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 what I was presented with at the very start:
| Beneficial | Concerning |
|---|---|
| Photoshop mockups Minimal funding – enough to get going Had some sort of previous development done | Unclear idea / mockups had no UX Intimidation / Controlling / Micro-management Extreme Secrecy / Paranoia Very verbal threats against the previous developer 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. 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 I was ridiculed by both. I had no choice but to leave the project, assisting with the founder to find replacements.
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 pre-seed investment which is testament to the foundation I was able to provide, however post-investment the company appeared to go 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 should 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.