Lessons learned from Kiko
By now, many of you have probably heard of Kiko, an online calendar application, due mainly to it being put out to auction on eBay. An unusual move for an online application, but one I expect we’ll see more of in coming years. Kiko was attempting to make it in the crowded arena of online calendar applications (including Google Calendar, 30boxes, 37signals’ Backpack, and many more), but decided to pull the plug on development and offering the program and domain on eBay for a starting bid of $49,999.
There are plenty of reason why the plug was pulled on Kiko (no revenue plan, Google calendar, etc.), but it is always interesting to learn what the folks behind the curtain think, and with today’s blog age, it is much easier. I ran across two blog posts by former contributors, both of which offered up reasons for the collapse as well as lessons learned for future adventures.
From Justin Khan:
- Stay Focused. Most entrepreneurs have lots of ideas. Often times, many of them may be really good. I don’t know about you, but my favorite part about startups is talking about new products and new business ideas. If you’re a creative person, it’s very easy to get side-tracked on side ideas when you really should be working on your main one. This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. We did this a lot with Kiko, and it caused many delays in getting the product out the door.
- Hire Slow, Fire Fast. Picking the right people is life and death for your company. We hired two people for Kiko. One of them (Rich White, our interface designer) was awesome; everything I could have asked for and more: self motivated, entrepreneurial, competant, hard working, and very smart. However, one of our hires turned out to be a huge mistake: he basically spun his wheels, didn’t complete anything, and left for months at a time without word. Working with someone like this can easily make working on your company not very fun at all. If you have any reservations about someone at the outset, you should probably not hire them.
- Cute hacks can cost you time. Take the time to do things right from the beginning. Seriously.
- Make an environment where you will be productive. Working from home can be convenient, but often times will be much less productive than a separate space. Also its a good idea to have separate spaces so you’ll have some work/life balance.
- Get your investors involved. Your investors are there to help you. Get them involved from the start, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. I think we made the mistake early on of trying to do (and know) everything ourselves, perhaps out of insecurity over being so new to the business world. This is a mistake.
- Build incrementally. We tried to build the ultimate AJAX calendar all at once. It took a long time. We could have done it piece by piece. Nuff said.
And from Richard White:
Stay focused
Justin mentioned this on his post-mortem write-up but I’ll elaborate a bit more. We were on track to release the new version of Kiko in the middle of January, when we *lost focus* and starting working on something totally different altogether. This was obviously a suicidal move in hindsight as it cost us 2 months: Kiko 2.0 launched on March 15th instead of January 15th. During that time two important things happened:
- 30Boxes came out of nowhere and launched on Feb 14. Thus becoming the new internet calendar darling.
- Screenshots of Google calendar were leaked and posted all over the internet.
The combination of those two events meant we got very little press coverage for our launch (or re-launch) since everyone was holding their breath for Google Calendar or fixated on 30boxes.
Release early, but not too early
You always hear “Release early, release often”, especially if you hang around Paul Graham crowd, but the footnote that doesn’t get enough airplay is that you shouldn’t release too early (queue the sophomoric jokes in 3.. 2..). You only get one shot to impress people; don’t blow it because they won’t coming back next week to see if you’ve improved. Kiko 1.0 was released in September 2005 and was met with much fanfare for being one of the first AJAX calendars on the web. Unfortunately, the user interface was pretty bad (which is how I pushed my way onto the team) and people generally said “wow that’s cool… next!” The obvious problem is that when we launched version 2.0 I think the general reaction was “Kiko? Seen it. Hey how bout that new Google Calendar coming out?”.
Too many features killed the cat
It didn’t look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a *lot* of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring *all* of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can’t cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched.
This also contributed to our late launch and slowed us down after the launch because we had so many features to maintain.
You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere
To a degree, it didn’t matter how many posts we got on TechCrunch, LifeHacker or Scoble; we would still be stuck in the same Technosphere duking it out with Google, 30Boxes and everyone else. You can make a nice living just pimping your wares in the technosphere (which is what I’m attempting with SlimTimer) but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it.
We didn’t have a plan for how to go mainstream, which, in hindsight, was a prerequisite for our success. We would have needed capital to do old school PR, marketing and sales and develop a sync service for Outlook. That said, I don’t think either of Google Calendar or 30Boxes have managed this feat either.
Very interesting advice! I though Justin’s 1, 3 and 4 were most interesting. Number 3 I deal with almost every single day on the client end. The company I work for outsources our e-commerce platform and webhosting and they seemingly quick hack EVERYTHING, which we pay for both in the near-term and long-term. It’s one thing if you are good and can quick hack, but what if you are a hack to start with?
Number 1 and 4 were also interesting to me, personally, because I am always coming up with business ideas to pursue and know I need to focus on one to make something happen. And 4, simply because I’ve always wanted to work from home, which in reality might not be the best idea. Especially since I just got an XBOX 360 (review coming on that in the near future!)
Anyway, Kiko has passed away (temporarily) to be re-born from the bowels of eBay. I’ll have to keep an eye on that one to see how it progresses after such a high profile (in the tech world) crash and burn. I’ve tried Kiko in the past and didn’t really find it’s feature set all that applicable to my lifestyle (especially considering the other options.) Same for Google Calendar (although being connected to Gmail is hard to give up). 30boxes wasn’t too bad (and I did use if for awhile), but in the end, Backpack was the only application to meet all my needs (to-do list, notes, reminders and calendar.) I can’t tell you how productive it has helped me become in all aspects of my life – work, home and even my side job! (We’ll have to wait for another post on that subject…)
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