Hello. My name is Travis Truett. I work for retickr, and here is what’s going on right now…
We Are Spending a Lot of Money (Relatively of Course)
I just found out yesterday how much money we are spending. For those of you unfamiliar with the organizational structure of retickr, I should know at any given second how much money we are spending and how much money we have. I have broken one of the cardinal rules of business management and Warren Buffett should slap my face. It really is inexcusable.
Some advice to my start-up peers: Never forget that every penny matters and expenses add up quick. Your enemy is the relative comfort that funding can (and will) bring you. It is a false comfort that causes start-ups to fail and corporations to grow complacent. Every night before you go to bed write down how much money your company spent that day. Now think about how many kids that would feed. Now sleep peacefully knowing that you are not wasting any money on your cool idea. I am a hypocrite and I owe it to myself, my team, and my investors to treat our funds like they are coming out of my parents retirement fund.
We are currently spending $18,500 a month. Basically, we are spending my entire life-time earnings every four weeks. Combine every hour, of every job I have worked in the last ten years (I’m 25), and we spend that in thirty days. That hits home. What’s our monthly burn rate? My life’s work, no big deal…
User Retention:
We have had 3,836 people create a retickr account. We currently have an “active” user base of about 325 people. Our current user retention is about 8.4% which means that for every 100 people that have downloaded retickr, there are only eight adults and one small child still using it. This is low, this is bad, and this is depressing. There are ways of course to rationalize this low figure… our beta users tested an incomplete product, our server crashes might have turned people away… but these are all excuses.
We are not delivering what the majority of our target market is wanting.
It has been two months since our product launch and we are now analyzing user feedback and figuring out what has been working and what has not been working. One of the biggest complaints we have received is that retickr is confusing. I take full responsibility for this and we are striving to rework our design and provide a simpler, more intuitive experience.
Some advice to my start-up peers: Feature creep is your enemy. We all have awesome ideas for features and hopefully one day we will be able to integrate (some of) them into our respective products. However, your first 3, 6, 9, 12 months is not the time to do this. People forget that Google did “search” for years before focusing on anything else. I forget this on a daily basis. Unfortunately I think this is a lesson that first-time entrepreneurs just have to learn the hard way. I have literally made myself signs, post-it notes, and whiteboard reminders that all say the same thing, “Do one thing well.” Apparently it didn’t stick because here we are now with a complex, confusing product experience.
Our application has a lot of really cool, really powerful features but if we lose 90% of our user base in the first sixty seconds… they aren’t doing too much good. At least we like them and use them, right? A promise to our users: We have listened to your feedback and are going back to the drawing board to fix some things. Thank you for your patience and I am already excited about our new design. I think you all will really like it.
Slipping out of the Honeymoon Phase
We launched two months ago. The Honeymoon is over. The trough of sorrow sucks.
Waking up Scared
Ted Alling (Lamp Post Group Partner) pulled me into his office several months ago and told me that he still wakes up scared every morning. I remember nodding and telling him that I did as well. To be honest, I didn’t. I do now. The strange thing is now that it’s back; I realize how much I have missed it. I think this is where “entrepreneurs” earn their label as crazy people, because this is probably something that isn’t (and shouldn’t) be missed. Before recently, the last time that I felt scared was last January when I packed up my life in California and drove to Chattanooga with no money, one business lead, and no idea what I was going to do. I spent about ninety days waking up scared on Brian’s couch trying to figure out what I was going to do that day for retickr.
Guess what baby… I’m back, cold sweats and all. What can I do today that will help justify the eighty-hour work weeks that Adam and Josh have been putting in for the last six months? This is the fear zone that I hope doesn’t leave anytime soon. This is the mindset that I love.
Interestingly, while studying user experience design I have come across a graph that I think applies equally as well to entrepreneurs and also helps visualize this fear zone…
Some advice to my start-up peers: Find this “fear zone” and stay in it. Fair warning… people around you will not understand what is going on. At the very least, they will think something is wrong. More likely than not they will think nothing, because they will not see you, because you will be at the office…scared. If I had to take a wild guess I would say that start-up entrepreneurs probably lose more relationships than they gain during the first year.
Accept it, and move on.
Oh shit, this is real…
…is probably a good summary of this post. I feel like this week has served as another inflection point in the “retickr era” of my life. So far I think I have had two… my first being last winter when I took a leap of faith, surrendered my life insurance policy, and started retickr after years of watching business ideas come and go. The second is now, when things like burn rate and user retention are real things, real things that keep you up at night, real things that people hold you accountable for.
Some advice to my start-up peers: Stay hungry. Stop eating for a couple days and your thoughts will get a lot clearer and more rational, I promise. (haha)
Seriously though, ride the ups and downs and enjoy the fact that you are really living. That’s all you can ask for at the end of the day.
One last thing… Take comfort in the fact that the poor start-up founder and the rich corporate CEO both go home at the end of the day, eat dinner, watch TV, and go to bed. The CEO dreams of being a poor start-up founder again and the poor start-up founder dreams of becoming a corporate CEO.
The only difference of course is that the CEO dreams while sleeping in his magnetic floating bed…
Thanks for writing this up :-)
You are welcome Jan. Thank you for reading and (hopefully) using retickr.
Fear is a deadly downward spiral. Focus on growing the revenue, son.
I would say that there is good fear and bad fear. I agree though that “outright” fear leads to a deadly downward spiral. Revenue will come but I feel that first we have to have a solid product offering…
Good post ! There right now except we are bootstrapped, we do have our differences but I can empathise with the feeling your having … I guess we just have to ride it out, work out the kinks and keep going …
Appreciate it sid,
That’s all we can do.. Win, lose, or draw I wouldn’t trade it for anything else..
