100 calls to talk to 10 people to get 1 in-person demo, frequently in another state. I got in the car, put on the suit, and did the demos. I put together some signage, set up a booth at ACTFL, IALLT, and military linguist conventions. My parents saw a lot of me (they live near a lot of colleges), I stayed in a lot of cheap motels, and slowly, I built a list of customers. Not a lot, never enough. Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other top schools were among my customers, but I never made the “big score” – the state school with tens of thousands of students.
This is, in a nutshell, why Bingo Card Creator has a price tag, a no-touch sales model, and no phone number. People write me, to this day, saying "I have a question about the product. Call me at 555 555-5555 between the hours of 3 PM and 4 PM." My response is a polite variant of "No."
I've had this discussion with a few people who make software for teachers/students and I hate to be the Business Guy, but just like "Buy for $2, sell for $1, make it up in volume" is not a sustainable plan, you can't use enterprise sales tactics (+) at consumer price points. If sales requires a phone call, we've low-bounded the product at hundreds of dollars. If it requires an in-person meeting, the lower bound is now $50k. That isn't "Could potentially be $50k if each of your 2,000 students pays $25", that's "You will be invoiced $50k."
+ Absent heavy modification. There are low-touch/high-touch hybrids which can work at the $100~$500 a month mark.
[Edit: The definitive article on this is Joel Spolsky's Camels and Rubber Duckies. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie... Search for [The reason I bring this up is because software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.] My only quibble is that both the pricing model and emerging standard marketing/sales model for SaaS companies have made the no-man's land he talks about a very interesting place to be in the ~10 years since this was written.]
"When you have children, you can have exactly one hobby. Anything else is an exercise in futility, self-deception, and ineffectiveness. Cooking healthy food is a hobby. Exercising is a hobby. Maintaining a website is a hobby. Writing a blog is a hobby. Bringing work home is a hobby. You have time to do exactly one thing after your kids go to sleep, if you want to do it well."
I was also about to come here & highlight that phrase. It's completely true. I don't regret having a child for one single second because she is amazing. But sitting down in front of a computer late in the evening, after another night of interrupted sleep & trying to solve complex issues is not easy.
Relevant to the story earlier today, John Carmack has three jobs and two children. He tweets regularly, speaks at cons, and occasionally blogs on altdev. He also reportedly lifts weights regularly.
1 - he's a multimillionaire. He can afford to offload lots of cooking (restaurants), cleaning (cleaners), childcare (nannies), loss of income (stay at home partner), shorten his commute (purchase a house close to work, put a gym in the basement)
2 - even with all of the above, I still bet his wife does a big chunk of the household maintenance and childcare
In Comments
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
He didn't say the OP was stupid, just the comparison. I would say a variation of that, but might actually say 'stupid', depending on how amiable the group/person is, and how well I could inflect my voice to my funny instead of mean.
That's a poor example then. "Calling names" generally refers to attacking the person/people, not ideas/things. I saw nothing uncivil about the 'stupid' post, unless you chose to read it in an iflammatory tone of voice.
Perhaps, then, you should rather just say that "when you have children, each additional hobby you want to indulge in will cost roughly $1mm/yr in opportunity costs. In order to Have The Time, you must first figure out how to make that much money."
I don't follow John Carmack closely, but I remember him telling in an interview that his wife took care of their newborn child for the most part so he could sleep 8 hours a night, which he needed to be able to work.
Not saying that his accomplishments aren't impressive, but being John Carmack probably helps doing the things John Carmack does.
He is also fully in control of his own destiny, being independently wealthy and running his own company.
If he wants to delay the next Quake engine by a couple days so he can speak at a conference, no problem. He can afford it, and it's up to him when his next product comes out.
Most people either answer to a boss, or are not rich enough to purposefully pass up on new business. So it's not impossible, but to do it well takes a level of means that most people don't have.
I'd frame this as: "You get to choose 3 between: work, spending time with your children, exercising regularly, maintaining a house, domestic duties, having a social life."
And I'd totally agree ...
I choose work, children and exercise ... but am lucky enough to be able to offload these other tasks
Depends what else you cut out, for instance I would add commuting in there. If you prioritize living close to work (or working remotely) then exercise can be your commute. IE Run or bike to work. Or if that's not an option do a karate class or get a climbing gym membership with your kids and exercise while spending time with them. Combining things you want to do is a great way to check off more things on the list.
Someone save this site. It's a pretty cool site that helps people learn languages.
Man, so much crap out there with new flash sales websites, new aggregators for media consumption, startup's that do home cleaning. But a website that tries to teach people something enriching without a business model, but just tries to do a good job gets tossed on the way side.
