How One Feature From a Failed Startup Can Become a Billion Dollar Idea

Cemal — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 13:58:34 +0000

I will go through a summarized story of a well-known startup and share my notes from this lesson.

You can read this blog post with a piece of smooth jazz:

First Attempt: Game Neverending

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of a gaming company Ludicorp is developing a browser-based multiplayer online game with his team in 2002.

The game has a simple but brave concept of the time:

Craft objects
Manipulate objects for humor
Socialize with others through embedded chat; send messages & images etc.

There is no way to win in this game, you just enjoy playing with others: "Game Neverending". But it could not hold on for very long.

End of Life: Game Neverending

The game reached its end of life in 2004. But the team kept one of the tools they used for internal communication of the game.

Second Attempt: Flickr

Players were uploading their images and sharing them with each other in the Game Neverending. The team evolved this tool into a new service: Flickr.

Flicker launched as an image hosting service where you can upload, tag & group, and share your images. Google's Blogger was popular also at that time but it was not allowing you to store images which redirects people to upload their image's on Flicker to share in their blog posts.

This exploded the growth of Flickr and it took the attention of global companies.

Sold to Yahoo!: Flickr

Yahoo acquired Flickr and also the team Ludicorp in 2005 for $25m-but some sources mention it as $35, could not verify the exact number-

But this giant corporate did not go well for the entrepreneurial spirit. Stewart left Yahoo in 2008 with an interesting letter full of metaphors.

Third Attempt: Glitch

Stewart Butterfield back in school, created a game company, Tiny Speck, to continue where he left from. Because now he and his team are well known by investors it is founded easily $5M in 2010 and $10M in 2011.

The game: Glitch, has a very similar concept to the Game Neverending with fantasy characters and improved user experience. It is again a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) backed by Adobe Flash Player.

Team also developed an internal communication tool which was necessary for their working culture. Developers were spread across the country and they need an asynchronous & effective communication way. Also, all communication should be visible to everyone in the team where a solution to the topic would be quicker than the traditional email-cc-forward-reply cycle. We will talk about this later.

End of Life: Glitch

Again, the game did not do well from the business perspective and announced its closing in 2012.

In his interview Stewart mentioned a couple of reasons for the failure:

Hard to attract the attention of new players
Mobile usage is spreading which means rough times for Browser based games
Limited budget to switch infrastructure from Flash to Mobile

I verified customer behavior also from statcounter for desktop vs mobile usage between 2012-2021. The year Glitch is the end of life was the last moment for the dominance of the browser-based game and then mobile usage is spreading around the world regularly.

Fourth Attempt: Slack

Remember the internal communication tool that I mentioned earlier? Tiny Speck team required a communication tool for internal sync with team members. At the time there were alternatives like IRC, e-mail, Yammer, Hipchat etc. but Slack was offering something that teams require to work efficiently according to Stewart

Tiny Speck team realize how efficient they work with their internal tool and wanted to keep use in this way wherever they work. Comparing with its competitors:

IRC did not have the ability to message asynchronously (come back and check/search later your messages) or search at the time.
E-mail is cumbersome and not transparent
Yammer by Microsoft forces you to use Office 365
Neither of them has a central management system where you can integrate with all work-related documents, Docs, Excel, Github etc.

So they developed "linefeed", later named it SLACK in 2013: Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge

Stewart Butterfield

@stewart

Yes. November 14th, 2012 (previous codename was "linefeed"):
Re twitter.com/minney_cat/sta…

23:07 PM - 27 Sep 2016

Minn @minney_cat
@stewart is this backronym for @SlackHQ true? Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge 😏

Success: $27.7 Billion Worth Company

After this long and though journey Tiny Speck (later named Slack) team reached success with their internal tools.

Slack has 18 Million active users and $902m annual revenue according to the July 2020 stats and in the same year Slack is acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion (transaction completed & announced in 2021) by Salesforce

Black Swan Theory

2 game company startup failures and their internal communication tool's success. This reminded me a theory which I would like to share with you.

Black Swan Theory : An event that can not be predicted by interpreting our dataset and having an astonishing impact. This terminology is mostly used in the economy like crises or global events that occur rarely but have catastrophic results like pandemics. Black swans in nature are seen as rare which is the theory named for.

In his Domain Driven Design training and Core Domain Patterns blog post, Nick Tune uses Black Swan in an interesting way:

A feature that does not require too much complexity and does not make clear business distinctions could become a core feature of your business, which happens rarely.

