My first failed startup and how to pivot your idea

Hello Indie hackers community, this is my first post here, happy to receive any feedback from already experienced hackers.

I want to share my failed startup idea 6 months ago. maybe it’s can be something helpful for someone else to avoid the mistakes that I did.

Hello, Indie Hackers community. I'm Veaceslav, a software developer with over 10+ years of experience, and I'm passionate about investing and personal finances.

I'd like to share what I've learned from a failed startup idea: how to pivot and validate your idea outside of your building. Maybe it's something that can be helpful for someone else to avoid the mistakes that I made.

1. The Idea

2. Startup Accelerator experience

3. What did I learn the most?

4. My biggest mistake

5. Why did your idea fail? What next?

1. The idea

A few months ago, I discovered an interesting service https://alpaca.markets/. This is a brokerage US company that offers stock and crypto trading to anyone in the world. The interesting part about them is that they offer only an API to trade stocks and crypto, and anyone can build their own UI or mobile app, something similar to the Robinhood app.

I registered a new user on their platform, received the secret key, and tested the API on a test playground. Everything worked like a charm. At the same time, after some productive scrolling of my Facebook feed, I discovered an interesting opportunity to implement this idea in real life. I saw some paid ads for some local accelerator programs, so I decided to participate. I just need to create a quick MVP version and win some free money from VC funds. Easy peasy 😀

2. Startup Accelerator experience

I sent the request to register my new startup idea to Upcelerator and after a quick 30-minute interview, my idea was accepted.

The main reason I attended this accelerator program was for educational purposes. I have a strong technical background but no experience in marketing or finance. They have a very nice educational program, where you can cover important topics like Customer Development, Market & Competition, Branding & Positioning, Revenue Models, Go to Market Strategies, Sales, Legal, and many more topics.

You must learn the proposed materials from all of these topics each week and turn in your homework on time. We also had an evaluation period where you could pitch your idea and, based on your homework assessments, you could proceed further to the next modules.

Finally, I pitched my next Robinhood app in front of ~ 50 people, brrrr public speaking, live, on stage is not the easiest thing. You need to have some practice to do this without fear 😬.

Unfortunately, the main prize of 25k EUR was won by a different team, and my dreams of becoming the next unicorn startup failed 😁.

The key takeaway:

• To win at accelerator programs, you need to have a very well-defined value proposition and it's preferable to have some traction (paid users or traffic).
• In my case, accelerator programs was a nice way to learn something new. In my case, I learned how to pitch and create very nice presentations. Look at this beauty

3. What did I learn the most?

Developers are terrible at execution. I think the biggest advantage of being a solo technical founder is that you can easily implement an MVP without spending a penny. But you need to deliver your MVP as quickly as possible to the market to receive feedback from potential customers, so forget about picking the perfect tech stack, pick the most familiar tech stack and you are ready to go.

Marketing, especially early-stage marketing of the product, is one of the most important things. Usually, developers' minds work differently. They first implement everything, like a nice looking website with a lot of new trendy technologies, and only after that think about the marketing. After pushing the "Go Live" button tadddda zero customers and no one needed your idea.

The key takeaway:

• Developers are terrible at execution.

4. My biggest mistake

I made the same mistake as a lot of developers. Instead of focusing on marketing from day one, I tried to make the best pitch deck and the best MVP with the latest technologies on the market. I reasoned that the landing page was unimportant and could be implemented later when my idea was ready.

The key takeaway:

• Try to collect emails and get early adopters as soon as possible.

5. Why did my idea fail? What next now?

There are multiple reasons why this idea is not live right now.

It's very complicated from a legal perspective to create a broker app like Robinhood. You have a lot of headaches with licensing stuff, and it's quite an expensive thing. You need to have a team of lawyers to save you from all the mistakes that you can make.

My approach of pushing hard to have something to show on MVP without caring about marketing was totally wrong. People are interested in your progress and want to see it step by step. Try to create a landing page as early as possible and collect emails from your potential early adopters. They will help you to build the app together and you will receive the most valuable feedback ever.

So I decided to fix these mistakes and pivot my original idea to something new. Instead of creating a broker app like Robinhood from scratch, I would like to connect existing brokers to my app and offer a completely new experience to end users.

Your brokerage app - on upgrade.

The main 3 features for the MVP version will be:

• Manage all your investments in one place—so you will be able to connect multiple broker accounts and manage them in one place and get rid of spreadsheets.
• Performance tracking — nice and informative graphics where you can see more than the broker shows you, like performance charts, dividend tracking, benchmarking, and other features.
• Automation — simply enter your target allocations and the system will do the rest. Just click on the "Trade" button and we will place all orders in your brokerage accounts without leaving our app (something similar to the M1 Finance platform).

Subscribe as an early adopter at https://www.investzoro.com/ and receive a 50% discount for the first year.

This is my first time posting on Indie Hackers and I hope you find this learning useful.

Please follow me on Twitter for further updates about my progress.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below. I'll try my best to answer.