How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

[felixchan]

Hello Hacker News,

I’ve been reading HN for a long time now and love the way the community shares thoughts with each other. I haven’t done anything extraordinary or extremely successful, but I want to chip in to the community with this experience that I find pretty interesting.

A year ago, I moved to San Francisco from rural Missouri hoping to join the start-up world. At the same time, I met a friend, Zac, who also just moved to the bay area around that time but had left his job to pursue something more interesting. We decided to become partners and start hacking stuff together.

Since we were new to the city and we didn’t know any one, we decided to build a mobile app that lets people use their phone to read the profiles of others nearby. It was supposed to help people “break the ice” and meet new people. This was our first startup. We coded the product in a week and pushed the product live.

Once live, we got like 5 users, since no one really knew about it. To promote this product, we decided to target events, since we thought that events is where people would like to meet each other. We locked ourselves in a room and asked this question over and over: “What is something valuable we can provide to event organizers so that they can promote our product?”

Zac finally came up with an idea. He proposed that we could build a kiosk where attendees can type in their name, and a name badge would instantly print. Then the attendees would be integrated into our mobile app as well. At first, it sounded insanely dumb (what would my mom think if I told her that I moved 2000 miles away from home to print paper name badges?), and I laughed really hard. But after thinking about it, it seemed “cool”, and we gave it a try.

In a day of work, we wrote the software in 300 lines of code and tested it. We ordered a label printer from Dymo and hooked them up to a Dell Mini 10v netbook. After that was done, we contacted an event organizer, convinced him that our system wasn’t going to fail, and asked if we could print name badges for him.

The event organizer let us try out our system, and that night turned out to be amazing. People thought it was the coolest thing ever to type their name in a laptop and instantly have a name badge print out. At the end of the night, we handed out lots of cards and got lots of people to try our mobile app. It was the first time in my life that there was “buzz” around something I created.

We continued to hit events and print name badges. We bought more printers and lots and lots of labels. We bought a huge travel suitcase to hold everything, and we carried it everywhere to print name badges for events.

The experience was amazing. Not only did we get a lot of people to try our mobile app, but all the attendees thought it was the “coolest” gadget ever. I guess we essentially “engineered” our way into these $600 technology events for free. Many event organizers gave us the front-seats sponsor booth, without charging us a dollar. Some gave us free advertising banners at their events. Most importantly, everyone walked around with our logo on their shirt. We shook all their hands as they walked into the door. Advertising can’t get any better than that. We quickly got our mobile app into the hands of our users, and talked to more than 500+ directly.

Unfortunately, after a month passed, we realized that our initial mobile app wasn’t working. People didn’t want the product. They didn’t want to read profiles about people around them. The mobile app wasn’t useful.

Here’s the weird thing about start-ups: things just happen. Although our mobile app failed miserably, our little name badge printing system became insanely popular. Event organizers were begging us to print badges for them every time they had an event. They were referring us to their friends, and we were hitting events literally every day with our name badge printer. To cater for each event, we forked our original software (which was completely hard coded and not well thought through) way too many times.

Just to name a few, we hit: TechCrunch events, Smash Summit, SF Music Tech, Future/Money Tech, ISA, Twitter events, FailCon/FailChat, TEDxSoma. You can see some pictures here: http://imhello.posterous.com/ .

Eventually, we got so many requests that we couldn’t go to all the events anymore. It was too much for us to handle. That’s when it finally hit us right on the forehead. This is what it’s like to build a product someone wants. Event organizers wanted to use our system. They’ll email you, call you, beg you, and tell their friends about you.

Since we were too overbooked, we decided to charge and up our product. We added EventBrite integration, customization, and polished it up a little. For every event, we would make around $50-$300 dollars (depending on the size and labor).

Soon, this little name badge printing software was now able to support me and my partner’s living expenses. And in the end, we sold the product to a small company. Although it was not an amazing multi-million dollar acquisition, it was an acquisition that gave us enough money to start another company.

