[timoth3y]

Hi. Tim here.

I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly.

1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.

2) I'm not saying there was no solution. There might have been, but the team and I could not find one. Think of it this way. You and a team decide to summit a mountain. It's a high-risk endeavor. After weeks of going over your maps and equipment you just can't see a plausible way up. Do you call it off or set out hoping you'll be able to figure it out. It doesn't mean no one can do it. I means I could not do it with that team and that equipment.

3) Why didn't we leverage the contract approval features that customers loved? We tried. The problem was that those kinds of approvals were not core workflow for SMBs. It was useful when importing contract templates, but was not used much after that. Nice feature but not important enough to get companies to sigh up for multiple seats, which is what we needed.

4) Whats going to happen to the code and to Tim? No decisions yet. I'm open to suggestions on both counts.

[cft]

When PayPal started, they were beaming money between PDAs. Then after a while when their curves were no good, they noticed that some confused users thought that their Confinity website that described how to beam money, was actually the place itself to transfer money to others. Then they pivoted. Then this new product was not viral. Then they started paying $10 when you open the account.

[seibelj]

Please don't down vote this comment. He is making a salient point about why it might not be a good idea to quit at such an early stage. Whether it was the right decision for Contract Beast or not, he is trying to provide a counterpoint to the idea of giving up by providing an alternative anecdote. Some people in a similar situation could use the boost.

[mpbm]

Yeah, but Tim already addressed that scenario when he said that nobody but him had quit their job or lost any money yet. The PayPal team was already well into being a committed startup.

[funkyy]

While your comment is right from my position (I often help startups to solve them problems) thanks for using "salient" - new really nice word goes right in to my dictionary.

[LionessLover]

The "salient point" as you put it suffers from a huge acute case of selection bias and survivorship bias, two deadly diseases that kill the argument immediately after it's born.

[CPLX]

Indeed. Not to mention the Internet was basically a wide open green field to build companies on in those days. There is no shortage of B2B focused web-based software in 2016.

[cft]

I agree with the huge difference between 1998 and 2016 decisions. Soon it will be like starting a car company in 1930s: was possible in 1905, became impossible in 1930

[TotallyHuman]

Yeah, just like with Tesla...

[clickbyclick]

Changing behavior is hard, many startups try only a select few can. Adjusting behavior an easier but less rewarding outcome.

[drumdance]

They had already raised $4 million for the PDA idea. Or rather, the MVP. The $4 million was famously beamed into their account via PDA.

[erikb]

Loving your article.

1) You can describe the market in a few sentences, even to people without a background.

2) You can track user reaction without the need to ask them.

3) You know that most people don't understand their problem and therefore can't give good feedback via feature requests.

4) You understand human nature. People want to see a payout fast, before investing real energy into something.

5) You can pull the plug when the setup is not right.

Hope to work together with more people like you in the future. Are you currently looking for a CEO position in a start-up btw? ;-)

[a-saleh]

You mention that you might write an article on distinguishing the tangential feature requests from the useful ones. I would really like to read that :) Especially if I could send it to our product managers, because our product has been in a cycle "we need an enterprise sale" > "potential customer mentions a feature they would have liked" > "we scramble for a month to write the feature and close the deal".

To be honest, it is much better now, but as a QE on the project, now I get to deal with so many half-abandonned/half-finished features.

[Negitivefrags]

The key is to ignore the feature request, and focus on the problem.

Users don't come to you with problems, they come to you with shitty solutions.

You need to take their solution, reverse engineer their real problem from that, then work out a good solution for that problem that fits well with your product.

[scott_s]

"My job is not to give the users what they want, it's to give them what they need."

[timoth3y]

That's a bad place to be stuck in. I'll see if I can put something together that makes sense and is fairly comprehensive. At the moment, a lot of it is "I know it when I see it" but that's not exactly helpful.

[a-saleh]

Fortunately we seem to be moving away from that now-days :)

And I have talked with our guys and I can sort of see it from their view-point. from their point of view it often is the hunt for the last `checkbox`, the last necessary tick somewhere on the customers requirements page.

In their mind it often seems as a simple calculation, on one hand potentially so much $/year from big-corp vs 2xManxMonth to get a new feature over the line? No brainer.

An I am struggling to somehow explain that you need to add much more to those two developer months, because with every feature there are bugs and regressions and customer tickets, e.t.c. and suddenly it takes one developer in perpetuity.

[StavrosK]

Isn't a big part of it the client saying that "it would be nice if..." versus "we can't use this unless"?

[davidgerard]

Much as a salesman can tell when a customer is saying "I would most certainly give you money if you turned your product upside down and painted it blue", which is correctly translated as "I will never buy your present offering."

[firasd]

Set Your Priorities: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.htm...

A couple recent related articles:

1) How to Pick Winning Product Features https://medium.com/pm-insights/how-to-pick-winning-product-f...

2) Building Products https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/building-pr...

[roel_v]

That dynamic is very different for one size fits all software than it is for consultancyware, though.

