It's Sad to See Your Startup Turn into a Business

This post was originally published on 2/1/2013.

When I founded Skritter in 2008 with Nick and Scott, we called it a startup. We raised three rounds of funding, hired developers to help scale our team, and attended startup summits, venture capital panels, and meetups filled with aspiring entrepreneurs working on the next big thing. As with all young startups seeking capital, our business plan growth model had us making 30M in profit in 3-5 years as we took the language learning world by storm.

Four and a half years later, Skritter has become a viable, successful, growing company. We have three employees in addition to the founding team, and have provided employment for twice that many along the way. We've proven that our business model generates profit, that it adds value to customer's lives, and that we can achieve product-market fit.

But somewhere along the line, Skritter stopped being a startup and became a business. And while I am deeply proud of our achievements, the change makes me sad.

When you run a startup, you dream big, you think in terms of conquering entire new markets, challenging entrenched competitors, and changing the world in a big way. You work hard, play harder, and forge lifelong relationships with your co-founders.

Businesses, by comparison, are more modest and mundane. Businesses tend to know whom their customers are, they have a good sense of what makes money and what doesn't, and they don't make a habit of re-investing every penny to try and shoot the moon with a new product. Businesses are like middle aged fathers who just want things to run smoothly without too much fuss. Startups are their star-struck sons spouting poetry to their lovers in moonlit gardens.

Startups are just more exciting, vibrant, and entertaining.

But they also have this frustrating tendency to fizzle out, fail, or explode catastrophically. Founders lose their shirts, relationships are ruined, investors are burned, and once stable, gainfully employed founders end up in their parent's basements applying for jobs to cover their credit card debt.

I'm proud of what Nick, Scott, and I have built at Skritter. I'm proud we achieved the dream of building a profitable company. But if you've ever been there for the startup part, the irrational giddiness you get from building something new, you'll know instinctively what I mean when I say it's sad to see your startup turn into a business.

Why You Should Bootstrap Your First Company

A while back I read Daniel Tenner's excellent article entitled Taking the Leap. Having run my own modestly successful startup for going on 7 years now, I can say with some authority that he makes excellent points. But one thing about the post bothered me: his advice is most applicable to your first startup. That distinction is critical.

Hacker News idolizes people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and other visionaries who take incredible risks in the face of absurd odds. Their stories are dramatic, and it's delicious to read stories of people who buck the system and succeed. But it is a disservice to the less experienced to omit the beginning to every success story: the small successes they had early in life.

The men who mine asteroids and build electric sports cars don't start with those ventures. To illustrate my point, I'd like to tell a quick story.

Back in 2008, my cofounders and I were going door to door trying to raise a minuscule amount of funding. One of our business advisers gave us an introduction to a successful founder turned angel investor who had just sold his company. Everyone was talking about how successful he was, but over the course of developing a mentorship relationship, we heard about how he  got his humble entrepreneurial start. He did it by selling asbestos file folders to legal consultancies at a time when everyone was going digital. The business model was in it's death throes, but he was able to generate enough profit to reinvest it on his next company.

Read that again if you missed it: our visionary angel investor got started selling fireproof file protectors to lawyers who wouldn't need them in a few years.

This sort of story is far from isolated. Success begets success. Elon Musk didn't start with Tesla, he started by selling a $500 computer game called Blastar at the age of 12.

Don't try and shoot the moon on your first startup. Bootstrapping reduces the upside of your ventures, but it also reduces the risk that you'll fail. Daniel Tenner has it right: keep your head down, reduce your burn rate, and if you succeed doing that a few times, Mars, cold fusion, and hover bikes will still be waiting.

Your Startup Need an Intractable Design Problem

Since 2008, I have been tasked with designing and UX testing the entire website for my first startup. From the outside, Skritter is pretty simple, it's a website that teaches students of Chinese and Japanese to better learn and remember their characters. Basically a flashcard program for Chinese and Japanese.

Seems pretty simple, right?

Well, not at all, actually. The problem is that Skritter uses a spaced repetition algorithm that makes it non-obvious to add and manage vocabulary. Unlike a standard flashcard program, you don't just add words to your library, the application does that for you gradually, as you learn and remember more content. So on Skritter, you can't "study" a list, you have to "start adding from" a list. The difference creates all sorts of problems for users. Where are you in the list? What haven't you learned yet? When you stop adding from a list, should we remove all the material you've already added? Spaced repetition makes Skritter powerful and useful, but at the cost of simplicity.

For years I railed against this unintuive aspect of our product. Apple, Dropbox, and a hundred other companies were making it big by making it simple. Although Skritter eventually became a big success, it took a while for people to "get it" and it was an exercise in frustration for me as the product designer.

So I was thrilled to start work on a new startup in 2013. CodeCombat offered me the opportunity to build upon the design lessons learned at Skritter, but in a different arena: game design. We were making a game that taught users to write JavaScript.

Sounds pretty simple, right?