The lesson we learned is that something so tiny as a “name badge printing machine” may seem silly and pointless at first, but it led to opportunities you can’t first predict. In our case, it fed us and turned into a small acquisition. We made lots of friends and great people while we were attending these events. Even our $10 Logitech keyboard was touched by many great CEOs and celebrities who came through us to get their name badges. We got completely free promotion and direct advertising.

I think that every startup has opportunities where they can be creative. Every startup can build something on the side and attach it to their product somehow. My advice is that if you find something “cool”, even if it’s small or trivial at first, take it for a spin before dropping it in the trash can. It might just spin into something that can help in the future.

After selling the name badge printing software, we decided to go back and pivot on our initial mobile app. Our new company is called View. View is a mobile app that “tells you what you need to know, wherever you are.” We’re really excited about this app because it’s very useful to our daily life.

We’re about to launch beta very soon. If you’d like to try it, go to http://view.io

Make sure you click the link above instead of typing it through the browser, so we can know you were referred from Hacker News and can give priority access.

Thanks for reading my story! Felix

P.S. View is not in the App Store yet, but if you’d like to try the iPhone app as a beta tester, shoot me an email and tell me your city/state in the subject line: [email protected]. We only have a limited number of invitations left, so I can’t guarantee that everyone can try it.

[SwellJoe]

I reached the end of this story and thought, "These guys have not fully learned the lesson of product failure. Nor have they learned to recognize product success."

You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a tiny marketing budget). You've now ditched the product people wanted, presumably selling it for a pittance, and went right back to a similar mobile app to the one you couldn't convince anyone to use, despite excellent marketing savvy.

It sounds like you guys are a great team, and I bet you'll make many great products in the years to come. I hope you'll also figure out that when the market speaks that loudly, it's a good idea to listen. I had the same problem for many years; it took me three years, from the time we first wrote the code, to realize that Virtualmin could be a great business.

[alttab]

I think a distinction between your argument and the OP's motivation is that it isn't money he wants - its to work on something he loves doing.

It may have started with a mobile app, and he found some tangential success with printing name badges at conferences. But nowhere in your response addresses that maybe the OP didn't want to print name badges for a living. He sold his company which he wasn't truly passionate about which enabled him to do something he was passionate about. Sounds like a success story to me.

Not everyone's motivations are the same, and when that's the case we end up with criticisms that aren't focused on the essence of what is being told.

[yakto]

I reached the end of this story and thought, "they're following their heart and building something they'll personally use every day." ("We’re really excited about this app because it’s very useful to our daily life.")

Some things are more important than commercial success, and taking the exit door when presented with a base hit or standup double, especially when it's a product your heart's not in, doesn't sound like that bad of a choice to me. I'm in a very similar situation atm.

[rdouble]

In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference. That sort of business is tough to scale. It's like those guys who take your photo at Disneyland. It doesn't sound like they were leaving that much money on the table.

[soapdog]

I just want to tell that I've been using virtualmin every day for some years now and it helps keep me sane while managing my virtual hosts. It is a great tool and worth every penny. Now, every time I see something like cPanel, I scream in horror. Thanks for your hard work!

[BalancedThought]

It seemed to me that they went back to the original application and pivoted. They didn't go back a build the same people to people proximity app. They built the people to environment proximity app which let them know about things going on in their environment (example from website : the Bart train is not running for the next two hours).

So, I don't think they gave up something successful to pursue something less successful. Rather, they decided to continue to work on something about which they are passionate.

[wccrawford]

The exaggerations in titles are really starting to bother me.

Yes, you started with 300 lines of code... But then you modified it several times for different conferences, and enhanced it a lot when you really become popular. Only after that did you sell it.

[zbowling]

The actual number lines actually hovered around that until we sold. It was fork soup because we hardcoded everything for each event (I love git so much for making that so easy). For every event, we always seen it as just one more event for promotion so we didn't want to make everything configurable. Simple and easy to test basically.

