Bidding Farewell to Another Project
After November 30th, my first LLC will be closing down and along with it, our main product: SplashTone.com.
Since October of 2006, Bob Cowherd and myself partnered together in Open Bracket LLC with the goal of leaving the corporate world of software to forge ahead on our own. We both had a laundry list of significant problems that we felt plagued the various companies that we had worked for. It seemed that every other company we researched or were involved with in some way or another had similar issues. We wanted to be a software company that valued focus, honesty, straightforwardness, and change. Through my experiences in a struggling rock band playing in Indianapolis, I asked Bob to join me in building a website where performing artists around the world could connect with venues and event planners to find reliable gigs. We worked tirelessly for years trying to get our company off the ground while still holding full time jobs. We did the work of marketers, salesmen, database administrators, software developers, framework architects, event planners, and graphic designers, and many times were up until the wee hours of the night. During most of this time, I was also still in my band and playing gigs as far away as Kansas City, attempting to bring word of our product to people in the clubs. We made T-shirts, huge banner advertisements, had 41 incremental software releases of the product, hosted a few rock shows here in Indianapolis with local and regional artists, had a few articles written on us in local newspapers, and took a road trip to New York to be part of the very poorly organized, first annual Urban Music Awards. The video included on this post is of myself presenting the award for best newcomer with rapper, Capone. The attached PDF is a collection of our story in the news. SplashTone.com wasn't our only endeavor. We also had a few other products along the way. They all met the same ill-fate that SplashTone is meeting now:
- Squish.NET: .NET component to minify and consolidate JavaScript and CSS files for maximum web performance. This product is still in use by some, but no sales were ever made.
- Speedy Framework .NET: set of components that has been continually improved and extended which provides our own foundation for building new web products. This framework also never made any sales, but is still in use by some today and continues to be improved through my other business, Dialawg LLC.
- Fondario: website that allowed developers to automate the deployment of their products. The heart of this project included a multi-threaded host using a queuing system to FTP updates to users' sites. This product never got off the ground as its objective became too complicated and efforts were needed elsewhere.
- The Lunchinator: this product never even got started beyond a splash page; it's goal would have been to bring democracy to the lunch room.
Sadly, despite all of our efforts, we were never able to make more than a few dollars here and there. These products haven't been my first attempt at making money with software—they will join a long list of failed applications and websites. I've learned a tremendous amount from all of this and I hope that my new endeavors reach the successes that these products never could.
So why did we fail? There are many reasons, though financial capital was certainly one of the biggest. With SplashTone.com specifically, we failed to recognize that the entertainment industry is one of the hardest eggs to crack—you have to shout to be heard because the market is filled with huge spenders. Development-wise our product could have been much more polished; I've personally learned tons about presentation since then. Finally, Bob and I are both fairly introverted people and were missing that crucial extroverted finesse to rally artists behind our cause. Bob moved out to California in late spring of 2008 to work for Vertigo Software and has had lots of fun and success there since then. To name a few of his projects, Bob was heavily involved in technology work for the Democratic National Convention and the 2009 March Madness website. I started a consulting company, Something Future Inc., and late last year interviewed to work for Mozilla on Firefox. That didn't pan out, but shortly thereafter a friend and I started Dialawg.com, a website geared towards helping lawyers communicate securely with their clients.
