Comment by thwarted
2 years ago
For our two-sided marketplace startup, this meant Android and iOS apps for customers, and another pair of apps for mechanics. 6 months later, we released our fully-fledged MVP to a deafening silence from customers, mechanics, and investors.
It's probably really hard to get traction when it's not obvious who your customers are, and this description reveals that. Your customers are the entities that are paying you. Is this supposed to be an app for mechanics to find work? Is it supposed to be an app for people with car problems to find someone to fix it? Those looking to get their vehicle serviced aren't going to want to pay the finders feed on top of the cost charged by the mechanic, which means those people are not your customers. What are the cases where someone would pay for your app? Are mechanics having trouble finding work? Are the mechanics the customers of Fixr? Do people with car trouble have it often enough that they'd pay for such a service vs whatever else they'd do?
"Talk to us again when you have traction" indeed. Or "Talk to us again when you know how to recognize traction."
100%. I was a little embarrassed to include it but the first-time-founders' naïvete was an important, and hopefully quite relatable to many people, part of the story
Yeah, I was thinking the same. Fixr seemed like a solution looking for a problem, without having an even borderline clear idea on what it is supposed to be. No wonder it failed.
I've seen hundreds of startups like this. Literally talking to someone last week who was developing an app but had no clear idea who their customer was or why they would buy it.
There's so much survivor-biased bullshit in the industry, though. Founders who raised millions on an idea with no MVP, no customers, no traction. Everyone laps it up and repeats it on social media and then there's another 100 founders who are wasting their time and savings on ideas with no clue. The ecosystem soaks up their savings and spits them out disillusioned and drained of cash.