Towards the very end we rewrote everything, made it configurable, integrated all past features, and made a UI designer for designing labels (instead of hardcoding the layouts) and then we sold.

[noodle]

and evangelized the hell out of it, too, which isn't exactly easy work.

i mean, its still a good story. but the tl;dr title isn't accurate.

[dmor]

As one of the early event organizers to use imhello just want to say we love you guys, and still want to have you back -- until I read this I thought you'd fallen off the face of the Earth. You guys helped us with badges at out City Hall event (where Tim O'Reilly spoke) and also with an event at Twilio HQ. I'm really happy to hear you're back, and my one piece of advice is that once you have that initial traction and buzz don't let it die.

As an event organizer, I felt like you guys were doing for free what I normally had to pay someone to do - manning the front door. It was very valuable, having you there and putting your logo on our badges felt like 100% win-win. Good luck with view.io

[ultrasaurus]

So was their success mostly based on the non-scalable aspect? (namely that organizers were happy to get an excited person to work the door for free)

Or is there a hidden scalable app in there for sending out people to do conference name tags in exchange for advertising in front of certain audiences?

[mdink]

Wow, awesome to see the demand still there. It would appear that event technology like this still has a nice future!

[felixchan]

Thanks Danielle!

[ck2]

Wait, those were simple black-and-white "HELLO MY NAME IS" badges printed on a mailing label?

Event organizers paid how much for this?

At first I though maybe this was the 1990's but then I read netbooks.

Very confused. How dumb/lazy/cheap are conference organizers?

[jarin]

Very. Well, actually I would say that they're extraordinarily busy and would rather just throw money at people to do things so they don't have to worry about it.

Having set up wifi networks for big conferences (under contract) and written conference software (under contract), I can say that literally everything is a pain point for them.

[sedachv]

Right now event organizers hire someone to print out badges ahead of time and hand them out at the door. Having your badge printed right there saves time, table space, waste from no-shows, makes it harder to gate crash (there's a scene in Up in the Air where Clooney's character just picks up someone else's name badge from the table).

Don't underestimate the psychological factor of having something printed right there with the personalized (you typed it) name.

[smbwrs]

Came to post this. Well, this, and, "It took you 300 lines to do THAT?" A dozen or so lines of Javascript + CSS would do the trick. I say this from experience, having built a system to auto-print thermal labels from a browser. It's reeaaallllyyy easy. Heck, most of the time was spent fighting with Windows' print settings. While I'm happy for your success, I'm kind of dumbstruck that anyone would pay for such a system.

[Edit] In the interest of not just poopooing on the badge thing, I want to mention view.io actually seems like a pretty interesting idea. One of those so-obvious-why-hasn't-anyone-done-it-yet types, could be big if it works well. Good luck!

[bjonathan]

"Make sure you click the link above instead of typing it through the browser, so we can know you were referred from Hacker News and can give priority access." (even if I think this point is bullshit): There is a clickable link to View : http://view.io

[jbscpa]

Great work.

I keep remembering that in my little community a business that just sold for >$100 million started out making steak fingers and selling them to restaurants.

Steak fingers.

$100 million.

nothing is impossible.

[keeptrying]

Whats the name of this business?

[cpr]

You probably ought to plan on Apple stealing your thunder with iOS 5.0, which purportedly includes http://siri.com/, a voice-activated app that appears to cover what you're doing exactly.

[6ren]

This is the best longform copywriting I have ever seen! I'm happy to be advertised to in this way. I especially like the "priority access" part.

The View app does look amazing - seems to basically be local advertising/information signage on your phone, as Philip K Dick predicted/feared, but (hopefully) more useful than typical ads (can you find ways to keep it that way?)

Suggestions: the example messages are great, but show them a little longer, maybe proportional to their length (I couldn't quite read some of them); and maybe somehow make your tag more concrete and specific (maybe 'what you need to know about where you are' - danger signs, like your "tow zone" one sum it up). Maybe something about "signs"?

