Nearly five years ago I quit my job. This was April 2009, I had spent two years at an ad agency (which I liked) when I quit to bet everything on a new business idea.
We had participated in an hackathon (called 24 Hour Business Camp) a few months earlier, got good response on our business idea, ended up at a leaderboard with the result that we won seats at the former office space and incubator MyQube. The thing was obvious! Now we would go for it!
My first failed startup
The business idea was that you could listen to a chapter of a book before buying it. Our challenge was to get us the users, but also the publishing companies who turned out to be terrified of the Internet at the time.
All in for a limited time
We decided that we, as a team of three, would give everything for 10 weeks. The business concept was fairly validated, had pre-booked a couple of interesting meetings and so on. Now it was time to finalize the alpha version and think through the business model.
We started at full speed and was very transparent. We had weekly progress meetings that anyone could follow live on the web. In a team of three we worked extremely iteratively. I managed the web development while my two colleagues worked with marketing, design and sales. There were long days, nights and weekends, all the time with progress meetings towards our goal we have 10 weeks away.
A few weeks into the project, things started to feel different. In the beginning we had good speed and was agreed on most things, but over time I noticed that we weren’t on the same path. We didn’t agree on priorities, wanted to go in different directions and so on. Six weeks into our project, I dropped out. We canceled the project. No bad feelings, we all agreed on the decision to close down, at least with the original team and strategy.
Although the project was canceled, it turned out to be extremely useful. I tried most things in a short time. We took quick decisions, evaluated, adjusted idea and product market fit, tried different types of business models etc. I learned a lot in very short time, to say the least. Probably more than I would have done if we hadn’t had limited the time period. It would probably been the same result, felt like a bigger failure, more like a sacrifice, if we hadn’t limited the time.
That’s why I like hackathons, you are forced to make quick decisions, make simplifications and become more creative. I’ve been surprised at how much I succeed in doing as short as 12-24 hours.
Lesson learned
This is really a lesson I’ve taken with me. Narrow your time, set goals and evaluate as time passes. Will there be a shambles of it all, as in this case, then you have at least spent less time and energy than you would if you didn’t set a time-limited goal.