“There are no mistakes in life, just learning opportunities.” – Robert Kiyosaki

August 3,2014 – the day we were on cloud9. After months of brainstorming multiple ideas, we finally settled on one and launched our first app on Facebook – MadVsMath (read full story here).  It was obvious to have excitement as we launched our first cool thing in market (cool huh.. at-least it was cool for us). We spent sleepless nights to make that. But here it’s going to complete a whole year and everybody forget that. It was a Failure. I am strong be-lover of “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure – Bill Gates“. So, we cheers up for that and founding are no more far away:

1) No market validation

We have seen multiple games on facebook that are popular and created a brand with them. As starting out, we planned to roll out on facebook to have initial traction. We programmed it such a way that when a user ends up playing a game, it automatically post a status on their wall about their score which is visible to all of their friends and more users would come on. That makes a chain process. But, as Facebook has its policy for creating account to be minimum of 13 years of age, we were unknowingly targeting millennials to play children’s game.

2) Launch in a hurry

It take us more than expected time to come up with a final application(that’s usual a case for everybody, and we are no more different) and meanwhile we already told about its launch to all (friends) in advance. All our buddies were asking about progress. So, instead of taking time to properly fix all issues, we roll out app with lots of known issues in hurry (Actually, we were not able to control our curiosity). When its taking 100 days, we should wait for 10 more days to make launch successful.

3) We were not persistent enough

We launched and sit back. Instead doing efforts on marketing and adding more features, we were just celebrating and started looking for our next idea (although we added some more levels). It takes continuous time & energy to get deeper understanding of market and users.

4) We forgot ‘Mobile first approach’

In era, when most of the e-commerce companies are choosing app-only approach, all companies are having their mobile app (or at-least mobile website), we lacked in creating our app even responsive. And we started rolling out the URL of our app via Whatsapp (rofl), we even forgot to see once that is it working properly on mobile or not. Properly working is second thought, we haven’t see that it’s even loading properly.

5) Spending time on unwanted things

We remain puzzled & busy on improving UI (it was just MVP), adding more features (what we thought,it’s great) instead of asking users what they want.

Reasons are countless, but we learned !

After seeing the death of MadVsMath, we planned to shut it down and take it away from facebook (It’s down now). Code is still present on Github.You can fork it anytime.

But we are hustlers,  always looking for new opportunities and moving continuously.

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