[pedalpete]

I had a very similar experience to yours (with the exception of partners and investors). I was building a staff scheduling system, launch with beta testers who tried it out and then suggested they'd start using it when it had feature x or y. I'd implement feature x and then they'd say they'd use it when they had feature z.

I came to realize that the challenge is in the changing costs. They already had a product that could do more than what they could do with the systems they had at the time (mostly excel). It did a bunch of reporting and shift swapping etc. etc. but there was no way it wasn't getting momentum.

Thing is, I just wasn't passionate enough about it to make it a product I would love working on for the next 10 years.

A few people here say you're burned out, maybe you are, but maybe there are other projects you're more passionate about.

The project I'm currently on I'm not madly passionate about as a product, but other people love it, and it is fun to move the levers and see the affect on traffic and the (potential) business.

You're definitely not alone in your thoughts on this one, I can appreciate where you're coming from. Hopefully you look back at this as a great decision.

Better things ahead!

(great writing style btw)

[SFJulie]

Hi tim, nice reading. It put balm in my heart.

Well, I thought I was crazy some times in my life (when I pulled the plug of my own company) for putting my life and my sanity on par with money. I was getting broken, I had a constant flow of ... 70+ /hrs job paid 35 hrs a week and even though I had customers but I was chaining more and more burn-in on burn-out. I was seeing my benefits diminish and my life sucked out.

But I did the right choice retrospectively. When clouds of stress disappears emotional reactions loosen up, then most of the time it shows you that rational thoughts such as the one you are exposing are right.

Risks have to be rationalized else you can get sucked in a gambler attitude. I guess some entrepreneurs are not guarded well enough against the "gambling/irrational risk" addiction that can be fired up.

It is hard because we are driven to entrepreneurship by emotions, and business decisions are best done in a cold sociopathic kind of state of mind.

You have all my regards and I wished I could have written such a concise and clear essay on the difficulty to live with decisions that are right and seem wrong because we human have doubts, emotions, dreams...

[timoth3y]

Thank you. I'm glad it meant something to you. TO tell the truth I was a mess the first week after deciding to shut down. No matter how many ways I could "prove" to my self I was doing the right thing, it still felt horrible.

I'm better now, and this discussion on HN -- even those who disagree with me -- really helps.

[SFJulie]

Lucky you, I pulled the plug a little to late, and now I pay a dear price.

Risk aversion is NOT bad. For 1 success they are hundreds of failures. Even though I accepted the game, it retrospectively feels like going for business is signing a pact with the devil. Either you win, and it is okay, or you lose and damages are doubled since your are marked with the seal of failure.

We live in a time where people want heroes and success stories, not reasonable persons that are boringly facing uncertainty.

When you take a risk of winning, you also take a risk of losing.

My epitaph will tell: "Si l'échec est la meilleure manière d'apprendre alors de mon vivant, j'ai vaincu Karpov et Kasparov".

[JoeAltmaier]

I made the mistake of going ahead. 5 years later and little to show (but a frustrated sales staff and confused investors) I gave up. Wish I had the balls to give up years earlier. I could have worked on something with a better outlook, which would have benefitted everyone more. Remember, its not "do this or give up"; its "do this or do something else".

[chaostheory]

"I'm not saying there was no solution. There might have been, but the team and I could not find one. Think of it this way. You and a team decide to summit a mountain. It's a high-risk endeavor. After weeks of going over your maps and equipment you just can't see a plausible way up. Do you call it off or set out hoping you'll be able to figure it out. It doesn't mean no one can do it. I means I could not do it with that team and that equipment."

From what I've read (and I could be wrong), it just sounds like you burned out. From personal experience, it's super difficult to keep up the energy and morale when you're either solo or semi-solo (when your cofounders aren't full time like you are). Part time cofounders are better than no one, but they're nothing compared to a full time cofounder who's with you in the trenches.

Good job on lasting as long as you did on that death march.

[timoth3y]

Tired certainly, but not burned out. If we could have come up with an approach to solving the problem, I would have been 100% on board.

I have no problem working 70+ hour weeks for something I believe in. I've done it before, and there's a good chance I'll do it again. Just not on this project.

[chaostheory]

Isn't uncertainty a major characteristic of a startup though? Even if you guys had a hypothesis that you believed in, would it necessarily be correct? I'm just saying that maybe you'd have more faith if either you weren't working 70 hour weeks or you had another full time co-founder

[AndrewKemendo]

Based on what I read, it wasn't that there was no way to make this work - as you state here.

It's that you didn't want to stake your future on an uncertain outcome.

Nobody can argue with you that such a decision was a bad idea. If you, the founder don't want to do it - it will fail. So I think this just wasn't your passion play and you can't go down this road without being passionate and come out the other side in one piece.

That said, if every founder thought this way we wouldn't have most of the companies that we rely on today (not just startups by the way) - maybe that's good maybe that's bad.

