post-mortem
Posts tagged with post-mortem
- Post-Mortem: Hockey Campus App Tuesday, October 1, 2024
After the Hockey Messenger, I built another product called Hockey. Nicknamed “hyperlocal,” the Hockey Campus App was a modern spin on Yik Yak. I always pitched Hockey as Yik Yak 3.0. Why 3.0 and not 2.0? I attributed the interim step to Jodel. A German social app whose founder I first met in 2020. Yik Yak Yik Yak was an app in 2013. It was the golden age of consumer social. They pulled all the stops and launched their campus-based social app with a bus, an electric Yak that people could ride, and branded socks. Peak 2013. The app was a school-focused clone of Twitter that came with two twists: 1. You could only see posts from people within a campus-sized radius, about 1 mile. 2. Everyone was anonymous, and there were no accounts or usernames. This unique combination of features fostered a
- Post-Mortem: Hockey (Messenger) Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Image: Our competitor gets a nice pay day. I used the brand name Hockey for three things: a messenger I started building in 2022, the C-Corp that’s the legal vehicle for my freelancing, and a social app I built in early 2023. This post is about the first one: the Hockey messenger. Before leaving Pineapple in September 2022, I had a Zoom call with Eric Migicovsky. Former founder of the Pebble smartwatch, YC partner, and now CEO and founder of Beeper. Beeper is an app I didn’t believe was possible until I saw their landing page. A messenger app for your phone that combines all of your texts and inboxes into one app. They were compatible with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Signal, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin All your texts in one inbox. It sounded like magic! Eri
- Post-Mortem: Späti Guide Sunday, September 15, 2024
After all the interpersonal drama, we’ll have something more light-hearted today. Späti Guide is a compass that always points its needle to the closest “Späti” still open. According to Wikipedia, a Späti is an East German convenience shop in cities like Berlin, known to operate late at night past the usual shopping hours. As such, it’s frequented by Berliners like myself in 2021 to grab a late-night snack or drink. I recommend Sterni, which offers insane value at 0.50€ for 17oz in 2021. Mileage after COVID-19 inflation may vary. Product Learnings I decided to build this app because Google Maps had terrible information on all the Spätis in Berlin at the time. You had to search through five different search terms to find all the stores that might fall under the term Späti, and even then, the
- Post-Mortem: Pineapple Thursday, September 12, 2024
My work on Pineapple started as a contractor writing the iOS app. Over time, we talked more about my becoming a full-on co-founder. Even though my equity never vested and I left the project before becoming a shareholder, my work on Pineapple was substantial enough to include in this list. I think Jared would agree. The Product Pineapple is a way to have an honest face-to-face conversation with four strangers. It pairs you into a room with four other people to discuss topics and answer questions. There’s a feed of conversation starters, and as soon as you answer the question, your answer becomes a part of a group of five total strangers. Now, the five of you are on a journey to discuss and answer more questions together. All answers are recorded as selfie videos of you talking to the camera
- Post-Mortem: Bubble Tuesday, September 10, 2024
I wish I had more of a break to reflect on the traumatic experience of getting kicked out of my startup before Bubble happened. Julius and Frank were looking for a technical founder for their startup less than three months after the previous breakup. That made it a rushed decision to determine if I was done with startups because of this negative experience or if I wanted to give it another shot. Luckily, even under time pressure, I made the right call and decided to become Bubble’s third founder. Bubble was a video reaction app that allowed you to create picture-in-picture reaction videos. It sounds like a carbon copy of Dub, and it’s close, but the core functionality worked a little differently. Bubble lets you post a social media video to places like TikTok, where you see your face as a
- Post-Mortem: School Night Tuesday, September 10, 2024
After building Dub and Knok together, School Night was the most extensive app my then co-founder and I worked on together. The product idea came straight from our advisor, NYC-based entrepreneur and sports expert John Brennan. He had most of the core idea written down in a document, and we followed it to a tee. It was the time of ClubHouse’s over-subscribed TestFlight launch with over 10,000 active users. All of Silicon Valley was wasting the first three months of the pandemic away on this app, and it seemed that for a brief moment, serendipity was back on the menu. You ran into people in ClubHouse rooms you hadn’t spoken to in decades, and it became a highly active third-place online. The community was pre-filtered for an interest in emerging tech and new apps. Many founders, builders, an
- Post-Mortem: Knok Monday, September 9, 2024
The second product I worked on in 2019 was Knok. Knok grew out of believing that how we use our phones to talk to the most important people in our lives is deeply flawed. It all started when my co-founder and I walked through Midtown to get something to eat. He had a product idea: “We should build a social media network for your own family,” he said. What a stupid idea, I thought. One week later, this product idea made some ex-Facebook engineers very rich. They built Cocoon and raised quite a bit of VC money for it. It was exactly what my friend had proposed: a private social media network just for you and your closest people. With this newfound belief in our ability to predict the future and generate ideas that reflect the spirit of the times, we built Knok, a text-based messenger that fi
- Post-Mortem: Dub Sunday, September 8, 2024
It is the job of the entrepreneur to build many unsuccessful products. That is until one of them turns out to capture an audience and work out. Work out in a way where it’s both a financially and spiritually sound decision to keep working on one thing and to give this thing your all. Until then, however, it’s all about iterating. It’s all about throwing things at the wall until something sticks. I’m sure there are tons of people out there who will say otherwise. People who work on the same products for years and years until they’ve perfected them and turned them into something that works well enough. I’m not that kind of entrepreneur. I am very attached to all of my ideas—until I’m not, And until I move on and find the next thing to obsess over. This post is the beginning of a series of po