How Mark Zuckerberg Destroyed A Start Up Enthusiast Post

Didac Hormiga has this to say on how facebook CEO Released an app that crashed his Startup idea.

On a Friday night in early September, my roommate Zach and I were playing a game of FIFA. We were unsure of where all of our friends were, and what was going on that night around campus. A laid-back night of FIFA suddenly sparked an idea for a startup that we called Pinr: a social media, location based app that helped people find events around them.

The app was created to solve three main problems:

1. People want to know about events going on near them
2. People want to know where their friends are, or where they are planning to go
3. Local businesses hosting events need more local publicity

To solve these issues, the app was going to have a map showing nearby events, a feed of where people were going, as well as a feed of what events that were happening near the user.

My roommate and I easily recognized that we were not the first ones to come up with an idea of this sort. However, we were especially careful about avoiding the traps that had caused previous businesses in the industry to be unsuccessful.

Our first step was customer discovery. We each contacted a few hundred people, asked about the problems they typically had with finding out about events, and set out to create a solution for them. We built a business model canvas, and I created mockups using Photoshop for every potential page on the app. We met with mentors, advisors, and legal counsel to get advice, and our idea seemed to be rolling.

The time came the time to hire a developer. Zach and I each messaged 50+ people (friends, clubs, everybody we could think of) and got a few responses. The first person we met with, Andres, was a perfect fit that was enthusiastic about joining the team. He had also thought of working on a somewhat similar idea before, got along with us very well, and had good experience with mobile app development.

Over the next two weeks, our developer had built the basic framework for all of the different components within in the app, and had begun styling each page. We had just gone to a meeting with on-campus entrepreneurship advisors who had loved the idea and given us positive feedback.

The idea was picking up traction; we were probably going to be able to release it in a month or two if everything went according to plan.

We had a good idea, a good team, and a desire to make a difference. I pulled out my phone and posted this picture of our team, and comically captioned it “Watch Out Zuckerberg.”

We went back to our dorm, sat down, and relaxed for a few minutes. I saw I had an email from one of my entrepreneurship professors and opened it: “Facebook Releases Events App.” I pulled up the article and went through the pictures.

The Facebook Event App had been released one hour ago. The concept was nearly identical, and the UI looked essentially the same; I felt squashed. In a matter of a few minutes I had gone from happiness and positivity to feeling totally crushed.

My team and I are definitely not the type to give up easy, however competing against Facebook with a concept this similar is quite the challenge. As negative as this new Facebook Events App release was, it was somewhat reassuring that we were trying to tackle a problem in a very similar way to Facebook.

This experience has taught me not to be overconfident. Within an hour of my Instagram post, my caption had been totally nullified, and our company had been forced to pivot. We’re not giving up, but we will definitely have to make a few changes. However, this time I know not to post a picture captioned “Watch Out Zuckerberg.”