Bootstrap Business - What we absolutely nailed

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Bootstrap Business that tells the story of my latest startup venture. This is the answer to the question "What were the three things that you absolutely nailed?"


The first one is easy. We absolutely nailed the product requirements for RoadEscapes.com. We filled a gap that exists for people who travel by car—marrying trip planning, booking, mapping, routing, and navigation. While each of those things exist independently and you’ve got sites like Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz on the trip-planning side and you’ve MapQuest and GoogleMaps and even AAA’s TripTik that handle mapping and GPS devices doing the navigation, there was nothing that did it all in a single integrated tool. I told our patent attorney that this is a little like coming up with the iPhone—taking individual components, such as a phone, a camera, a GPS unit, and a personal organizer and coming up with something that together is just unbeatable, as well as integrating them for maximum productivity and ease of use. The patent for our product also covers a
new type of personalization and intelligent search capability, which corrected another major flaw in how travel search has worked for the last thirty years.

The second one was a little bit painful. We elected to listen to consumers when we first finished the product and conducted usability testing before going live. Many people do that just to tick a box that they have done it. What we found was that we had been really enamored with the original user experience that we designed, but it just plain didn’t work. The consumers couldn’t figure it out. While that cost us another four months and another couple of hundred thousand dollars,we took the time and invested the money to get it right. That one was, as I said, a mixture of the bittersweet and the sweet.

Lastly, and again, this was another painful lesson, was what I will call “knowing when to fold ’em.” After launch, within days, I knew that the original business model and hence the projections were wrong because the product was geared for e-commerce (e.g., converting visitors to a sale) versus advertising (e.g., monetizing traffic to the site with ads and sponsorship). While people were using the tool and we got good feedback, we just weren’t seeing any conversion at all. That error required retooling the business model and the product, but by that time, we just
didn’t have the funds to keep going without the projected revenues.

Although it was a very painful decision at the time, less than forty-five days after launching our first online product, we had to basically close down the company and look for either a buyer or a strategic investor.

The good news is that we kept a small team on board, I stepped back into the company on an active basis, and we retooled everything. In the process, we discovered a third, highly differentiated and unique way to monetize the system. Plus, during that time, we were able to do limited tests of what the “right” consumer traffic looked like and saw amazing metrics that proved to us that we had accomplished the retooling goal. Now, once we are able to get the proper investment to get the company over the last five yards to the goal line, I am confident that the product will perform even better than originally designed to a broader market with more sustainable results.

We are fortunate that we don’t have to have a “fire sale” or worse yet, just watch the product go to the Internet graveyard, never to be seen or heard from again, chalking it up as a very expensive learning experience. We still have a very powerful and unique product as an asset to be sold or relaunched when market conditions improve and we find the right strategic partner.