I was brought in to an ideation / pre-seed stage startup with one founder and a shadow investor of sorts. The goal sounded simple – to build “The forum to end all forums”.
Here’s the traits I was presented with at the beginning:
| Beneficial | Concerning |
|---|---|
| Photoshop mockups | Unclear idea / mockups had no UX |
| Minimal funding – enough to get going | Intimidation / Controlling / Micro-management |
| Had some sort of previous development done | Extreme Secrecy / Paranoia |
| Very verbal threats against the previous developer, and others | |
| Unclear path to monetisation |
As you can see not a lot to work with on the beneficial side, and a lot to try and work around on the concerns. The first to tackle was what does this thing look like, and how will it work. With the rapid rise of social networks and with reddit being virtually unknown at the time I suggested this:
It needs to be infinitely scrollable, so that if I’m waiting for a bus or a train it will keep me entertained.
So with that in mind, the project ended up as a mashup of the founders concept with as much commercialisation as I could squeeze into it:
- Two primary columns on (desktop) screen, both independently scrollable, with two outer columns serving as the margin.
- Monetisation is through advertising, present in the margins.
- Multiple “threads” can appear in the same column, with threads leading to other threads.
- The user can join social groups to tell the system which threads to show.
Time to get to work.
Infrastructure & Architecture
Due to the extreme secrecy and paranoia, along with micro-management, the code had to remain on location at all times, nothing could be removed from site, internet connectivity to any server or desktop only at request and when required. The founder was the only person who could be in possession of any IP. This made it unsafe for backups (never keep backups at the same location) so my solution was to create multiple backups and have the founder store them at different places within the location. I was never made aware of where the locations were due to secrecy.
For the server being primarily offline, a dedicated system was created with Ubuntu Linux as the operating system for familiarity, with a custom internal LAN for development and testing.
Development was made in a typical LAMP stack using Codeigniter (MVC) so the project could be delivered as rapidly as possible, and for ease of sourcing future developers.
Short road to downfall
After ~5 months of development a few alterior motives were discovered as to why the founder wanted this platform, and why it should work certain ways which went against the ethics of what I was comfortable assisting with. From what I could see it was no-longer a solution to the forum problem, but rather an attempt to keep tabs on what people were engaged with – people that were no-longer on good terms with the founder. I raised this concern with the founder along with the shadow investor, where the response was less than professional. I had no choice but to leave the project, assisting the (hostile) founder to find replacements.
Developers in early startups just want to help the founder succeed and have the application used by others. However the environments are often less than ideal. This was one of the more colourful ones, which makes it important to note a few of the more major things from it in hopes it helps others see the signs to avoid a similar situation, and to help founders see just how developers get affected.
The founder would count the minutes I was working by whether I was looking at the screen & sitting in my chair – I first picked up this was happening as the founder would browse websites all day so there was never any typing – however every time I stood up or sat down I would hear them type a few keys. At a later meeting it was brought up that I was being tracked and a few minutes over/under my allocated 30 minute lunch break. The result was I would take shorter lunch breaks, arrive earlier, leave later, and rarely leave my seat. This ended up in a 2+ day overtime which was also unacceptable to the founder.
The radio was on loud all day, on the one station, playing the same songs multiple times each day – I have actually had this similar situation occur at multiple places. What it does is when the workplace becomes toxic, those songs get associated to it. So when you leave that workplace and hear those songs (as they were popular so they keep playing on tv shows and radio for decades) it drags you back.
I swapped to dark mode editing, as it was the only way to save my eyesight – This one surprises many people. The office was a home office of the founder, a dark room with no windows only a doorway. The desk faced a corner opposite the door which was always left open to the outside. If I looked away from the screen it was treated as me not working. This does tremendous damage to eyesight if you can’t swap between close and distance during the day. So I switched my editor (notepad++ at the time) to a dark background. With the (luckily) glossy monitor it allowed me to see the outside reflection which I could focus on to get my distance vision.
It was unfortunate as the technology developed at the time had some interesting tricks:
- Advanced templating engine allowing on-the-fly modification of CSS rules
- Real-time efficient multiple thumbnail engine from uploaded & linked media
- Highly recursive branched functions
The project secured significant investment which is testament to the foundation I was able to provide, however post-investment the company appears to have gone dark which aligns with my earlier concerns.
There are no screenshots or diagrams available due to the security policies of the founder.
Retrospective
There were definitely hints there at the beginning that this project would be an uphill battle to make successful due to the founder themselves, but it’s securing of funding validates the work put in at the time. The investors ideally should have had more due dilligence to discover the alterior motives of the founder.
The founder ideally could have relinquished business control to either the silent investor (who was running a successful business at the time) or a co-founder, and become the subject matter expert or consultant on the idea. That would have reduced the security/paranoia from the mainstream, making a much better working environment and accellerated the business through to the traction stage.
This is such a common scenario found in the startup world – often the founder is not the right person to run the business, they serve as the catalyst to the vision but need to hand over the reigns early on otherwise they will be the blocker preventing the business from being successful.