No Traction and a Dwindling Runway: How I Decided to Restart, Not Pivot, My Startup, by Johnson Goh

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In a story posted to the AtticTV Blog, Johnson Goh Han Swee, Founder of AtticTV, describes how he decided to restart, rather than pivot, his startup amidst disappointing traction and a quickly dwindling runway. 

Read this post on the AtticTV Blog; part 1, and part 2. 

Below is an excerpt of the article:

"About three weeks ago, I was still working on a startup looking to bring a “tournament” element to casual games where users competed against each other for real world prizes. 

Unfortunately, we spent six months building it and failed to get any traction. Us being a platform, we managed to build a well designed system with a couple of games from Malaysia. We even solved a lot of huge business problems, like how to distribute prizes worldwide without distribution hubs, for example. 

The thing was, we actually thought we were doing customer development and were “listening to our customers”, when we really were not. As a result, we made a lot of dumb decisions.

That was enough me to send me through a short bout of depression. The feeling of giving up constantly crossed my mind, and with our initial FFF round drying up, I was stuck in a rut.

I realized that I had to do something.

First, I looked at why the product was failing:

1. The games were not “branded” enough - we used Malaysian indie games.
2. The concept was just wrong - people did not want to pay to compete for prizes at casual games anymore.

Then, I weighed up the situation. I had just four months of runway left, and a product that did not work. But what I did have was a team of two awesome developers who had learned many lessons along the way, and could develop product really, really fast.

I had two choices:

1. Try to get the likes of Bejeweled and Diamond Dash to be on the site, AND try to fix the flaws in the concept.
2. Attempt a complete restart.

So, I got the team together and we brainstormed possible next moves for each option. And, since it was clear the team was gravitating towards the restart, I made the decision to do it.

I suggested that we create a new product that all three of us would use on a daily basis, that was scalable, and that could gain traction quickly. It was tough us to come to a consensus, as all three of us have very different likes and dislikes. But, we did find one thing in common … Watching videos online.

So, we knew we were going to do something with video. But what? Every damn vertical seemed to be taken by someone. So, we started doing some customer development, and began asking people on Facebook which videos they watched online.

The answer shocked us a little - most people said they went online to watch music videos. The popularity of MTV kinda just slipped our minds. PLUS, they were watching a heck loads of videos a day! 

Since we do the same, and we are all passionate about music, we made the decision to pursue it. We started brainstorming how the experience would look, and realized Youtube was a total piece of crap to use [in terms of music discovery]. 

We wanted something like MTV, where the best music just played all freaking day.

And this is what we came up with: after just one week of launch, and basically relying on pure word of mouth and a couple of small blogs covering us, we have already managed to reach 130 daily active users with people watching over 15,000 music videos.

Please do try out AtticTV and we look to hearing back to what you think about AtticTV and where it could go :)"

AtticTV, Music Television for the YouTube Generation, is a Graduate of the Singapore Founder Institute. Follow Johnson Goh Han Swee on Twitter at @spicyxtreme.