A cautionary tale about not validating your idea.

What the hell were we thinking?

I want to relay a story. Sometime back in the early 2010s, we came up with a genius idea. Or so we all thought. If you recall, we were an agency who mainly built websites for businesses. Often these were new websites or even new businesses. One thing we noticed is that clients generally didn’t have much of a clue about everything that needed to be set up to get a digital presence up and running. It’s easier today, but back then it was a bit more of an admin PIA. From checking whether a domain was available through to creating a basic hosting environment, and everything in between. We generally ended up having to do it for people and it wasn’t very interesting and was kind of tedious. So we thought, what if we could automate everything for them? What if all they had to do was enter the name of their company and in the space of a few minutes, their domain was purchased, their email set up, their hosting, a basic website, their social media etc etc all created and ready to go?

What then followed was a team began working on what we called GetDash. At first we thought maybe 3 months’ worth of work. Then after about 6 months, we thought it was only a month away and so we booked a trip to SXSW in order to show it off to the world. Trouble was, it still wasn’t quite ready and so that trip was a waste of time. It became really a presentation of a video about what we thought it might end up being. But we kept on persevering. After all, it was still a great idea.

People within the agency were starting to get grumpy. We were holding back on delivering actual client work because we were trying to protect the engineers working on GetDash. If you’ve ever worked somewhere where your job is to deliver a technical project, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the last 5% is often the longest part of the job. It may be that there’s only 5% to go, but somehow that 5% takes longer than the first 95%. On top of that, 95% done is the absolute worst place you can be: you’ve done all the work but you can’t charge the client until it’s complete. That’s where we were for what seemed like forever (small aside, I’ve since found that writing a book is the same!).

I’m not exactly sure of the timing, but I think after about a year and a lot of frustrated comments within the wider team about our inability to hit any sort of self-imposed deadline, it was finally ready for the big reveal to the company. 

The trouble is, whist the product gave users the domain, hosting, email MX records and reserved their social media profiles, it wasn’t integrated into any kind of content management system or website tool. It probably could have been, but we’d stopped short of anything visible for the non-technical customer. I think the phrase I heard from a colleague was ‘damp squib’. 

What happened next? Well, the honest answer is ‘nothing’. There was nothing to sell and there was no appetite from anyone anywhere in the business to spend even more time and money on something that everyone had fallen out of love with. So, we effectively wrote thousands and thousands of dollars off and just moved on. 

If I were giving a lecture at a university now, I would probably ask my students ‘what mistakes do you think we made?’ Maybe you experienced something similar, too. But just for shits and giggles, let’s go through them one by one.

1. Customer need

I said at the beginning of my story, ‘we came up with a genius idea’. But, ‘we’ weren’t a customer. We came up with an idea that none of our many clients ever said was a pain point for them. Why? Because we’d always taken care of it. So it was a pain for us, but for the customer? Not at all. It would be like asking restaurant customers to pay a 5% premium to their bill to pay for a dishwasher machine because the staff found washing dishes themselves was boring.

2. Addressing the customer’s pain point

Because we hadn’t identified a customer need, we hadn’t articulated what the solution was. My suspicion was that the idea was more driven by a desire to prove that we could just create the technology to do all of these super clever things. For me, I just imagined that the magic that emerged would be so cool, of course everyone would want to buy it. Idiot.

3. Business model

You can’t tell from reading the above, but there was no business model either. No conversation about how much someone would pay for this and the fact that they would probably only need to pay for it once anyway and so the customer acquisition cost would have to be close to zero. We just didn’t think about any of that. At the time, we were very much of the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. We’d had some success with some Open Source projects we’d worked on and I we just thought that the dev community would be so blown away with its technical brilliance that we’d be beating customers off with a stick. This ignores the fact that it wasn’t the dev community we were building this for, but hey, that was just details.

4. Side-project syndrome

Some of the team were pretty much full time on it, but on a day to day basis, this wasn’t an obsession for the leadership team. We just trusted that it would somehow emerge. And unsurprisingly that didn’t happen. There was no project management to speak of and little in the way of pressure to hit any deadline. Even when we created our own (by buying a stall at SXSW), it still wasn’t enough to really matter. If not delivering would have meant running out of money and being unable to make payroll

, or having investors breathing down our necks, maybe it would have resulted in more of a concerted effort rather than just letting it all chug along. Who knows…..

5. “When it came time for the big reveal…’

This is probably the one I cringe about the most. We always had a tendency to ‘believe in our own gut’. Not only had the rest of the company not seen the product until it was already a fait accompli, but we hadn’t shown this to any potential customer. Not a single one. What the hell were we thinking? We spent thousands and thousands of dollars and put our client-facing staff through hell for something we hadn’t even thought to validate with someone who might actually buy it. And we had hundreds of those people: they were who we spoke to every single day. 

I’ve tried to understand why we overlooked this very obvious step before sinking a load of time and cash into it and I think it was partly our own misguided belief that we were somehow geniuses and we didn’t need the validation. It was also partly because we thought maybe that they wouldn’t appreciate its genius unless they saw the finished manifestation, and partly because as an agency our job was to deliver a polished product to our clients. I remember reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and suddenly everything made sense. Which leads me to….

6. Not launching until ‘it was ready’

To be fair to us, the concept of a Minimum Viable Product either wasn’t in existence or certainly wasn’t mainstream back then. But imagine if, (after speaking to customers to confirm this was a problem) instead of the all-singing, finessed waste of money we ended up with, we went live with a paired down version - maybe a tool just for GoDaddy customers that bought you some hosting and updated your nameservers and MX records at the same time? It would have taken a fraction of the time and we could have seen whether there was any interest in it before sinking a shedload more time and cash into it.

Before I finish this article though I do want to stress one thing. Although the experience for us was a painful one. I think that without it, we wouldn’t have been so prepared when ScreenCloud came along. So in many ways, the investment in GetDash almost certainly did pay off, just not in the way we imagined it would.