Rise and fall of our first startup, Epiclist

A truly epic writeup of the building and closing of a startup...and it's especially a must-read for anyone hoping to go into the content-creator/provider route. This is a good line:

> Observing the user behaviour we have realised that there is no community feeling in the app. People simply did not share a common interest to create networks with new people they did not know, because everyone had different personal goals in mind (from running a marathon to climbing everest to mastering guitar or cooking skills). We weren’t able to focus ourselves on one direction, let alone focus our users on achieving their dreams.

One of the takeaways is that you can't build a business on such lofty, farwaway goals (e.g. users "achieving their dreams"), just as it's a bad idea to live your life with vague dreams ("I want to be the world's most famous scientist!", "I want to be beautiful and marry a beautiful person")...the success stories we know about came through having and reaching step-by-step concrete goals...Facebook's mission may now be to "connect the world", but it started out as a way to better hookup with Harvard co-eds.

And with content specifically, you're just at a major, if not crippling disadvantage. Content is not scalable. Either in its creation or its consumption. I love reading great stories once in awhile...but it's not a daily need. I don't build a habit for it. And Epiclist, being just an app as opposed to a website, even when I want to discover great stories, there's more friction to discover those stories via a narrow app like Epiclist than there is by just opening up Facebook/Twitter/Google.

> We truly believe in storytelling, but we don’t see a working long-term business here.

Lots of thoughts on this one point. Could they not have done some market analysis beforehand? Given the pace of change over the last decade, when you see something with lots of competition and still no one having an actual viable business with profits yet, what drives someone to think they can just "make it happen" (yes, obviously with a lot of work)?

If it's a "highly competitive market" there should be some profitable company by now that you can simply copy. There isn't. I sort of suspect there won't be for a long time - perhaps ever. Or... at least not 'profitable' to the degree that VC/investors want to see.

Why should storytelling have a business model? We have business models around 'storytelling' in the form of book and music publishing, and they're going through dramatic changes. Loads more people can self-publish - very few are profitable, and most aren't really doing it to be profitable in the first place - they're doing it to express themselves.

One of the few ways to do storytelling on anything other than a very local scale had to involve those with access to the publishing tools, and therefore many more 'stories' (music, books, poems, etc) had to fit within the business model of a publishing middleman. That's model is dying/morphing, and 'storytelling' facilitators may never be the business model that it once was.

Good write up. However, this is just another example of a startup focusing on raising VC rather than building a profitable business from the start.

The illusion is that all successful startup companies require VC. However, the reality is the vast majority of businesses will not be funded and require a profitable business model.

As a community, we need more reinforcement that profit is the life blood of any company. Profit isn't a bad word people.

A very informative heartfelt write up. Lots of great insights from battle-hardened entrepreneurs here. Thank you.

This was a tough read, honestly anyone going through this for whatever reason, is definitely in a tough spot. They're taking failure with the full intent of learning from it, I think they'll bounce back.

It might be interesting to create some sort of Markov chain startup generator putting together random sets of social features on RoR. Not to denigrate their business but that occurred to me.

The things I'do w/ 200K dollars...