Mistakes made, lessons learnt #1 — Found

This is the first article from the “Mistakes made, lessons learnt” series. Check out all the articles here.

Over the past few years, Singapore enjoyed some small celebrations in its startup scene. There has been some prominent acquisitions, as well as the setting up of new VC funds and places of gathering for like-minded entrepreneurs.

However, the brutal truth is that behind every news of success is a story of failure. As such, we decided to roll out a series called: “Mistakes made, Lessons learnt”. At SGE, we hope to do our part by enabling start-up members to learn from each other and collectively help put Singapore on the world map.

First up in our series, we are fortunate to have Danny (left) from Found (previously Foound) to let us repost their very honest blog entry.

Company & founder:
Getfoundapp.com; Danny Tan

Biggest mistake made: Not validating the product/market fit fast enough.

Most memorable: Dave McClure announcing, “Singapore, you have hope.” after Foound’s pitch at Echelon 2010 Launchpad.

Milestones: Receiving seed funding from Neoteny Labs, East Ventures and Singapore National Research Foundation; winning Echelon 2010 Launchpad.

Setbacks: Having to shut down its first product version in June 2011 and restart.

“Mistakes made, Lessons learnt”:

1. Designing for the user vs designing for the community

Our mission is to help people spend more time with their friends in real life. Foound was our first shot at a solution. Specifically, we wanted to build a smart­phone application to help people organize casual meet ups with their friends without sending and receiving multiple text messages and emails. Many of us face this problem, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work right? Not quite. Turns out executing it was not only much more difficult, and we also completely missed the point on how meet ups happen in real life.

We did not understand that meet ups consist of 2 distinct groups, the “organizers” (people who initiate meet ups), and the “invitees” (people who receive invitations). On hindsight this seems fairly obvious, but the bias to make it really easy for “organizers” to create activities caused us to neglect the “invitees” (>90% of our users). This leads us to the 2nd point.

2. Not anticipating technological roadblocks

Most of the “invitees” were receiving their invitations through emails and text messages, yet had no easy way to link their replies back to the “organizers”. Ideally, “invitees” should be able to respond directly through these channels (e.g. text #RSVP_Going to a specific mobile number to update other participants of their status). However the infrastructure for doing this is not mature in most markets, and would require too much resource to engineer in-house. The inability to seamlessly integrate “organizers” and “invitees” greatly affected the usability of Foound.

3. Reaching out to external collaborators to help accelerate learning curve

The team has grown tremendously in terms of technical capabilities and process maturity. A lot of credit goes to Pivotal Labs and our engineers for taking up new challenges with gusto. As a result, we are now able to iterate much faster with better quality. We also have much more insights into solving the problems that we want to solve.

Closing remarks:

Ignore everything else and focus on getting to “product/market fit” first. Everything else is moot until you get there.

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