“We were going to do a startup and get rich. Ha. Hahaha.”

— Matt Gordon, telling me about his startup experience

Back in September of 2009, I made a declaration on this blog that I was “going for it”: forget the job hunt, I said; I was going to follow my destiny of being an entrepreneur! Fame, fortune, and world-changing progress were sure to follow.  My ticket was going to be Blurity, a tool for removing the blur from blurry photos.

Publicly, I gave myself two and a half years to get my company off the ground, but my private spreadsheet showed that I would almost certainly be kicking it in the Caribbean by the following Easter.  Everything seemed to be lining up, and there was excitement in the air.

“I’m going for it.”

— Me, 18 months ago

I went through the steps like I was checking them off a list:

• Make minimum viable product? Check.
• Be embarrassed by the product? Double check.
• Talk to customers, then make changes?  Indeed.
• Apply for various tech accelerator programs? Yup.
• Get rejected by said programs? You’d better believe it.

Little by little, the initial euphoria wore off and doubt began to creep in. I attempted to set that aside using euphemistic rationalization, which was made all the easier by my being a single founder.

“The product doesn’t work worth a hill of beans? No, no. It works fine in this unicorn special case.”

“Customers not flocking to the site? I just haven’t promoted it enough.”

“Friends getting annoyed by my talking about the product? That’s just part of the game, right?”

I believed myself for a while – six months, in fact. In the end, though, I could not fool my bank account indefinitely. My product wasn’t gaining traction.

That was hard to admit. I’m usually pretty good at finishing things, so the prospect failure was as unappetizing as rotting potatoes.

What was the problem? In my mind, I didn’t have a market problem so much as a product problem.  I was the exception to the rule.  People clearly wanted their blurry photos deblurred. I figured that if I made the deblurring good enough, the world would beat a path to my door.  At least at first, I thought that my only problem was that the product was… how should I put this… the product was shit.

“It doesn’t take a formal process to figure out that there will be huge end-user demand for [a drug that cures cancer].”

— Steve Blank

“You’re not curing cancer. Did you even read the book?”

— What Steve will think if he reads that quote here (Hi Steve! MSE273 Fall ’07 alumn here.)

What I ended up discovering was that I had both a product problem and a market problem.  I wasn’t special after all.  Sure, everybody had blurry photos, but not everybody cared, and even fewer people were willing to pay to fix the problem.  Even among the people who did care about blurry photos and were willing to pay to make them sharp, I could serve only the subset that had photos that were blurred in a particular deblurrable manner.

About the time I realized all of that, I got gun shy.  I was too embarrassed to talk about the company with strangers because of the poor output quality, so I did very little promotion.  That, of course, is like a death sentence to a company.

It wasn’t all bad.  Even with limited promotion, I managed to attract a handful of customers to give it a try. Many of them were even willing to part with some of their hard-earned dollars for what small improvement Blurity could offer at the time.

I spent months trying to make the deblurring algorithm better.  I managed to achieve some minor advances, but there were no major breakthroughs.  I was hitting walls and burning out.

And so, with Blurity a plane stuck on the runway, and the end of that runway fast approaching, I swallowed my pride and reached out to some contacts in industry. Yes, in March 2010, I followed that well-trodden post-failed-startup path:

I became a consultant.

(continue to part 2)