A little over eight months ago, two guys came up with the idea to create a platform, service, application, or whatever you want to call it to bring together people in the tech industry (Techies). They were overjoyed to put their plans into action, as a larger number of people than they had anticipated were enthusiastic about the concept. They were so excited to have their first two volunteers within the first two weeks of publicizing the idea. The “planning” and design process apparently took a month, and at this point everything still looked good (LMAO). As they would have definitely and desperately needed it a couple of months ago, they were thrilled by the idea and just went with the flow (tsk, bad).
They started building but weren’t moving fast enough, so one of them tweeted and the other talked to the interested volunteers, and they were overjoyed that everything was going so well. But then it didn’t, and it made no sense at the time; things were slowing down as the months passed. The building continued, but the fact that the project was poorly planned and thus poorly executed could not be ignored because it was interfering with the project’s development process, which they were completely ignorant of at the time. They were aware of what an MVP was, but they passively ignored it as well. At that point, people had already labelled the project as a startup, and the team had already done so, so they went along, even though they had no intention of it becoming a startup in the first place; it was always intended to be a project that delivered value. But now they had to build something more feature-rich (so they thought, stupid guys) as well as a monetization plan, because who would pitch a product with no revenue-generation plans? And this was difficult for the niche they were building in because they didn’t want to rely on ads like other social media (another sarcastic “lmao”). It just sort of happened” is not something you want to say about how a startup started in this day and age, which was the case here, big mistake again.
The product began to lose its original purpose as they attempted to do too much with it at this point, and it only got worse from there; it had been months and this “MVP” was nowhere near ready, and they were freaking out, so they did the same stupid thing again, bringing in more people who were interested (at this point, they should have just open-sourced the project because wtf?). Sighs. The team members were also growing tired of wondering when the product would be released; everyone was confused at this point, which was obviously a bad sign; the project had been mismanaged; a lot of unnecessary features had been built out to near completion and had to be scrapped to focus on the essential ones; and while they had a ‘working’ product, it was of poor quality; too much was missing, and the great UI wouldn’t compensate for that with the users that had been waiting for months. In summary, it was a disaster at this point (yes, I keep saying “point”, I know).
The amount of time they had already wasted on this project made it difficult to do what they should have done sooner; instead, they kept pushing because they didn’t want to disappoint anyone; not the people working on the project, and certainly not the users (again, these asshats had already promised a slew of features, argh!). They had a ‘working’ beta but it lacked a lot of core features, it was so bad they didn’t want to release it and they knew it was entirely their fault. One guy was more of a builder, and the other was a great project manager who didn’t realise it until it was too late and he had left the builder in charge for too long, and now they were thinking very hard about what to do, they already felt guilty enough for both team members and users who were waiting. Come on, they knew this was a poorly planned and poorly managed project that they couldn’t pitch to anyone at this point because it had lost its identity, there was no “good” product to proudly show off, and it was all a complete mess.
At this point, they had two options: continue the cycle and waste more time trying to build a good product from scratch (even the actual files and code were messy at this point, continuing would be a disaster waiting to happen) or accept they messed up, own up to their shit, and stop wasting people’s time with a mail promising a release they thought “would be ready” because of how things appeared, so they chose the latter, which is heartbreaking for them. You probably get the gist by now: I’m the builder, and @_frokes was the real “product” guy, and we screwed up. This should have been a relatively smooth build for us and the team, but we (I and him) fell for the hype and made a shitload of bad decisions as a result. It should have always remained a project and never tried to do too much; in fact, there are many “it never should have” moments. This project will be dead to you and everyone else by the time you read this, but not to us; we still love the idea even if we went about it the wrong way and everyone would be off the team and development would halt. We still have actual thoughts in mind for the project and we want to get things done right this time but not any time soon to be honest. You will receive an email after this article has been published with a link to unsubscribe from our wait-list; however, if you choose to remain indefinitely, we will continue to provide you updates as necessary.
EDIT: I actually decided to delete the whole data & drop the database, so the mails will not be going out.
It’s been an incredible journey with everyone, and we want to thank everyone who has rooted for us, waited for us, and even built with us. If you’re going to start a project or start-up, make sure you’re not doing the same BS these guys did and fucked everything up. This is hopefully not the last you’ll hear about the idea (not the Frikax product), and thank you once more! Ciao :(