How a lack of conviction cost me a YC company
How a lack of conviction cost me a YC company
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On Tuesday of this week, as I swilled my morning flat white, browsing the morning tech news trying to to arouse my brain from lethargy, an article hit like an ice bucket in a Banya. An article that exposed, in perfect clarity, how I’d missed out on $10m or more in equity value. This mishap wasn’t due to a market blunder or career misstep, it wasn’t due to a poor trade or bad decision. It was due to a lack of confidence, an absence of absolute conviction.
To dissect this blunder we need to take a step back, to late 2019, and my first foray into the world of software.
I was 25 (a late bloomer by modern-day tech bro standards) and building an app with a friend called Friction (I still love the name). The app was simple. You’d select the apps you wanted to use less, and every time you opened them, Friction would pop up for 7 seconds. The theory was, that just this short delay would be enough to pull people out of their habitual app use and help them think about whether they really wanted to use the app. You can see Friction below, a snapshot on wayback machine from October 2019, 4 years ago.
Unfortunately, the video on the left won’t render on WayBack Machine but you get the idea, one side shows someone mindlessly scrolling through apps, the other someone using friction and putting their phone away.
While I clearly had very limited design skills (what was I thinking with that handrawn phone) I have to give myself props for the copy. Simple, to the point, clearly demonstrates the value.
Over the next few months, I started to immerse myself in the world of digital distraction. I started blogging on Medium, trying to drum up a bit of a name for myself in the space, every couple of weeks I wrote a post on the drawbacks of constant technology use, how apps fucked with our mental health, turning us into twitching, content-consuming slaves, at the mercy of big tech. I became a disciple of Tristan Harris, and an enemy of Nir Eyal – the fact he didn’t know who I was was irrelevant, every founder needs a nemesis.
As I went through this process of writing and creating an echo chamber of like-minded people my conviction grew. I deeply believed Friction was a product many people would find use in, it seemed that the only way to solve the dangers of technology was with technology. Audre Lorde may posit the master’s tools can’t dismantle the master’s house, but maybe they can be used to create new homes for their subjects, freeing them from their chastity.
Eventually, the reality of creating a startup kicked in. The product never really worked, people I spoke to said the app wouldn’t be of use, as it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem (I never really saw this as an issue), others said that it was a cool idea but impossible to monetise (I believed this more). I also realised just how hard it is to get product distribution. Thousands of apps get released every day – without a solid go-to-market plan, no one will ever find your app, no matter how good it is. At the time I did not have the skills or knowledge to distribute Friction.
All these factors ended up with me and my co-founder giving up on our little project. I even added the ‘failed’ to Friction on the projects page of my website, my way to formally put the nail in the coffin of my graveyard of failures. I hadn’t thought much about Friction until Tuesday, week when I came across Clearspace.
Clearspace is Friction. I’m not for a second saying that the founders stole my idea, firstly, ideas are free, second, the chance they’d have seen Friction is pretty low. But the point still stands, product wise Clearspace might be a bit more evolved than Friction, it might have a few more features and better ux, but the basic premise of blocking apps before you open them for a time period is exactly the same.
Clearspace is a Y-Combinator-backed company. For those that don’t know YC is like the Stanford of accelerators (apparently its acceptance rate is lower than Stanford and Harvard). YC has birthed AirBnB, Stripe, Dropbox and many other unicorns. YC invest $500k in the earliest stages, usually based just on the team and the idea. If ever, there was a litmus test for if your idea is genuinely good, getting into YC might be it.
After you’ve gone through the YC accelerator you pitch your idea at demo day to VCs for your seed round. The average valuation of a YC startup on demo day is $12m. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say then, by not sticking with Friction I potentially left millions on the table. But I didn’t stick with Friction, so I don’t deserve those millions, simple as that.
I’m not at all angry about this, I’m happy that someone is bringing an app that eliminates phone distraction into the world. I also feel vindicated, that my idea was objectively good. I feel many of the same gut-feel feelings I felt with Friction that I do with medley, this will give me confidence that my current startup is a product that people need and will offer insane value. Having said that, it would be foolish to not take a few lessons from my misadventures at Friction, so here they are. Here’s what I’d do 4 years ago, if I had the knowledge I do now.
Create an echo chamber, put the blinders on
There is a time and a place for self-reflection. Unless you are a sociopath you should probably go through a few self-reflectives phases in your life. Times where you look at everything you do and believe, where you deconstruct what you know and try to get closer to some epistemological notion of what is true. Building a startup is not one of these times.