We need a foundation or grant program for non-profit and NGO websites. Most startups are crap-shoots anyways, VCs and developers should waste respectively their money and time on things that do good than the usual social media crap or new online marketing channels for conventional businesses.
Is there no one that could take this (and others like this) to the notice of a Moskovitz or a Houston, in a discreet way and without much fanfare, so that a lifeline could be had?
And as I mentioned below, the space is crowded with plenty of little guys... like myself. :-) Most of us will lose. That's capitalism. Hopefully, the survivors will be much better because they competed in such a crowded space, and the consumer wins big in the end.
I'm not sure it's worth it. This is a crowded space (disclosure: I developed for Anki). Everything Wordchamp does is done better by a bunch of competitors. Add to that the fact that there have been intermittent shutdown notices scaring users away since at least 2011, and I think there's not much value left in saving it.
I noticed that he's considering doing an iOS app. I think the space is pretty crowded for language learning software. I've been working on my iOS app part time for 3 years this month. I'm building it to be generic but getting clean data is a nightmare. I was going through my French data tonight and saw some basic errors. I started paying people a few months ago to help write sentences, which will eventually be in each language. Anyway, writing it is a lot of fun. Give me a couple more years I think it'll be great.
If there are any patient people who want to help me iterate more quickly, drop me an email and say that you saw me on HN and I'll give you a promo code.
I think French will be clean soon and I just got the pinyin back for my first 600 words.
This story resonates so much! I'm in the same space as OP and even doing something similar at http://membean.com .
Where our story digresses is that we got paid traction quickly. Early on we decided we wouldn't be free and we'd convince schools(& parents) that we offered enough value to pay for it. We narrowed in on a very specific need, focussed obsessively on quality, provided our teachers fantastic customer service, kept our burn rate very low, bootstrapped(it was hard) and just buckled down and executed.
Along the way, somehow, and this was crucial, our teachers turned into evangelists - parents, principals and administrators took note. It wasn't that they just liked what we offered -- they went to bat for it. Many of our teachers spent 8+ months convincing their principals and district officials to buy us. Private schools were crucial in the beginning to get our cash flow going, public schools took longer but we waited patiently (and nervously)
The current ecosystem is not friendly to Ed startups, it's stacked in favor of the large Ed vendors who have the manpower to closely follow budget allocations, develop long term relationships across 50 states and have deep knowledge on how to work the system.
OP, congrats for sticking to this for so long. I suspect that it was incredibly draining but along the way you've helped countless teachers & students and that should count for a lot.
This is the story of too many startups in the edtech space. Slow growth, grateful users, but not enough traction to grow the company through revenue or outside funding.
Very few edtech companies have managed to avoid this fate, and often come down to one or two people keeping the product going as a labor of love. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that sales are inherently high-touch and expensive, and that the users (teachers/kids) and payers (administrators) have different perspectives and incentives.
Great article. Congrats on sticking it out so long.
Articles like this scare me. I've been working for 8 months full time now on a bootstrapped website for learning vocabulary via reading (http://readlang.com). I've been advised a few times that it's extremely hard to make money with this kind of site but for now I'm ploughing ahead anyway. Reading this gives me pause for thought but as long as I've getting good feedback I'm happy to keep going and see where it might lead.
Even in the worst case though, I hope that I wouldn't ever need to shut down the site, and that it could at least pay for it's hosting costs and be automated to keep running with minimal maintenance.
I would encourage you to start charging customers or to find another monetisation strategy for it, unless youre getting mmassive traction you arent a aquisition target and if its nice but free then it may never make money.
It's still early days and I'm more focused on growing the user base right now.
Saying that, since last month I put a daily cap on phrase translations for free users and a 'Readlang Supporter' plan at $10 / year for unlimited translations and to support development through the beta period. So far I've had 13 payments, a total of $130, which I'm pretty happy with since a) the user base is currently small (about 500 signed up since I added the payment option), b) it's validation that people are willing to pay for the service, and c) I've got a lot of ideas for improving it in future.
In certain cases this is easier said than done. If he hands it off he'll need to teach someone else how to run the site, how to deal with each customer, how to...
Shutting it down will let him breathe again without having to worry. It's like ripping off the bandaid.
I don't buy it. You can give someone the keys and say 'good luck, don't call me', and have a nonzero probability of it succeeding without any further intervention than you'd have to use for shutting it down.
Easy to say when its not yours, I suspect. If he got to this point by thinking he was wasting his life at this thing, why would he consider giving it to someone else to waste their life? And his customers are his friends. It's like giving his friends away to a stranger and saying "don't call me".
I guess that's my point though. That "throwing it away" makes you completely unencumbered. There's value in that. Anything else comes with strings that make it really hard to move on ... even if that's emotionally.
