What I learned about market research after my 6th startup failure

Photo credit: David Schwarzenberg.

There has been a paradigm shift in how people look at buying and selling. New ideas that faced skepticism and distrust in the past are now welcome, as people are starting to adopt just about anything and everything.

To prove my point, let’s take a look at NoPhone. The product is basically a plastic block shaped like a smartphone. It was an instant hit, with thousands of desperate people mobbing online stores to buy them. They wanted to use the product to comfort themselves when they didn’t have their real smartphones with them.

The company capitalized on the popularity, releasing variants such as the NoPhone Selfie and the NoPhone Air. Read NoPhone Selfie’s product description to get an idea 🙄 :

Upgrade your NoPhone to the only feature available for the NoPhone, a small adhesive backed mirror. Enjoy taking a real-time selfie and remembering the time you did. Add a real friend for a real-time group selfie.

Now, if that isn’t a crowd receptive to new and out-of-the-rut products, then I don’t know what it is. They are queuing up to purchase plastic bricks that don’t serve any purpose whatsoever, for heaven’s sake.

Our eureka moment

The sheer volume and variety of products available on the market mean that you should aim to create a product, service, or platform that is truly unique. Understand that creating a totally unique product is not a compulsion. And it certainly isn’t an invitation to create something totally crazy like the NoPhone (which was a very lucky exception).

However, it would be a very good idea to follow up on your eureka moment with some intensive market research. Chances are, someone has had the same eureka moment, acted on it, and built a business around it.

Something very similar happened to us while we were working on our sixth startup, The Clippings. It was our attempt to create a media platform that would provide bite-sized news that could be read in 20 to 30 seconds or less. Our long-term aim was to deliver news to people at their most convenient time and eventually make the app a fixture in there lives when they are, say, traveling to and from work.

It was my sixth startup, and like the five that preceded it (all bootstrapped), it failed.

The moral of the story

The idea was certainly good. And with both the consumption of content and content itself increasing by leaps and bounds online, it was very feasible. Since both my co-founder and I had considerable experience in media, working with fast-paced news, we decided to hire and train a team of interns. This allowed us to stretch our meager funds and hire different correspondents for different categories.

The result? The company managed to operate in three months before collapsing on itself, forcing me to borrow from friends and family in order to pay the interns.

Do market research until you are absolutely sure that no one else has already done or has been doing what you are thinking of doing.

Improving someone else’s idea