Conclusion

There is more detail in Slack's story; market study, feedback & improvement cycles, and business methods. I didn't want to show it as an illusion or I know that there are also more failures than popular success stories. But there are people who need motivation or looking for an idol to inspire themselves and these stories could help, at least it works for me.

Failed? Be aware of what you're doing well (Game Neverending -> Flickr)
Succeed? New opportunity for your dream (Flickr -> Glitch)
Bored? Quit your job for your dream (Glitch -> Slack)
Competition? Target audience (Slack -> $Billion worth)

Hard choices easy life, easy choices hard life

Bonus

Did you listen to the music I suggest at the beginning? It is Slack's new feature, Huddle's hold music (quick conference/meeting room inside the Slack) which is the music from their failed (really ?) game, Glitch :)

Stewart Butterfield

@stewart

@dasilvacontin @mcclure111 Funny detail: that was composed/performed by @DannyboySimmons for the failed MMO Glitch, the original project of the team that made Slack.

It was for a "waiting quest" (where you just sat around waiting) as part of the Bureaucratic Arts skill. (Did I mention the game failed?)

16:01 PM - 17 Sep 2021

Resources

How buying an iPhone helped me to land my first job as a Developer?

Cemal — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 03:27:00 +0000

Just buying an iPhone (I have never been a fan of any brand, it is not related to the iPhone itself) helped me to get my first job in an interesting way back in the 2016 summer. This situation helped me throughout my career to have a different perspective.

Graduation

I had just graduated from College with a Computer Science degree and was applying for jobs in Istanbul. One of my applications was going great. It was a Young Talent program of one of the biggest Telecommunication Companies in Turkey and I was in 4th step of 5 stage recruitment process:

Video Assessment
English Assessment
Talent Assessment
Group Interview
Meeting with Executive & Offer

If I pass the Group Interview stage, I will get an offer. The group Interview was interesting; a case study is given to 8-10 people around a table. Everyone reads the case carefully and suggests a solution for the given questions.

Group Interview

It was the interview day. I was prepared by watching example cases on Youtube but I had never participated before. There were 4-5 employees (later realized that most of them were managers) and 8-10 candidates in the room. We were given a 2 pages case, on the first page there were some graphs and on the second page, there were a description and a question at the end. I can't remember the graphs exactly, but one of them was something like the below:

There was also some demographic distribution of users and other market-related information.

Question: What are your ideas to increase our Online Store sales?
Mission: Explain and convince your ideas to others. Also at the same time inquire about others' ideas, ask them why they suggest this way, etc. Your idea should be the best one while respecting others.
Note: Company was selling internet plans (GB deals etc.), headphones, accessories, tablets, and cell phones.

Success

Thinking time is up and now it is discussion time. One of the candidates started to explain his idea then I and others began to discuss:

We should make discounts on physical products with sim card deals
We should have cheaper internet deals than messaging deals
...

I did not write down too many ideas but one of them was interesting. The year before I graduate, thanks to my father and his friends, invited me to join their trip to the USA. It was in September and Apple had just announced iPhone 6S.

When we went to Apple Store in Washington I joined the long waiting queue first time in my life. At that time I searched the reasons and learn that because of Apple's announcement policy, people were already prepared for this time. If you look in detail at the release cycles in the above picture, most of the releases are in September and October.

Back to the interview, I was thinking of the peak point in a specific picture. And suddenly I had an idea;

Is it possible people are checking if there is a new deal for the new iPhones?

When it's my turn to share the idea I mention;

Apple releases iPhones every year around the September (which I remember because of my trip and research after). Seems like people are looking for new iPhone deals on the store mostly this month. We should highlight the iPhone deals around this month and have special offers if possible.

So far any employee ever made any comment on our discussion. But when I mention this idea, 2 of the employees (managers) mention that they are impressed, not directly to me; just as reflexively. Even after the interview is done some of the candidates came to me and said "you will be selected".

In the end, I got a job offer and started my first job as a Backend Developer.

Conclusion

Never limit yourself to given data. Think about correlations and similarities of a problem in your life
Try to take lessons from all events. It doesn't have to relate to programming, engineering, etc.

DEV Community: Cemal

How One Feature From a Failed Startup Can Become a Billion Dollar Idea

First Attempt: Game Neverending

End of Life: Game Neverending

Second Attempt: Flickr

Sold to Yahoo!: Flickr

Third Attempt: Glitch

End of Life: Glitch

Fourth Attempt: Slack

Success: $27.7 Billion Worth Company

Black Swan Theory

Conclusion

Bonus

Resources

How buying an iPhone helped me to land my first job as a Developer?

Graduation

Group Interview

Success

Conclusion