Learning lessons from Kiko - a tale for first time entrepreneurs

Kiko.com - the online calendar startup got a lot of coverage this week as the young founders decided to call it a day, putting the site up for sale on Ebay in the face of increasing competition in the online calendar space. Apart from being touted as a casualty of the new internet bubble, with much speculation over why they bit the dust, looking at the whole story provides some fantastic lessons for Young Entrepreneurs on their first startup.

Dharmesh Shah of onstartups.com speculated that the introduction of Google calendar or Kiko running out of money may have led to its demise but further reflection on the founder's blogs identifies that Kiko simply lost their eye on the prize, despite having first mover advantage and widespread press on the blogosphere (geek press that is).

A number of points are apparent which allowed Kiko to lose their advantage to more established competitors like 30boxes and Google:

1) They released TOO early: Kiko launched in September 2005 amidst fanfare as being the first AJAX calendar on the internet. But releasing early may have been a mistake. Kiko's designer Richard White, Kiko's designer elaborates further

"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 (queue the sophomoric jokes in 3.. 2..). 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. Kiko 1.0 was released in September 2005 and was met with much fanfare for being one of the first AJAX calendars on the web. Unfortunately, the user interface was pretty bad (which is how I pushed my way onto the team) and people generally said "wow that's cool… next!" The obvious problem is that when we launched version 2.0 I think the general reaction was "Kiko? Seen it. Hey how bout that new Google Calendar coming out?".

2) They lost focus: Being creative young entrepreneurs, they never stopped brainstorming and bouncing ideas and decided to pursue a sideproject. Its so easy to do this, I do it all the time. However, while this was easy to do in a creative environment they lost focus of their core product allowing competitors such as Narendra Rocherolle's 30boxes to steal market share while they should have been concentrating on getting the next version out. Upon the relaunch of their product (in january 2006) 30boxes' launch and screenshots of Google calendar dampened down the press around Kiko.

Founder Justin Kan elaborates:

"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."

3) They tried to build the ultimate product - rather than building incrementally from a simple start point they suffered from feature overload. Coupled with lack of focus this increased the time it took to ship product this led kiko to be succeptible to competitors evaporating any first mover advantages they had.

Richard White:

"It didn't look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a *lot* of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring *all* of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can't cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched."

Justin Kan:

"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."

4) They were slow to fire: If you are not happy with your team, cut dead wood immediately. Kiko didn't have a fully functional team, which affected morale and also focus.

Justin Kan

"Picking the right people is life and death for your company. We hired two people for Kiko. One of them (Rich White, our interface designer) was awesome; everything I could have asked for and more: self motivated, entrepreneurial, competant, hard working, and very smart. However, one of our hires turned out to be a huge mistake: he basically spun his wheels, didn’t complete anything, and left for months at a time without word."

Overall, Kiko's death has nothing to do with the fact that they had established competitors but more with operational mistakes the founder's made. Its easy as a young entrepreneur to suffer from idea overload, but I think what i've learnt from Kiko is to pick something you are going to excel at, focus harder than anyone on doing that and execute hard. Successful startups focus on doing one thing well. Frankly online calendars are features rather than companies and ultimately the Kiko founders went with their heart. Find something sexy and do it. Do your explorations, then commit to an idea and sit it out. Its easy to something for 6 months, but if it has the potential to be big, ignore other ideas or partner with other people to take them forward. Who wants their finger's in 10 pies?, someone who can't commit.

Kiko didn't get killed by Google. Even if Google is doing what ever you want to do, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it (That would kill the entire web ecosystem). David Hannemeier Hannson of 37 signals has a great retort to Google pessimists on why google doesn't render futile resistance:

"From the ashes of Kiko, Paul Graham reads that Google is unstoppable. That all hope is lost when fighting big G on its home turf. That resistance is futile:

The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of Google’s way.

What a depressing conclusion from a man who has inspired so many and gives hope to those who dare challenge the incumbents.

No. Don’t run, don’t hide. Be different. You can’t outdo Google by trying to match them point-by-point, but you don’t have to. There are other, better ways to fight. Compete differently."

Sadly no one has put in a bid on the eBay auction. There a great many lessons to be learnt here and i wish the Kiko founders good luck with their next venture. They have experience you can't buy.

if you want to explore the lessons further:

Justin Kan's blog is here
Richard White's blog is here
David Hannemeier Hannson reply is here
Paul graham on google