The end of an era: a Flukebox post-mortem
It’s been a fun ride but now it’s officially over - I’ve decided to call it a day on the Flukebox project. To be honest, I’ve made little progress over the last few months but the final nails in the coffin were provided by IndabaMusic. They’ve not been around long, but they’ve already created a slick web site with many of the key features that the Flukebox musician community was going to have. With competitors this good, I think it’s time to find a different problem to solve.
It’s often said that you learn more from failure than from success, and for sure, this project has taught me a lot. Most fundamentally, it has taught me several important things about myself that perhaps I knew but was trying hard to ignore:
- I prefer to pick a hard problem and spend all day thinking about it than to pick a easier problem and actually solve it. Instead, I should try harder to do something productive without worrying too much about the details or in which order I should complete things.
- I need to work with other people who are less imaginative but more productive. Not just so that I can sit in my chair and bark orders, but that that my team-mates can periodically encourage me to stop dreaming and do something useful for a change.
- Apart from occasional toilet and meal breaks, I really can surf the internet for an infinite period of time. Having regular contact with other humans, especially those that ask you “what have you done today?” helps a lot, but ultimately I need to recognise my knowledge addiction and keep it under control.
With that in mind, it’s not surprising that as my team fell apart, so did the project. Although I succeeded in finding some great people with the right skills and a genuine interest in the project, they all had successful businesses of their own as well as full-time study. I knew that it would be a problem from the beginning, but I had hoped that I might be able to persuade them to give me just enough time to make it work. As it turns out, I was being over-optimistic. In retrospect, I should have tried much harder to find team members with time as well as ability, instead of trying to “go it alone” with inevitable consequences.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though - many things have gone surprisingly well:
- Almost everyone I’ve talked to about my ideas have been very helpful, supportive and sometimes even constructively critical
- Being given funding from my University to “be entrepreneurial” was a pleasant surprise!
- Moving to Poland. Not only has it been a lot of fun living here, it’s given me a lot of confidence that I can live a semi-nomadic lifestyle without problems. I mean, if I can live in a country where even “hi” (cześć) is unpronounceable, the deputy education minister thinks that “the theory of evolution is a lie” and government officials are worried about school teachers and even the Teletubbies promoting homosexuality, I can live anywhere
Thanks to everyone who gave me their support and good luck to the IndabaMusic crew - it’d be great to see them grow rapidly and vindicate my ideas! I feel I’ve learnt a lot and am much better equipped to start my next businesses. Watch this space.
Sad to see you hanging in the towel, but it’s obviously been on the cards for a while.
I had to fill in the SPEED questionnaire this week and when it asked whether if I tried to start a business and it failed it would have been a waste of time, I strongly disagreed. If my business idea doesn’t take off I will still see it as an extremely valuable experience.
I think it takes the right set of people, in the right market, at the right time with the right idea to really be successful and a large proportion of that is luck.
So, with that in mind, congratulations on your successful journey and it’s great to hear you’ve learnt so much.
What worries me is that I strongly empathise with all three weaknesses you mention. I’m going to have to be careful of that!
So, what’s next?
Definitely. Another bonus is that I’ve hardly lost any money, only “wasted” a few months of my life. Except that it wasn’t a waste, I’ve learnt a lot. Even better, I’ve learnt a lot of things I wouldn’t have learnt at University or just working an office job.
What makes the whole thing slightly frustrating is that I think we almost were the right set of people in the right market at the right time. If everyone was in a position to devote as much time and and energy to the project as I could, I genuinely believe we’d have something impressive online by now. But they weren’t, and I was wrong to ignore that. I don’t blame luck - it’s true that it’s a major factor, but it’s not useful to blame things that are outside your control. Much better to blame yourself, because you’re the easiest person to change.
I didn’t call them “weaknesses”, I called them “things”. Facts of life, if you will. Actually I see them as strengths - but strengths that will only work with a little bit of self-awareness and, preferably, as part of a balanced team.
What’s next? FaxItQuick, your instant online faxing service. Not nearly as exciting, glamorous or even innovative, but there seems to be a gap in the market that I can plug fairly easily - and, if I’m lucky, give me a little income with zero effort. Which is always nice.
Grrr.. just posted a comment but seemed to have messed up the math question somehow! As I strain to recall..
It was a tough problem in a maturing market. You clearly have the energy and imagination to succeed and you’ll be well placed with your recent experience for your next project.
Maybe the biggest ongoing lesson concerns people. Obviously you have to understand the needs of your users better than themselves. Then you have to be able to spot people who can make a contribution to the project (even if in a very specific way) and activate and engage them. Finally, you develop the self-awareness that uses your strengths to get you on a roll but stops you getting stuck in a groove. It sounds like you’re well on your way to mastering these skills.
Looking forward to to some more great conversations upon your return!
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