Rewind the time about four years. Sweden had at this time about 75,000 Twitter users (source: Media Culpa), 2 million Facebook users (source: Mindpark{.broken_link}) and Spotify had recently been launched in invite-only.
The year was 2009. This was the year I quit my job.
The main reason that I quit my job was that four months earlier, I participated in 24 hour Business Camp. A hackathon where 90 internet entrepreneurs met to launch 52 start-ups in 24 hours.
We got great response on our idea and ended up in fifth place, which meant we won office seats in an incubator _R.I.P. IQUBE.
I was very excited. We wanted to do this! There was no other option. We wanted to breathe life into a conservative industry. The book industry.
The idea
Our idea, FörstaKapitlet (the first chapter in Swedish), was about books. We wanted to make it possible for everyone to listen to a chapter of a book before you buy it. At this time, social media was something new for us swedes. People had barely heard of Twitter (or Facebook) and streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud was something new.
My feeling back then was that the book industry was terrified of the internet. They understood that they probably somewhere sometime has to be there but how and now (?!)… well, rather not.
We decided to see Sweden as a test market. We wanted to develop a prototype that we could pitch to our swedish book publishers.
In a team of three we got started! We were one developer (me), a marketer and a video- and audio producer. We booked meetings with all publishers we could find in Stockholm. Both traditional publishers and audiobook publishers.
In parallel with the the meetings, I started as a single developer to hack like never before.
10 weeks
One of the most important and most instructive decisions we took those days was that we would give this a chance for a limited time. We would give everything, really _everything_ during a hectic, intense but limited time.
We decided that we would work hard for 10 weeks and after that have a ready prototype and evaluate how things had gone.
Agile development and transparency
In addition to the project period of 10 weeks, we wanted to be transparent and let the users take part in our development. On our website, anyone could follow our progress. Honest and open meetings were broadcasted daily for everyone to take part of. Every week we had a new release (which of course was named after a famous author) and a video summation where we talked about what we had done during the past week.
After six weeks
It had been an extremely busy period. I sat in front of the computer day and night. We had met so many publishers we could and everyone on the team had given everything. Yet there was something that didn’t felt good.
Firstly, we disagree about the strategy and the approach in the team. Secondly, it was hard to keep it up with me as the only developer.
After six intense weeks we blew everything off. I had a bad gut feeling. I dropped out.
What I learned by failing fast
Besides requiring extremely hard work to become established in such a traditional industry as the book industry, this is the biggest lessons I’ve learned.
Get to know your team. We as a team were not quite in sync. We had talked a lot about the idea, but not so much about strategy or marketing and how we would work with the product next 6-12 months. Neither had we worked together before. The lesson here is to talk together thoroughly as a team, discuss workload, strategy/marketing, business and how to take the idea further as a product once you have one.
Develop a simple prototype. Develop a prototype so you can get feedback on the features of the product/service as soon as possible. If you can simplify advanced features, do it. Show wireframes before you do design, all feedback is good feedback, especially in the beginning. Make sure to get the idea validated properly before you start to build something more substantial. Your first product should at its best be a minimum viable product (MVP).
Limit the time. Definitely the best decision we made was that we decided to invest everything in an agreed time period. We didn’t decide much more than that. We wanted to go all in, for a limited time. And did it.
In retrospect
In retrospect I see this time as a very instructive period. We did SCRUM, Lean and agile development in practice. An iterative work process, fast forward, build, measure, learn. Our six weeks contained it all.
Today I’m glad I got to experience all of this so early in my life as an entrepreneur.
It’s really fun to throw yourself into the world of a entrepreneur. The roller coaster ride and everything you learn along the way is priceless.
Thanks for reading.
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