Futurecam Was a Partial Success, Not a Failure
I ran my startup Futurecam for 3 years:
When I was building it, I’d happily share something cool we’d built with a founder, advisor or investor friend. They said what I built is useless. It means nothing. It’s irrelevant — since I don’t have enough users. They weren’t wrong. I had disagreed with some of the advice I was given, but looking back, I realized it’s insightful. And these people had only my best interests at heart in sharing their valuable perspectives with me, and they got nothing out of it. Indeed, Futurecam had only 1000 activated users over its lifetime, and failed1.
If you were an investor in Futurecam, that would be it. But as the founder, you need to evaluate success or failure along multiple dimensions, not just one:
As a company: FAILURE
MARKETING: FAILURE
Product: SUCCESS
Engineering: SUCCESS
UX: SUCCESS
Career growth / skill development: SUCCESS
The joy of executing your own vision: SUCCESS
Let’s look at each of these dimensions:
Company dimension
Let’s evaluate Futurecam as a company. On this dimension, Futurecam was a complete failure: it did not break even. It achieved only 1000 activated users over its life. It did not have a soft landing like an acquisition2. The TAM was too small. The LTV was too low and so it wasn’t possible to acquire users for any reasonable CAC. There were too many other camera apps, including our biggest competitor — the iPhone camera app — which kept getting better. iPhones did not replace SLRs while the company was alive.
So, as a company, Futurecam was an unmitigated failure.
Product dimension
From a product point of view, you could see the world differently using Futurecam, with unique benefits like a light trail video:
Timelapses:
Light painting:
… and more you can see on the website. The quality of the photos and videos were at least as good as any other app we benchmarked against.
This is a better product than many startups, who dump a shitty product onto the market and then bribe users into using it. If you take pride in what you build, if you’re a creator rather than a businessman, the product makes all the difference.
UX Dimension
From a UX point of view, the app was a success3. Sophisticated features like the above were presented in an understandable manner. You could edit photos after taking them, as you can see by dragging the slider below the fountaion. And the choice was presented in terms of the output, unlike SLRs where you had to choose a shutter speed without knowing what it would look like. The app was opinionated enough to not offer choices that produced bad results. In other cases, where one choice was ideal for 80% of cases, that was the default, but the user still had the ability to change it for the remaining 20% of cases. If you made mistakes while using the app, we had a hints system that analyzed them and gave you specific sugestions on what to do to improve. You'd get different hints from me, because it was personalized.
Career / Skill Development Dimension
Before I started Futurecam, I was stagnating in my career and Futurecam helped me leapfrog. I learnt technical leadership, product management, UX design4, project management and people management. And people skills in general. I had access to founders, and I was treated with respect, as an equal. I could get a job as a CTO, with a great role, work conditions and pay that I couldn’t imagine a few years back. Later, when I decided to consult, what I learnt during Futurecam helped me start the race halfway through5 rather than from 0.
One engineer who worked with me wrote:
I personally don't consider it as a failure, I genuinely enjoyed working for the product and was always constantly thinking about how it will help photographers to go highly creative on their craft. If not for Futurecam, both mine and [another engineer]'s growth would not have been this significant.
The joy of building one’s vision Dimension
I chose software engineering as a career since I wanted to build a product based on my own vision. That’s what motivates us builders, drives us, and sets our heart on fire. Not implementing some compromise some PM or businessperson came up with.
Futurecam was a golden opportunity for me to implement my vision in product, UX and engineering, unalloyed by anyone else. People could and did disagree with me, which is good, but the final decision was mine.
This is a golden opportunity that many people don’t get even once in their career. They spend their whole work life slaving away building insipid, uninspired features and complaining to friends or posting angrily on Hacker News about how work sucks. For a builder, there’s no greater joy than building what one wants.
Besides, building one’s vision without compromising with others gives a very strong feedback loop to improve. Things that work are an affirmation of your decisions, and things that don’t give you a signal on what doesn’t work. There was no other decision-maker, so it was clear as day who the feedback was for. This helped me improve fast.
How hard a problem did you tackle? Dimension
I played Futurecam on hard mode: I started a startup, despite not having any startup experience, rather than working in a startup to begin with. I ran it as a single founder rather than joining a cofounder. I ran it with my money. I ran it for multiple years.
Unlike most startups which are technically trivial CRUD apps, Futurecam is a sophisticated app. It had a research component: I researched computational photography, despite having neither a professional nor academic background in the field. After researching comes productionizing, and here I built a real-time app that processes 1 GB of data every second on a phone — not the server. The app had hardly any bugs or crashes. Futurecam had an extremely high level of quality, higher than most startups.
If you tackle a hard problem, if you play the game on hard mode, and fail, you should not criticise yourself. Some would say that that’s better than playing in easy mode and winning.
As you can see, Futurecam succeeded in some aspects but not others:
Company: FAILURE
Product: SUCCESS
UX: SUCCESS
Career growth / skill development: SUCCESS
The joy of executing your own vision: SUCCESS
How hard a problem did you tackle? SUCCESS
Neither “success” nor “failure” would be a fair summary of the above. “Partial success” is the right assessment to make if you must boil down the multiple dimensions into one.
This is something managers understand when giving feedback: Feedback is shades of grey and rarely black or white. There are different ratings like Needs Improvement, Meets Expectations and Exceeds Expectations, not pass / fail. Even a person who Exceeds Expectations has some areas for improvement, and a person who Needs Improvement does some things well.
If 95% of startups are failing, it only shows that the bar for success is set too high. If a university passed only 5% of students, we’d say that something is wrong with the university, not with the students. Similarly, if the bar for startups to “succeed” is so high that only 5% pass, we should re-examine the definition we’re using for success.
The world is not binary. Futurecam was a success along some dimensions and not in others.
Saying “Futurecam failed” is same as saying that “Kartick failed at Futurecam”. Since I was the sole founder, no one else is responsible. And responsibility doesn’t mean blame. Responsibility doesn’t mean something was lacking from your side.
Acquisitions are sometimes on unfavorable terms, and don’t justify the investment put in or the stress it caused to the founder. Such acquisitions serve only to make the founder look good to unsophisticated judge. But Futurecam did not even have a success for appearance’s sake.
Further improvement was needed, but after we had a sufficient number of users. We knew some problems, and could have fixed them had we not run out of money.
Not as good as a professional designer, but enough to get the job done.
Some of the engineers who worked with me have gone on to a much better job after Futurecam than before.