I can't speak on behalf of the author, but I have been "stuck" in similar limbo projects myself (an iOS game).
Admitting to yourself that the project has failed, and "just one more push" can't rescue it, and shutting it down is emotionally difficult enough. Handing it over involves finding a suitable recipient, instructing them, transferring domains and accounts, and making sure the clients understand the ownership has changed. And refusing to answer requests for help or documentation over email can be impossible, especially if you cared about the project or its users. Without this documentation and knowledge, a code repository is of almost no use to anyone.
If someone is capable of walking away with zero documentation or help, they would have shut down a limbo project much earlier.
I the first cost of your strategy that comes to mind to the current owner is that there is a certain amount of reputation that can be lost if the next person does a bad job.
Sorry for sounding like a blatant marketing. But we just launched http://sideprojectors.com where you can find someone else to take over your project. Hopefully we can help your project from being killed.
Kudos for finding the courage to stick with it, and the courage to quit. Those who have been in this position know what a heavy burden it can be. I hope you can find it within yourself not to turn cynical, and to use your skills and experience to make a positive change in the world. (Or, if you choose to just live your life, my hat still goes off to you)
I can't imagine the weight of shutting something down which you've spent almost a decade on. While this is a tail of not getting to product market fit it's the struggle of every entrepreneur.
Knowing how long to stick it out and when to call it quits. There is no right answer. The right answer is when you reach your limits. Most people's limit is much less than 10 years.
Getting to the point where shit hits the fan (out of money with a family) has to be one of the hardest experiences outside of losing loved ones.
Congrats to the OP for their determination. At the same time I share my condolences at the time, energy and money that the experience cost.
He has this to hold on to...
> I’m glad I had the courage to try, and I’m grateful for the insight it gave me into what it takes to build a business.
Dan,
I admired the fact you hanged on to your dream such long. It takes lot of courage and perseverance. I have been in your shoes and have felt the pain when its time to let go of the dream. But when you clear it off, it feels great. Once i met a founder of startup who gave advice 'You should be passionate about your idea but not disproportionately passionate'
All the best!
If it is a profitable/good idea - surely someone out there would buy it from you for some small amount of money. Or is the monthly income not worth someone buying?
> When you have children, you can have exactly one hobby. Anything else is an exercise in futility, self-deception, and ineffectiveness. Cooking healthy food is a hobby. Exercising is a hobby. Maintaining a website is a hobby. Writing a blog is a hobby. Bringing work home is a hobby. You have time to do exactly one thing after your kids go to sleep, if you want to do it well. The pointless waste of time had to go.
21 century, the first world, and yet raising children is an almost insurmountable task. No wonder fertility rates in the West are so low.
Being a father of three, I can attest to the profundity of that statement. It makes me smile though. Because there is hope yet. I have found that as time passes, two things happen:
1. Your children grow into creatures less demanding of your immediate attention (post nappy years, post "Daaaaad, I'm done!" on the toilet years ... etc). The real problem with keeping with other tasks while raising kids is not so much that you're unable to juggle many things at once, it's just that the sort of work we do (ideas, coding, design, you know the serious! stuff) requires longer chains of time for concentration and this is what suffers when kids (or for that matter anything else) constantly interrupts your thinking. You attempt to juggle at first, but pretty soon you realise the frustration of context switching from a more cerebral world to a banal one - and then back - takes its toll mentally. So you give up your art. (For the right reason of course. I love my time with the boys.)
2. You get better at juggling the cerebral and the banal at the same time. :-)
ps. When I say banal, I don't intend to belittle the sheer fking honour of executing paternal obligations, no! But it cannot monopolise your time such that paternal obligations are all you commit to at the expense of your art. I ain't no John Lennon. :-)
> The real problem with keeping with other tasks while raising kids is not so much that you're unable to juggle many things at once, it's just that the sort of work we do (ideas, coding, design, you know the serious! stuff) requires longer chains of time for concentration and this is what suffers when kids (or for that matter anything else) constantly interrupts your thinking.
The author also mentioned exercising and cooking healthy food, which for the most part does not demand long chains of deep concentration.
Do you have multiple small children under the age of 5? Both those activities typically take at least 30 minutes of continuity to be done right... a real challenge with a 4 and a 1 year old. After they go to bed, great. While they are awake? If you are ok with some TV time. then you might get lucky to have them sit still for half an hour.
> Do you have multiple small children under the age of 5?
I don't have children at all. That might make you immediately dismiss my opinions on this, which may be justified.
> Both those activities typically take at least 30 minutes of continuity to be done right... a real challenge with a 4 and a 1 year old.
