odaiba —the story of my first startup

I failed.

After 9 months of balancing full time job, part time job, family, and my own startup, pouring every free lunch break and 10pm+ evening I had into building the app, conducting user interviews, and managing the team, it has finally become clear that things can’t go forward anymore and it’s time to put a stop to it.

It has been one heck of a ride, and I’d like to use this article to take a look at it, what went well, what killed us, and what I learnt from all of this.

Inception

It all started from LeWagon — a coding bootcamp I had graduated from in 2019 and stayed active in since. On the 25th of May 2020, one of the at-the-time participants, Julien Ergan posted a link on Slack to a hackathon asking if enough people were interested in joining and forming a team.

I was intrigued by the prospect, as I had never experienced a hackathon, but having a family with small kids I knew it’d be a lot to ask to “disappear” for a whole weekend, so I committed myself to applying only if I could come up with a good idea. And that idea came soon enough.

An Italian friend — university professor and mother of an elementary school kid — shared her struggles on Facebook. This was during the first wave of COVID19, when schools closed down and had students go through a pile of homework each day as substitute. Many parents were asking for school reopenings and online an opposition formed accusing such parents of just wanting to “park” their kids and go on with their lives. She went on to write a long post sharing her struggles: how her son who normally loves school became less and less motivated to learn with each passing day, how the lack of any interactions with his peers affected his mental health, and how school is much more than the subjects you learn — it’s about the small talk with your desk-mate, the time you spend in recess with your friends, and all those little moments that get summarised as “fine” when a parent asks how school went.

This led me to a thought: it’s clear that offline learning will always be better than online learning in terms of connectivity, but when kids can’t meet in person, what is the next best thing that we can provide? What if we built a platform that would allow kids to collaborate on homework online, bringing back part of this lost connectivity?

And like that, an idea was born, ready to be put at test by the competition: Socialize Homework (later renamed to odaiba). An online platform where you upload your homework and then connect with your friends via a voicecall to take turns to fill it out, whiteboard style.

Challenge

With the idea ready, the next step was to gather a team. I first asked my co-worked Myra Li to join. She is a very talented designer and it was clear that we needed to make the app look good. Then I looked who else of the LeWagon students had applied, but turned out that only Julien had. However, it turned out that a LeWagon graduate from Singapore, Ann Koh, had applied too and asked to join our team.

We had a decent team, but with a problem: it was clear that the app would need a lot of JavaScript work, a programming language that none of us had much experience with. We were looking for alternative solutions, but without much luck. Then finally, 30 minutes before the event was meant to start, Dzakki, a fullstack JavaScript developer reach out asking to join.

What followed was probably the most intense weekend of my life. Hours of coding and managing, at the same time as helping with emergencies at home and even going for work on Saturday, coding at the job and phoning with mentors during lunch break. That same Saturday I ended up practicing the pitch until 3am with the help of my dear friend and long time mentor Fabio Tognetti.

Sunday, the last day of the hackathon, came and we were all exhausted, but the work wasn’t done yet. The app still wasn’t ready to be demoed and while other startups were pitching my son disappeared and I had to run out to find him. Luckily all got solved 10 minutes before our slot, and while it took me a while to get over the stress of the moment the pitch itself went well.

We did so well in fact, that to our surprise the judges decided to award us the first price: 500.000 yen! A result none of us expected considering the other cool apps that had entered the competition.

While the hackathon story is that of a happy ending it also foreshadowed the problems we’d be dealing with from then on, namely balancing startup&work and lack of JS resources.

Rise

The period right after the hackathon was like a honeymoon. Emboldened by our victory we decided to keep working on the project and everything seemed to give us good reason to do so. We got features in several news (online, printed, and even TV), teachers and government officials in my network I reached out to really liked the idea and were willing to use it once ready, and many people were keen to join and help out with the project.

The hackathon organizers helped us get in touch with some high level schools, and even connected us with an educator with 20+ years of experience across 4 different countries, who’d eventually ended up becoming the COO: David Fingerote.

The plan seemed clear. We had a bare-bones concept version of an app. If we could get it to a working stage, we could then share it with teachers, have them use it and we’ll improve it from there.

As we worked on the app and prepared our network for test the ready version, another boost came our way: we had been accepted to join an accelerator program aimed a startups with a social impact organized by ImpacTech. For us it was another sign that what we were building was of use, and that we were moving in the right direction.

But this was not meant to last.

Crash

The first cracks started appearing fairly soon.

We all had our life, families and jobs to provide for them, so working on odaiba had to be done in our free time. This meant that progress would come much slower than during the hackathon, which at times was disheartening. This impacted the hardest Dzakki, our only JS developer. We tried to counter this by onboarding more JS developers, and one of them especially (Ivan Garcia) ended up being of huge help, but it proved to be a big cost on my time, which ultimately only kicked the can down the road.

With much effort and push we finally developed an early stage prototype: just a form and a collaboration screen connected via a generated link, but enough to test our hypothesis. And here to our horror we got the first reality check: nobody cared about our app.

