Thu 18 Feb 2010
Sayonara BrandAdda
Posted by tej under story
[3] Comments
For the last 2-3 months, BrandAdda has been in lights-on mode. The site has been up, but there is no action on it behind the scenes. Due to lack of success on the business front, we have decided to shut it down.
At this unfortunate juncture, a saying comes to mind:
It is better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all
We loved building BrandAdda, enjoyed pursuing our dream, and learnt a lot from the experience. We do wish the outcome was different, but not all was lost.
There were many challenges we faced in building the business, and a few we faced building the product.
- Working without a founding partner was extremely hard
- Hiring quality talent was super tough (see previous post)
- Brands have not yet appreciated social media, specially in India. It was a hard sell. It was hard enough explaining the concept to them, forget selling a service. They need to first warm up to it, and then organize themselves appropriately to take advantage of it. That will take longer than we had hoped for
- The budget for internet marketing is a tiny fraction of the overall marketing budget
- BrandAdda wasn’t giving consumers something compelling or solving a pain point, so consumer adoption was poor. We were counting on Brands to be able to offer something of value to consumers, but with no traction from Brands, this never materialized
- There was no one from the Marketing industry in the team. We were outsiders to the industry, trying to reach Brands through a well-established layer of Agencies around them. That was hard. The soft business climate made matters worse.
So what were the key lessons in it for us?. To be honest, easily the most important lesson was that SUFFICIENT VALIDATION OF A PRODUCT/SERVICE WITH THE PAYING CUSTOMERS IS ABSOLUTELY VITAL. We did not do much here. We should never have moved forward without being convinced that we did plenty of validation. A lot of the challenges we faced later would have surely surfaced earlier. Shorter distance. Less pain. More time to try other ideas.
Some of our other learnings include:
- Start with a partner
- Do have an expert from the business domain in the team, atleast in the role of an advisor
- VC Funding has its pros & cons. But an overriding pro in India is that it eases hiring greatly. By and large, we found people to be risk-averse, and putting more emphasis on cash compensation than on equity
- There are some great tools in the startup ecosystem in India, such as pluggd.in, WATBlog, TiE, HeadStart, Proto, etc. Make good use of them. Participate.
As we sign-off, we wish the current and new crop of entrepreneurs all the very
best in turning their dreams to reality.