Bootstrapping is almost scarier – one misstep and you lose your revenue abd you have no savings to fall back on.
Here’s an astonishing clip from ’60 Minutes’ on free climber Alex Honnold – climbing 4,000 foot vertical rock faces with no rope. Lots of parallels with start ups: no room for error, you live or die on your wits, being ‘out there’ makes you feel totally alive.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/02/60minutes/main20114487.shtml
Pointcast for social. Looks like these folks did it too: http://m.techcrunch.com/2007/10/18/remember-pointcast-meet-chirpscreen/ … Chirpscreen.
Great right up, thanks for sharing. You are burning a lot of money on such a simple product with no obvious features that couldn’t be replicated in a heart beat so be careful man!
Thought I’d give you some hopefully helpful feedback on a few things that just put me off your product:
a) Mac only.
b) The US map on the video.
c) I don’t need this as I keep OWA open and get pop up notifications via email
I agree I’m a windows (for now) and linux user, while I do expect you to hit every platform, support for more then MacOS would be nice. Also, focus more on the news portion, and less on facebook, I had to watch the video to figure out what your product did, Streaming Facebook and Twitter – I have that, Tweetdeck does it. News though, thats awesome, its like the news reader on Android, see if you can figure out how to sell your strength.
Robert,
Communicating our message is definitely something we need to work on. Thanks for the honesty and feedback. We look forward to signing you up as a user when we expand platforms. Personalized news is our focus, and you’re right that we need to make that our focus.
I’m curious on what you guys are spending that much money on (if you’re able to share)? Makes me feel like I’m maybe not spending enough money :)
I downloaded and installed retickr. My advice is not to open the Home window after the wizard process. Only open the ticker. My initial reaction when the app launched was: “Whoa, what is all this!? There’s 3 arrows pointing in different directions, I don’t know what to do!” It was a bit overwhelming. I think you get people in with just the ticker and those who want more from the ticker will be able to explore the other features by opening the Home screen.
Marvin,
My advice is stay lean, stay lean, stay lean. No need to spend money. Just get users and traction. We want to be as transparent as possible, and posting our mistakes and lessons learned for fellow startups is part of it.
On the home screen popup, that happens for only first time users – but we are definitely listening. We are currently studying user interaction and focusing on what works and what makes retickr as simple as possible. Clearly, we are failing at that now so we are hitting the drawing board.
Good writeup – not sure where 18k is going every month. I’d ask for an itemized list of all those expenses, you may be getting fleeced.
Also, i’m a fan of aggregate news sites. I use Google Reader (2much) everyday, but i’m not a fan of the “ticker” interface. Every TV News Network uses them and I hardly notice them anymore, I dislike them and have _tuned_ them out. I’m sure retickr is a good app, but I would never install it.
I might consider using this app if it was a wordpress plugin…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=retickr
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The fear zone was something which stood out to me. Why must you live in fear to succeed? Surely as you roll out new features, yes you will be worried as to will it work, will users want to use this, how useful is it; however after you see this feature succeed or fail, your fear will decrease due to you knowing the final outcome.
‘Accept it, move on’ – Something I’ve said a lot recently, yes you should analyse what you did wrong, but don’t waste time over what’s happened, focus on the future and keep adding to your users’ experience.
Very interesting post, thanks for writing it up :)
Travis, fantastic post, very honest and brave you’ve written that up. I don’t know if it is a consolation, but we’ve all been there as entrepreneurs or startup artists. The level of “scaredness” multiplies if you are bootstrapped.
What I am trying with bluside.com is kind of getting a new balance to that, at least to get some different thoughts in our head, at least for a few minutes…
Thanks for writing that up. Good to know that more people know what that fearzone is all about.
Cheers!
Great post.
It’s always interesting to hear the inner thoughts of somebody deep in a new startup.
Thanks for being so honest.
Keep up the posts.
We understand the working like a crazy person and loosing relationships in the begining! If you want things no one else has, you have to do things no one else does. Cant wait till you all are at the TOP!!!
Sounds kooky coming from a complete stranger, I’m sure, but I’m not removing retickr…I like it. I only had a few days using it before things went into a holding pattern, but during that time, I liked it. I have hope you’ll get your ducks in a row and bring it back online. I check it out every coupl’a days to see if things are back & I’ll continue to do so, especially after reading your post. I’ve worked with some of the rock stars in an open source start up a few years back. I was in awe. I’m a right brain, a creative, pretty picture guy – not a developer any where near the caliber of my former co-workers ( but still current friends ) and I saw first hand the time & dedication that needs to go into a project, and into a start up. I was proud to be a part of that. They taught me how to panic and yet still smile,…….and still panic. It’s hard for someone on the user side to understand any of that, which is why retickr will sit right there, in my dock, and I will patiently wait. You do have a good thing and you certainly don’t need me to tell you to keep at it. So,……Keep at it!
-max
Max,
Thanks for the support and while retickr is “struggling” right now, we are working night-and-day to launch retickr 2.0 soon. We are giving our “proof of concept” a complete overhaul and it will soon provide much more value, not even taking into account how much better it will look. There is no denying that start-ups are crazy, time-consuming, depressing, awesome… I couldn’t imagine doing anything else though and working with people that share the same passion is something that will stay with me forever. Again, appreciate the kind words they mean a lot.
-Travis
You really make it seem really easy with your presentation but I to find this matter to be actually one thing that I believe I’d never understand. It seems too complicated and very vast for me. I am taking a look forward to your subsequent submit, I’ll attempt to get the hang of it!