When you are building a startup you want need to be single-minded. Time will tell if you are right or wrong, but at the outset of a startup, you really do need to create an echo-chamber around yourself of like-minded people. Your cause of failure is far less likely being wrong, and far more likely you never got to a place where you can even prove you are right. You want to serve yourself the Kool-Aid and drink it down. You want to brainwash yourself with your own rhetoric, you need to inhale your own bullshit. You need to shovel your brainwaves down the throats of anyone in earshot, medicate yourself with memes.
The reason is that in those first 6 months to a year, the only way you are going to know if your idea is good or not is to get it out there into the hands of as many people as possible (at least 100) and see what they think. Once you’ve done this you can start to make adjustments based on feedback, but until you reach that stage any doubt, watering down of your vision or distraction will just reduce the chances you ever make it to that place.
Don’t read widely, don’t get a diverse viewpoint, don’t facilitate an environment in your startup of questioning the vision (people should be on the bus or off) just do the thing. This may sound psychotic, and it is, but I truly believe this is what it takes to take an idea from 0 to real users.
Intensity is the strategy
Stop talking about ‘strategy’ in your startup. In the very early days, you have no strategy, you have a vision and you make tactical decisions each day to bring that vision to life. Intensity is the strategy. If you are currently speaking to 5 potential customers per week, speak to 50, if you are spending 40 hours writing code, spend 80, if you are creating 5 pieces of content a week, try 15.
Again, further on in your journey, you can speak about ‘efficiency’ and ‘leverage’ but in the early days these words are meaningless, you just need to get your idea to market, and have some users of your product.
Anything can be learned
When I first saw the success of Clearspace, one of my first reactions was that Friction was the right product at the wrong time. 4 years ago I didn’t have the skills to bring an app to market, and it would have been difficult to ever make this product a success without these skills. This is true, but it’s also nonsense. Anything can be learned.
Indeed, everything I’ve ever learned about business has come in the last few years, the majority without any formal instruction. In 2018 I did a short course on Product Management which gave me the frameworks to think about the job role, but after this course, I was, of course, a terrible product manager, I was a very average (probably below) product manager, even when I was employed as one, it wasn’t until I started my first proper startup and focused on learning the skills that I became better. The same with marketing, anyone can learn marketing, it just takes a tonne of time, and a tonne of experimenting. I’m still a poor marketer, but I am confident I’ll be great at it one day, because it’s the skill I’m putting 90% of my efforts into learning. The same with design, no one needs to teach you design, look at the Friction design work, it was awful, I now do 90% of the design work at medley, and I think our UX is pretty good.
Everyone starts out as a beginner, unfortunately, many of us stay this way. We think that learning a field requires some formal education or even worse a corporate ‘training and progression plan’ – it’s probably exactly the opposite. Take writing, much of being able to clearly communicate is unlearning what you get taught in school. People don’t want adverbs, complex sentence structure, affected tones, or, god forbid a semi-colon. Good written communication is just two things – clear thinking, and writing how you speak. Apologies for the rant against the political-education complex, the second flat white of the morning has just been necked, and nearly always mandates a tirade against the biggest grift of the 21st century.
What I’m trying to say here is that Friction could have been a success, even though I didn’t have the skills at the time to make it so. Humans don’t live in a state of stasis, if a problem becomes big enough, we pull the techniques to solve the problem out of the world and learn it by applying those techniques to the problem at hand. Theory then proceeds this empirical approach, and we share this with others (this is what is happening right now)
If you’ve made it this far, something has resonated. You might be sitting on an idea of your own, not sure whether to make a go of it, or you might be in that dark place of a startup where you are questioning everything you believe to be true, trust me we’ve all been there. Hopefully, you take something from my past mishaps, and at least see your idea to its first 100 users. I’m certain this is where the majority of ideas fail, and there must be a graveyard of good ones mixed in with the genuinely bad. We’re nearly universally taught that questioning our assumptions and prejudices is a good thing, and it nearly always is. But sometimes, just sometimes it isn’t. If you want to be a successful founder, I think you do need to know when to flip the switch, to ignore reason and just doggedly see through your vision, to whatever end.
WAGMI
Tom x
Funny. I was writing on Medium four years ago as well, also in that space, railing about tons of stuff (you have to earn those claps!), and never seeming to reach anyone. But your post gave me a clue as to why -- I used semi-colons! Just kidding... quite the idea you had! Speaking for myself, I wish there was something like Friction (awesome name, by the way, way better than Clearspace!) back then - and even now - as this tiny reminder is often all you need. I now use the all-or-nothing Freedom and sometimes I wish I didn't have to lock myself out of apps for hours just to stave off the danger of losing myself in social media or games (quite low probability anyway).