[felixchan]

thanks for the suggestions :)

[borski]

After signup, there is a syntax issue:

  To try our initial beta on Feb 31, invite 2 friends that live nearby:

Feb. 31 doesn't exist. :)

Also, the watermarks don't show up in Firefox; I almost assumed I needed to know the "secret codes" to get an invite.

[MichaelGG]

"Feb. 31 doesn't exist."

Maybe they are using MySQL? http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html#1_14

[mdwrigh2]

Are you sure that's a syntax error? I'd probably catch that during typechecking...

:)

[felixchan]

Haha, thanks. Yep, we get lost sometimes. There isn't a Feb 31 :)

[tlack]

Did you not see enough money in the event market to continue trying to build products in that space? View.io seems to be a bit of a departure from that.

[cpeterso]

Plus I could easily imagine a View.io-like app directed to event planners and attendees that leverages the badge printing service: an event-specific "mobile app that 'tells you what you need to know, wherever you are' could be useful for people networking (like their original business plan), visitors new to the conference city, or promotions of related events/services.

When you have to turn away interested, paying customers, it's time to increase your rates and leverage that relationship to sell them more products and services.

[gcheong]

I thought most badges are simply printed from the event registration data and I would have certainly expected the events you listed to have had badges already upon arrival, so I'm curious as to why they didn't have the badges printed already. But it's certainly a great story of how something they developed in order to promote what they thought was their main product ended up becoming the main product.

[zbowling]

A bunch of events were like that. We proved that our name badge system could verify tickets, print badges, and handle name errors and changes faster than someone using pre-made badges. It almost ran it self (one person could manage 3 kiosks at the bigger events). After the first run, it always proves its worth.

[neurotech1]

At TC Disrupt 2010, a very organized and well resourced event, I personally printed dozens of badges that didn't get printed from event pre-registration.

[YooLi]

For the people wanting to know what the badge-printing setup looked like, I think these pictures show it:

http://imhello.posterous.com/

[MortenK]

Love the hacker at pic 6 of 13

[corin_]

FYI, the signup form on view.io doesn't show the placeholder text in Firefox, I had to view source to see what it was meant to display. Fine on Chrome.

[chipocabra]

What boggles my mind is that tech events in San Francisco don't print name badge automatically on admission. 0_0

I live in South Africa and pretty much any trade show or event I have gone to in the last 4 years have had name badges printed at the door on admission. Or am I missing something here?

[ujeezy]

Is yours the product used at SHDHs? I (and others) were very impressed with it :)

[Vivtek]

What a great story! "This is what it's like to build a product someone wants."

[rexf]

From the landing page, view.io sounds like an useful product. As someone new to NYC, I'm always looking for relevant upcoming events. In a city like NYC, there has to be events of interest, but they are hard to find. This sounds like what view.io addresses.

That said, this trend with spamming friends to receive an invite (thanks to UseHipster, LaunchRock, etc) is frustrating. Yes, it may increase your launch e-mail list, but it's an extra step that deters certain users (I gave up after being told to tell x friends to sign up).

[zacharycohn]

It may deter you, but for every person it doesn't deter they get 5 more people to sign up.

[baddox]

Rural Missouri, eh? That's where I've been my whole life, and I too have always wanted to move to San Francisco or a similar population center. Cool that you're pulling it off.

[kevinelliott]

The story was fascinating. What is most interesting to me is that several people here on HN are dumbfounded by how such a simple service was in such demand. That seems to be the trend these days: do something simple, that everyone needs, and you can be a success. Complicated ideas don't seem to fair well (there is a lot of resistance to it anyway). If people need to try and figure out what you're offering, you've already lost most people.

Looking forward to the release of View!

[emit_time_n3rgy]

Thanks4sharing. In NYC's Google office(s), when you walk-up to the front desk there's a system to enter your name (or anything for that matter) and it prints out a sticker-badge. And I've used a scale programmed to spit out sticker labels with prices depending on the weight of the product code entered. Perhaps an add-on to the event badges would be color coding them based on some other attribute voluntarily entered into the system (not weight :)