Not at all. Although there are hundreds of educational games teaching everything from typing to math, surprisingly few teach users to code. And those that do serve more as antipatterns than examples of successful design. For CodeCombat, we couldn't just rely on typical game mechanics, because we were supposed to be teaching users how to code the very behaviors most games take for granted like move up, for instance. As a result, simple things like unit selection, setting waypoints, choosing actions, and resource allocation turn into non-obvious design conundrums.

When I was working on Skritter, I used to think, "Someday I'll be able to work on a product that's simple and obvious, boy that'll be sweet." But CodeCombat taught me is that if you aren't running into seemingly intractable design problems, that's a strong indicator the product isn't solving real problems.

There are products out there that won by simplifying a complex problem; perhaps it's file uploads, or listening to music, or sharing photos with friends. But it's a mistake to assume that because the end result is simple that it was simple to design. As Apple has proven time and time again, making things simple is extremely difficult.

So, if your startup isn't solving an intractable design problem, find one.

Minecraft Isn't Educational

I have spent the majority of my professional career building edtech products. First I taught tens of thousands of students Chinese and Japanese, then I taught millions of kids to code. I know a lot about building educational products; games in particular. As a lover of Minecraft and an edtech game designer, I'm here to tell you that Minecraft isn't an educational game.

For those not familiar, Minecraft has several game modes none of which are games in the sense of having levels, bosses, missions, and achievements. Minecraft more closely resembles a digital sandbox with varying levels of abstraction. Survival mode is a bounded sandbox with randomly generating baddies. Creative mode is digital Legos. None of Minecraft's game modes explicitly teach the player anything. That's right: there is no educational content in Minecraft whatsoever. There are no lessons, tutorials, grades, or tests, there is no backstory, no plot, no puzzles, no brainteasers, riddles, math, or history. Nothing in the game tries to teach anyone anything. 

I hear you crying out "but Minecraft holds kid's interest long enough that they learn to mod the game, or build simple circuits, or build historic structures. Surely that's educational!"

But take a look at that line of reasoning again: the advocates don't claim that Minecraft teaches anything. They claim that kids like it enough that they may end up teaching themselves something unrelated while playing. The girl who likes computers learns enough Java to mod the game. The boy that likes building things constructs interesting structures. But to say that learning in the pursuit of addictive entertainment is educational is sloppy and unfair reasoning. By that same logic, Grand Theft Auto 5 is educational because some kids get so into it that they memorize the geography of LA to minimize transit between missions [1]. 

The reason that parents, schools, and kids call Minecraft educational is that it combines the addictive behavior of video games with the least offensive content imaginable. What learning occurs in the course of that addiction is labeled educational, but is no more useful to kids than anything else they voluntarily spend equal amounts of time on.

Why does the distinction matter? Because it's misleading educators and game designers. Spoiler alert for people making edtech games: there's very little to learn from Minecraft because as I mentioned above, it doesn't teach anything. Spoiler alert for teachers: Minecraft won't teach your students anything useful [2]. 

I love Minecraft and have played for much longer than I'd like to admit. So has my wife. So has my brother. As a game, it's great; but as education, it's no better than World of Warcraft. If you want your kid to learn, you'd be better off letting them follow their interests and educating themselves.

[1] Yeah, yeah, "Los Santos." Everyone knows it's LA.

[2] Even though it will keep them entertained for a class period with little to no chance that parents will complain.

Call Me When 3D Printing Becomes Practical

This was originally posted on 1/4/2013, but I'm still a skeptical grump about 3D printing.

Over the holidays I finally got around to reading Wired's effusive article about Makerbot and the coming 3D printing revolution. I get it: 3D printing is going to take over the world. It's going to eventually let me download a car, and that's very cool. But in the interim, 3D printing appears to be nothing more than a distraction.

I want to own useful, practical, and cost-effective things. Making a plastic belt buckle, or RC plane wing, or clothes hanger isn't terribly compelling. And sit-around items like action figures don't meet the practicality rubric. Even if I were interested in making these things, I wouldn't want them made of plastic. For most US consumers, plastic is a poor substitute for the metals and alloys that we have come to expect in quality consumer devices. The real clincher though, is the ready availability of superior substitutes. I'm busy enough that learning to use a CAD program to create a plastic sub-component of an equivalent metal device I can purchase in a fully functional form for $10 on Amazon just doesn't make much sense. And I'm guessing that I'm not alone here.

The revolution in 3D printing is going to come when disinterested folks like me can download, customize, and effortlessly create complex products from the comfort of my own home without having to become proficient in CAD software and the vagueries of 3D printing hardware.  Right now 3D printing is like the personal computer market in the late 80s; it has explosive growth potential and the possibility to disrupt our system of commerce right down the foundation, but it's all but inaccessible to anyone but engineers sporting the modern equivalents of pocket protectors.

I bothered to right this not to slam companies like Makerbot or tear down gushing writeups like the one I read in Wired. Makerbot is doing great work and Wired always gushes about new tech as though it will single-handedly bring about the singularity tomorrow. But until I can download that car I was talking about, articles about 3D printing are just distractions.