Done right? A pro sportsman might need at least 3 hours a day in order to get a decent workout out of the day, but I think that the consensus is that any activity is better than no activity. I don't see how squeezing in some sets of pushups while you have time (a set might take 30 to 60 seconds), doing some sets of (one legged) squats, etc., is insurmountable. Instead of jogging outside, you might do x hundred amounts of squats.
Cooking healthy food is just about making something simple with healthy ingredients. Making a salad doesn't take a lot of continuous activity, boiling something doesn't either, the only thing is not burning the meat or whatever.
I don't get how kids under five years of age are so spastic that you evidently can't even take your eyes off them for one minute. I guess I must have been an exceptionally well-behaved child.
> After they go to bed, great. While they are awake? If you are ok with some TV time.
There's also something to be said about American suburbia and everything being so sparse. Until a kid is 16 and she can get a driver's license at least one of the parents has to be on call to drive her on/off to school, on/off to other kids' parties etc. That can consume a lot of time.
> Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.
It's hilarious that she included a paragraph solely to excuse herself for complimenting a certain aspect of the French lifestyle, presumably in order to appease the (imaginary or not) anti-France streak in the American consciousness.
Off topic, but:I have seen this anti-French attitude a lot (in most cases, jokingly). What is the reason for the American dislike for the French? One Frenchman I talked to said that its because France does not always support US Foreign policy....is that really the case?
As you said, it's mostly a joke, usually exaggerated for comic effect. Even calling it "anti-French" may be too much; it's just playing off a stereotype of French people as snobby and overly "sophisticated" (in a slightly derogatory way). I don't want to link it to working class/upper class or rural/urban or whatever, since those aren't really right, but perhaps a vaguely similar impulse.
Trying to tie it to "foreign policy" or something is thinking about it much too hard.
That stereotype exists because, right before US elites started formalizing their own cultural scenario (before F.S. Fitzgerald, to give a rough idea), French culture was one of their main models, if not THE model. On the other side, French elites invested a lot in the American Revolution and were quite disappointed with the outcomes (a society characterized by freedom but also rough and greedy, which eventually chose The Anglo Way in most matters and stole their thunder as Beacon of Civilization). Ever since, both sides were locked in a constant and intense debate in a way that very few other countries experienced. It's funng because both French and US mainstream cultures agree on very fundamental matters (the need for a secular State, the power of technological progress, the importance of cinema and popular culture, down to comicbooks) but express them in completely opposite ways in practice.
There's a very complicated history of mutual love and disappointment between France and the US, stretching all the way from before the American Revolution.
My wife and I have 4 kids 8 and under, and that paragraph is really making me think about my life - it resonates with my day-to-day experience and I wonder if it isn't time to scale way back on the various things I'm (perhaps ineffectively) trying to accomplish in my current life phase.
Encouragingly, life phases always transition into something else at some point...so there is an end in sight. And it is so very worth it to not toss "spending time with my kids" out in place of a "hobby" like writing a blog.
Children are also a hobby. You don't have to have them to survive, unlike Middle Ages. And it's not innovation as it has been done billions of time before. It's just a matter of picking the most favourite hobby: children, science, healthy you, social you etc.
Although I think you can't have that many more hobbies with children, either. I think jobs are a bigger problem than children (bigger time sink I mean).
"The story of one man is the store of the entire world".
I think it's easy to talk down to someone who has admitted failure, but the truth is we've all been through it, although some of us hide it better than others.
My custom web-development business tanked last year after customers refused to stop asking for changes. Insomnia & anxiety were frustratingly close friends of mine too.
Maybe the site is shutting down and maybe you could have done something different that would have succeeded more, but super-kudos for trying!
This is, in a nutshell, why Bingo Card Creator has a price tag, a no-touch sales model, and no phone number. People write me, to this day, saying "I have a question about the product. Call me at 555 555-5555 between the hours of 3 PM and 4 PM." My response is a polite variant of "No."
I've had this discussion with a few people who make software for teachers/students and I hate to be the Business Guy, but just like "Buy for $2, sell for $1, make it up in volume" is not a sustainable plan, you can't use enterprise sales tactics (+) at consumer price points. If sales requires a phone call, we've low-bounded the product at hundreds of dollars. If it requires an in-person meeting, the lower bound is now $50k. That isn't "Could potentially be $50k if each of your 2,000 students pays $25", that's "You will be invoiced $50k."
+ Absent heavy modification. There are low-touch/high-touch hybrids which can work at the $100~$500 a month mark.
[Edit: The definitive article on this is Joel Spolsky's Camels and Rubber Duckies. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie... Search for [The reason I bring this up is because software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.] My only quibble is that both the pricing model and emerging standard marketing/sales model for SaaS companies have made the no-man's land he talks about a very interesting place to be in the ~10 years since this was written.]