Eze Vidra, entertaining us with a Q&A flavoured morning and speed mentoring afternoon.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

#OH from the teams: referring to Instagram’s ability to be purely mobile… “cuz it is just pictures”

#OH from the mentors: ”Think out of the box with business models on mobile because the big guys aren’t getting it right yet. Some of the small guys are rocking it.”

“We’re getting a Chrome vending machine.”