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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Technology
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When they start focusing on the brand, it’s over.
I was part of a “startup” that was all volunteers. We called ourselves Citizens Market, and the idea was to produce an app that let you scan a barcode to get ethical info on the company who made the product.
Like GoodGuide, but they got to market faster.
After a few years of effort, a marketing person joined our all-volunteer team and convinced the head to change the name to Fosfo. Why Fosfo? Because matches have phosphorous in them, and so it referenced illumination, and the illumination had to do with our mission of … you guessed it: providing information.
The thing failed. I mean, we were already failing because we didn’t have the profit motive cutting our decisions down to what worked. But the name “Fosfo” was when I knew the project was dead.
“Citizens Market” was the perfect name for what our app would do. But no, had to have some web 2.0 jackass giving us a facelift. That was our path to salvation: a rebrand.
That's a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.
Out critical blunder was hoping to crowdsource the generation of the dataset we’d use to provide scores.
What we should have done was find existing data about company ethics and just build the feature of scanning a UPC barcode to get the data.
We tried to be the app and the data source, and we had a huge two sided marketplace problem, and no incentive for the volunteers who would spend hours and hours doing research.
Another reason why I won’t do a startup under volunteer conditions again. We unconsciously modeled everyone else as like us: willing to donate copious time.
At least it sounds like you learned a lot from it :)
Definitely. It was during that project that I switched from subversion to git for the first time. I remember my coworker James showing me how files just changed when he checked out a branch. I started using git at his insistence (which I hated because I wanted to own the project and he was a more impressive dev than me), and I started to like it. Switched all my other projects to git as well.
Reminds me of a snip from The Winner: be a leader, but if you can't be a leader, make sure your leader is a damn good teacher