Many people asked (and still ask me): “What went wrong with TALENTARENA?”. My answer varies from time to time regarding how much time I have to tell the whole story. Next time I will refer people to this posting. Actually I can’t tell you how to build up a service, but what you might avoid!
I do not want to tell the whole story about failing with talentarena.com now, but sum somehow our biggest mistakes or/and our worst assumptions up.
If I had to describe our planning phase, I think “Think Big” would be the right term. In a nutshell: We had the great idea to establish a platform for all kind of creatives (music, design (including photography), film (including motion design), text and show), where they could interact and monetize their talent. This is a very simple summary of what our ideas were, so don’t quote me or judge TALENTARENA on that.
1. It could be too confusing for the users,
2. it binds to many resources
3. and is therefore much more expensive!Instead of that, think big and start small. Have an easy idea of how to make the world, or at least the internet a bit better, solve a problem! You have tons of ideas? Great, add them constantly to your service, don’t overtax the users. Even better: grow organically, use user feedback!A second big mistake was waiting too long (in going online). Don’t think “Ah, oh. We have to program this feature, we have to add that button before we start.” Just go online! Of course you have to have something, but don’t think you have to build the perfect internet-service first. If you have an open communication with the users, they forgive you almost everything and will help you with great fun to improve your service.Another point which goes in that direction is being a salesman! If you are not the salvation army, you need to earn money with your company. Don’t wait too long to sell your product, commercialize your service. If you don’t have the new uber-viral-super-service, you have to go to the customers, media and sell your product. For me that was the worst part of founding a startup. Thinking about and creating a service is great fun, but explaining it to people is awfully annoying. You will get a lot really dumb feedback, people will look 2 seconds on the product your spent hours, days and months of work on and will say:
a) it sucks
b) “service abc” does the same
c) a) + b)
Give a fuck about that! It’s the internet. On the one hand you have trolls like these, whose only own performance of the day is to tie their shoes, on the other you have people who respect your work and help you out. Take criticism to heart, but never personally.
One and a half year ago on the Ignite Hamburg event, Markus gave me the opportunity to speak, and my “lecture” was about “Pros & Cons of starting a company”. At that time we had the best phase of TALENTARENA, and my last sentence was: “Just fucking do it!”. Now, after seeing bad side of starting a business, my opinion didn’t change: If you have a great idea, start a business or be self-employed, take the risk. The experience is worth a try!
After reading this text, I must admit that it doesn’t have the structure I wanted in the beginning, but maybe clippings of it will be interesting for some people somehow.