MoreWhite

The online calendar startup Kiko has been sold on eBay for $258K. The bidding story is here. Following the successful sale of the meta-search engine Jux2 for $101K, eBay is really becoming a plausible way to cash out.

Kiko was seed-funded by Paul Graham’s YCombinator, for the price of one programmer’s 6 month salary. Paul sums up Kiko’s failure in two words: Google Calendar. Supposedly it was the integration with Gmail that made Google Calendar more useful. This is the same office-effect Microsoft has used in the past to combat rival office products: integrating products together.

Whilst Paul was blaming competitors for failure, the founders blogged their own thoughts on why they failed. In summary:

- Stay focused

“Most entrepreneurs have lots of ideas. Often times, many of them may be really good. I don’t know about you, but my favorite part about startups is talking about new products and new business ideas. If you’re a creative person, it’s very easy to get side-tracked on side ideas when you really should be working on your main one. This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. We did this a lot with Kiko, and it caused many delays in getting the product out the door.”

- Don’t release too early

“You always hear “Release early, release often”, especially if you hang around Paul Graham crowd, but the footnote that doesn’t get enough airplay is that you shouldn’t release too early … You only get one shot to impress people; don’t blow it because they won’t coming back next week to see if you’ve improved.”

- Build incrementally

“We tried to build the ultimate AJAX calendar all at once. It took a long time. We could have done it piece by piece. Nuff said.”

- Do it right from the beginning

“Cute hacks can cost you time. Take the time to do things right from the beginning. Seriously.”

- Hire Slow, Fire Fast.

- Define your target market, don’t just target the early adopters

“… If you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the (Techno)sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it.”

“Our contact management and calendar sharing implementation did not meet our users’ needs because we never defined our target market. In addition, our designs for how these features should behave were negatively affected by our marriage to the existing, and broken, workflow in Kiko 1.0. Techies, families, social groups, and businesses all have different needs for sharing their calendar data with others and, by ignoring that fact, we created a solution that met no one’s needs.”

It seems that all of these points come down to one thing - focus. If you focus your ideas and your business you will have less features to maintain, the ability to build incrementally, be careful about who you hire, and target the right market. Its better to be the leader of a niche market, then a nobody in a large one. Less is more.

The classical reason for failure - hubris - still applies. I think the web 2.0 hype has given the founders unrealistic ideas about their market, product, and value. Whilst the geeky early adopters are willing to try anything, it is not an indication of quality. Imagine what the techcrunch crowd would actually think of MySpace if it just came out. Realistically, Kiko’s user interface was far from perfect for anyone who doesn’t know the term AJAX. Google does lots of things at a time, and yet their calendar looks neater. If calendaring is all you do, you better make sure yours is not just better, its amazing. That takes some real calendar passion, far beyond making a web version of outlook.

I wish the founders all the best, and hope they find that failures are just as valuable as hits.