The network we had prepared earlier pretty much dried up. When we reach out to them it was clear that they have much more urgent things to take care of and online connectivity wasn’t in their top 10, much less top 3 of concerns. The ones who were patient and willing to test it gave at the end a polite nod, but when asked whether they’d use it, they’d usually say that yes provided <insert feature> was added. A response which much later on, thanks to reading a book called The Mom Test, I found out is actually a polite way of saying “no, your app is crap”.

This wasn’t a sudden shock, but rather a gradual process that slowly built with each direct and indirect rejection, until it threw me in a bit of a panic. How do we go about getting users? Do we develop more our app (add a teacher’s overview, implement a webinar session)? Do we broaden the scope (make it not just for schools, but also for homeschooled, hikikomori, etc.)? Do we pivot and make it something about something slightly different (target training companies and turn it into an alternative to Zoom)? We explored all the aforementioned options, but the reality was we didn’t have enough resources. And this confusion in terms of direction would just go on to hurt us.

Fall

It was at this time that Tim Romero, one of the mentors provided by ImpacTech, laid it clear before me: the most important thing for a startup is Product Market Fit. If the product doesn’t fit the needs of the market, then there is no way it can succeed, and the best way to see if you have Product Market Fit is by checking if (and how much) would users be willing to pay for your product — a question that you MUST include in your user interviews.

This was something that I understood with my head, but not with my actions. Internally I still believed there was a way out with what we had and so I ended up constantly chasing that ONE thing that would save us — that ONE developer who can build what we need, that ONE teacher who would use the app, that ONE investor who would put money in this dream and get it running. I had too much stuff going on in my personal life and couldn’t afford to start over from scratch — I needed this to succeed somehow.

But alas, it was just my blindness, and I was meant to be reminded of that.

ImpacTech organised a pitching competition with a 100.000 yen prize for each bracket, and I was confident we would get it. I prepared, practiced, got again in touch with Fabio, all to make sure we would win the prize and get another boost. I was prepared, I was good, I was confident we would win.

But we didn’t.

A moral loss. A punch in the gut. The lowest point in the whole startup experience.

Still I didn’t want to give up, so I redoubled my efforts and moved to focus on investors. Maybe if we got what we needed from them, then we could finally move to success. But that also didn’t work out. The confusion we had in terms of target audience (and therefore value proposition) was justifiably a big red flag, and not a potential for growth as we were trying to paint it. So in the end, no salvation came through here either.

With all these signs it finally became clear to me. The startup I had in mind couldn’t exist in the form I envisioned, so it was time to put a stop to it.

Lessons

All in all I have to say things turned out pretty well. I’m so grateful my frugal spirit stopped me from dunking thousands of dollars into an Indian outsourcing company, or taking a big bank loan to dump into the long list of things I wanted to pay for, and instead my biggest cost was just the incorporation, with all other tools (Slack, email, hosting…) handled for free.

But as I am sitting here, taking a trip down memory lane and thinking about this 9 month experience I can’t help but wonder: what are some advice I’d give my past self?

• Winning a hackathon doesn’t mean you have a good product. If anything I’d say winning is more of a hindrance, because instead of starting with a pain and making a market and UX analysis to validate that the pain exists and customers can be found, you start with a product and then try to find who will pay you for it. Essentially you are putting the cart in front of the horse.
• Compliments are easy to give, don’t believe them. People will seldom tell you what you are building sucks and will try to protect your ego, especially if they know you. Mom Test everything and don’t fall in the trap of “just one more feature will get us the contract”.
• The most important thing is Product Market Fit. You don’t have a budget to artificially create a new market (cough-bottled-water-cough) so your only path to success lies in creating something people actually need and are willing to pay for. And if you are asking whether you have PMF then the answer is no — if you have to ask you don’t have it, because when you really have PMF then your worries are how you can handle the rapid growth. As Paul Sipasseuth, another odaiba member, put it: if you have the cure for cancer hidden behind a website with the worst UX possible, people are still going to buy it.

But despite having to close odaiba’s chapter, I’m doing it with gratitude and a desire to return to this wonderful world in the near future.

I’m thankful to the original team: Julien, Myra, Dzakki, and Ann, who got this wonderful project running. I’m thankful to David who showed constant initiative and invaluable support. I’m thankful to Paul, Ivan, Frances, Roomee, Noemi, Eliška, and all other members who joined and contributed, even if it was just a little bit. I’m thankful to Fabio for always lending an ear and being available to help. I’m thankful to LeWagon with a special shoutout to Sasha for being there at the inception and organising and connecting us with so many events meant to help us grow. I’m thankful to Kana, Watanabe and the other members of Japan Hackathon for the immense help in connecting us with people. I’m thankful to Fara and the ImpacTech team for providing us a platform to learn and grow. I’m thankful to Tim for that painful but important lesson on Product Market Fit. And last but not least, I’m thankful to my wife for helping and supporting me on this journey.

From life to death. From death to soil. My hope is that out of this soil, new life will emerge.