31 Dec 2014
Josh

The trough of sorrow

I had a chat with Belle today about Exist. This isn't a rare event — we talk about Exist daily, because we're thinking about it and working on it almost every day. But today caught us both in a pessimistic mood, and so our conversation turned to all the things we aren't doing, or aren't doing right, or won't ever be able to do, and that we should

probably

just

give

up.

Actually, that's not true. Neither of us really wants to give up. But when things aren't looking up, it's easy to joke that we should be doing something else. Unsurprisingly, this is pretty common. When the initial hype has worn off, but you haven't yet made it, you're in what Paul Graham calls the trough of sorrow.

When I sat down to write this, I had a vague memory of some kind of startup lifecycle graph with a "trough of despair". When I found the real thing via AVC, I was surprised at how well it fit.

We're somewhere in that trough right now. The trough is real, and it's getting us really down.

Sure, it fluctuates each day. But broadly, that's where we are. Somewhere in there, after our early, easy press wins and radio interviews, the novelty wore off. Has the Quantified-Self-track-all-the-things wave crested? Or have we failed to live up to expectations?

We had a big 2014: we went from private beta to private backer campaign and finally to launching. Since then we've added a bunch of new features, services, and redesigned the dashboard completely. But when we launched back in May, we thought we'd see steady growth and be working on Exist full-time within twelve months. It seems so far from our reach now.

We're left with a core of users who pay for the service, and maybe even love it, but we haven't "made it". Growth has been flat. Progress has been slow, and we're both still working day jobs to get by. We have a few vocal haters, and we have a few vocal lovers, but mostly we're right in the apathy zone. I think. It's hard to tell for sure.

Are we being too hard on ourselves? On one hand, we're hardly sports-metaphoring our way to success for the reasons outlined above. All of our customer feedback points to the fact that we're just not providing enough value. Right now we're making something that's only a nice-to-have, but we're trying to charge real money for it. Are we brave or just foolhardy?

One alternative would be to make Exist entirely free. The thing is, we can't afford it — we'd have even less time available to build something valuable. But by charging money, we're hampering growth and painting a dire picture of our progress. There doesn't seem to be a right answer. We're both unwilling to gain a huge user base just so we can court investment with our growth numbers. We'd rather have a genuine relationship with our users, where we provide a service and they pay. We care strongly about selling out, and don't want to sell our users' private data or slap ads on the site to turn a profit. We have strong values that we're stubbornly sticking to, so often it feels like we're taking a different path to one advocated by big, visible startups and their VCs. How much does that hurt our success? Or is it irrelevant because we're building the wrong thing?

On the other hand, that AVC story talks of an entrepreneur who only got it right years after he started. We're not even a year past launch. Perhaps it's naive of us to expect to be getting it right so soon, without help, on our first ever startup. We don't really know what we're doing, but we have such big plans. We're working on those ever-important mobile apps, and next we'll be opening our API to build a true platform for anyone to track and correlate any quantifiable data source. We want to build real-time smarts that help users achieve their goals or just live more efficiently. There's so much left to do. Maybe we've made bad choices so far, but how can we know that we're wrong until we try everything we've planned?

I have no idea. I want to believe that we can make it. To me, the only thing we can do is persist until we're successful or we're dead.

I want to believe that we do fit squarely into the trough on that graph, because that means that if we just keep trying, maybe we can hit "the promised land".