[T2_t2]

> Based on what I read, it wasn't that there was no way to make this work - as you state here.

It totally was! He had no way to solve the fundamental problem of the software - making people use it ALL the time, for multiple (paying) users. If the software was doomed to be one licence for an office of 20, where it is used sporadically for one or two infrequent use cases, it was doomed, and the only hope was a pivot. No one should start a business hoping to pivot.

> It's that you didn't want to stake your future on an uncertain outcome.

Again, no it wasn't. It was that he didn't want to chase hoping there might be a solution, because there may not have been a solution at all. If your whole business plan is "raise cash and hope we pivot to a good idea", is that really a solid plan? Why not just pivot before getting the cash? I have never heard of anyone proposing to raise cash based on an as yet undecided pivot.

> That said, if every founder thought this way we wouldn't have most of the companies that we rely on today

Prove it. No company I can think of knew pre-funding of a huge flaw at the core of their product they couldn't solve, and raised cash so they COULD pivot. Most pivots happen because a company finds a small element people love, so they move towards that. Startups don't go in hoping to pivot to an as yet undecided new plan. I mean, that just seems non sensical to me.

[AndrewKemendo]

Prove it.

There are other examples in this thread. A pivot is exactly that, something you need to re-engineer or change the market on to make viable.

Reddit is a good example. Burbn/Instagram another. Flikr even better.

If your whole business plan is "raise cash and hope we pivot to a good idea", is that really a solid plan?

As with most things, the answer is "It depends." Taking money can be a forcing function on a pivot. If you have a solid team and know that there is a market, then you seek hard for a solution - if there is no solution in the market then you take the company in a different direction. That's why team is so important - ideas fail.

[macca321]

I'm very interested in your learnings.

I've worked on enterprise collaboration software before, and came to the conclusions that the users will favour using the simplest thing for the task in hand (email or excel) no matter what SAAS products they have.

The trick then becomes 1. sell to management and get them to gamble on enforcing it's usage, (maybe by taking away the other tools, extensive training), or 2. have something that works at a grass roots level (e.g. dropbox being used to work around IT constraints) .

I think I may have just restated your post, oops!

I keep wondering if the future for workflow tools might be to unobtrusively monitor user interactions by hooking into the email client, and have an intelligent Clippy-like service which prompts and decorates their tools i.e. prompting to use ContractBeast if a contract is attached to an email (or in fact just doing so), and to display relevant information as and when needed. There was some CRM system extension for gmail years ago which I remember being radically successful.

Could something like that have worked out for you?

*and server in order to provide analysis, archiving etc.

[softawre]

This is a good idea.

As another example, if I had to enter tracking IDs into some app to have a nice view of when my packages were coming I wouldn't do it.

But gmail picks them from my email for free, so I use the app every day.

[lobotryas]

Tim, I only have your perspective to go by, however, from what you describe, I agree that you did the right thing.

On the bright side, you still have Contract Beast on the back of your mind and if you ever do think of an interesting solution then you'll be in a good position to test it out.

[crzwdjk]

Nice article. I just had a similar experience: after a bunch of work building a product, I came to the realization that the problem I was trying to solve just wasn't urgent enough, and the organizations I was trying to sell to just didn't have it together enough to decide to buy. So ultimately I decided to shut things down, though I did manage to salvage some of the code for reuse in later projects. Ultimately, entrepreneurship is an experiment, and sometimes what an experiment teaches you is that your hypothesis was wrong and you should try something else instead.

[conductr]

If team & investors wanted to move forward, did you discuss letting them (without you)? Basically just walking away, with no/low strings attached. I'm just curious, because sometimes I pick up on an "if I can't have it, nobody can" type attitude. If you made that offer and they refused, it's not on you.

I think you made the right choice, I would have done the same and don't think you should be judge worse for it. The whole thing was an experiment, your reason seems like a good reason to cut your losses personally. Before investment, that's Ok.

[timoth3y]

I would have been OK with it, but I don't think it would not have worked. I developed most of the code and was the only one with significant startup experience. That said, I don't know if the rest of team ever discussed it with the investors. They did not bring it up with me.

[taytus]

I don't know man, $500k is a LOT of money to even pivot to the next Uber for X. I might be totally wrong, but I think you are just burned out. Best of luck!

[allemagne]

Personally, I think more healthy skepticism like this is needed in startups. Everyone being completely convinced they can pivot to the next Uber for X is what scares me that there's a bubble and makes satires like HBO's Silicon Valley so poignant.

[joe563323]

Bravo. On a different note. Why is your username is displayed in green ?

[RainManDetroit]

No one manages his money as carefully as his own. If you were as clear and succinct in your description of the situation to stakeholders as you just made plain here, and they were willing to pay for the chance of success or the effort toward success, the project should have gone forward.

[kornish]

He made it clear, though, that it wasn't just his stakeholders' money he was worried about - it was investing his own valuable time and energy in a problem he believed to be fundamentally unconquerable. That, to me, is a far better reason to not go forward.