Antti Akonniemi

My good friend pointed out that I/we are starting lot of things and not ending them. I am also fan of Failcon. So it seemed like a good idea to start posting failed/closed projects and also tell you what we’ve learned from them. Hopefully these postings will give you some insights.

Problem to be solved

Time reservation is not easy. UX could be A LOT better. Small businesses have also lot of other stuff that could be developed.

Idea

1. Fix time reservation UX
2. ?
3. Profit

Really. We did not think this through :) We just thought “If we can build the best time reservation thingie in the world, we’ll make business out of it”.

When we would have enough customers we could then help them also to solve other business problems like CRM stuff. We also thought that if this thing work we could take it to different countries.

Reality

Time management is really hard. This didn’t kill us, but it was the hard reality which hit us in the face during the 24 hour coding marathon. I think it was around 2AM in the morning when we started realizing this. I remember thinking that “We should be writing tons of code and all we do is think how does time work” too meta when you have deadline in 10 hours :D

Selling to businesses is slow and takes resources. No matter how small the investment is. This was the final blow. This thing would not sell itself and selling took too much time. We did try to sell it, but it was way too expensive to be sustainable.

Lessons learned

1. Test your market. Talk to your customers. Ask if they would buy the product, ask about the competitors, problems, pricing.
2. Ask enough money. Ad sales as business model is bad, but so is low prices.

Update: Second post in this series