Eighteen months after I began working on Blujack I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to move on. It goes without saying that things didn’t go according to plan. Bootstrapping a startup requires a significant amount of personal risk. That risk has become too much for me to bear. As I now meet this fate it is crucial to learn as much as possible from the experience and move on to something new.

While these thoughts are my own, I want to call-out my co-founder. Kevin Egge has been a wonderful person to work with in the last 18 months. It’s also been great getting to know him on a personal basis. He has taught me a great many things, which is, ultimately, the kindest gift.

A look-back is useful, to better understand what could have been done better.

The Product

We built a useful product. A number of pilot customers got value using our product. The product provided some measurable value over the several months it takes to plan and coordinate a large group trip. The product provided value to travelers, trip planners and other involved parties.

Given a good product, why wasn’t there any traction? In a word: Impact. The product, in many ways, was only an incremental improvement to an existing business process. Instead of going for a 10x improvement, we managed a 10% improvement. We knew going in we needed to make a huge impact, we just weren’t able to make that happen.

Our product was very wide, and not very deep. Which is to say, we did a number of little things reasonably well, but didn’t do anything exceptionally well. This made it difficult to achieve the necessary impact to close sales and generate strong interest. It also made the sales process difficult, as there was no single feature that would make a splash during a demo.

Of all the clichés about startups, we largely missed on: “do one thing, and do it extremely well.”

The Market

We shifted the product from being consumer-focused to business-focused eight months into development. This was in response to a lot of feedback we were getting from potential customers. However, we over-estimated our understanding of the enterprise market for a product like ours. Our lack of specific domain-knowledge around corporate group travel was a significant issue.

The Process

Our development process was effective. We were able to make product changes and ship new features quickly. While the codebase was somewhat ‘prototype quality’, we didn’t spend a lot of time fixing broken deployments. For the most part, we were able to build and ship things fast enough to be successful.

Our founding team didn’t include a designer. I have a reasonable amount of skill to make things look nice, but not enough skill to make things look awesome. Having fulltime web design skills would have helped a great deal. (we did have a contracted designer, Joey Golaw, who did a great job, with the time he was given.)

The Team

This startup was never just me and Kevin. We were fortunate to have a number of people helping us right from the start. My sincere thanks goes out to all of my close friends who provided invaluable time, input and support. I especially want to thank my engineering friends who contributed a lot of their personal time to help build our mobile applications.

The Future

Companies can survive the loss of people, but a company as young as Blujack probably can’t survive the loss of a founder. Still, the product exists. There is a market that is interested, and can benefit from it. Which means, there is still a sliver of hope that there might be a future for it. I wish it all the best.