I'm super surprised by this, and Kevin Rose just lost a couple of points of respect in my book. Must be nice to have investors who will throw money at you, so that you can give a half-hearted effort at something (or maybe less than half) only to shut it down a few months later to "try something else".
It's like ADD at the business level.
Terrible decision. I don't even think anyone even tried to make this a success.
In fact, I think it shows a lot of discipline to stick to what they said they'd do.
I think a very valid argument can be made that this is the problem with the Milk model. The fact that they're funded without a product mandate means that they have a nice safety net so instead of pivoting a product and trying to fix what they have, they "shoot it in the head" and move on. There's no incentive to try to make what they have work. This isn't discipline, discipline is about making the hard choices and its easy to put a product out to pasture, its in fact the opposite. There's no reason to be disciplined when you're just playing with other people's money.
This is pretty much the opposite of what YC does which is give a smart team just enough money to live and make them fend for themselves. You're a hell of a lot more disciplined when you're clawing and scrathcing just to be ramen profitable.
While I'm not disagreeing with this, I wonder if it will impact the users of Milk Inc tools' willingness to participate in future projects. For services which run off of user's submitting content (reviews in the case of Oink), I'd imagine users may become hesitant to contributefor fear of the project (and thus their work) getting shot in the head.
I'm not saying terminating a project that didn't meet expectations is wrong, I'm just curious about the lasting implications.
I was one of the (seemingly) few people using Oink in Orlando, FL, and I thought it was great. I'll certainly be more hesitant to create any more content for a Milk product because it kinda feels like I just fired off information in to a black hole.
I figured it would be killed after how little people in my area were using it and I knew what I was getting in to, but I think I'll still let other people be the test dummies next time.
In the grand scheme of things none of this will really matter. Silicon Valley and tech in general is in the grips of ADD culture.
It's no longer about million dollar ideas, it's not really about execution of solutions either, it's about teams wandering around in search of something.
And maybe inevitably Kevin Rose will stumble upon the real purpose of Milk and spend time on it and make it a success. And the mistakes he made will just be papered over while what worked is left to be studied.
So silicon valley's real value is to coddle the needs of wishy-washy primadonnas as they attempt to find them self? When they succeed, we deify them and shower them with worshipful funding, when they fail its an exercise in letting what worked float to the top to build upon it for the next what-if?
I call bullshit.
Sorry, but the idea behind Oink simply wasn't very compelling.
I am actually turned off by the fact that Kevin managed to get investors in his own private sensory incubation tank which has no problem walking away from everything.
The mantra of fail often is being confused with continual failure.
Not everyone plays it but a lot do. It's the easiest point of entry for when you don't have the know how, lack experience, don't know enough people to do things such as launch rockets, design electric cars, optimize doctors, or achieve world peace.
And the mistakes he made will just be papered over while what worked is left to be studied.
Actually, what didn't work is very valuable. That's the whole point of things like customer development/lean startup. You learn why something didn't work so that you don't repeat your mistakes, and chart a course for something that you think will work the next time.
It should come as no surprise. Rose said they were going to do this all along. The vision for the company is to continually pump out apps until one sticks. If Oink didn't receive the traction they needed to keep going, why keep going?
Oh God. Queue this as a forthcoming trend. Sucks because this trend is really going to have a negative affect on new startups acquiring early users. People are no longer going to invest themselves into a product if they think it's simply going to close up shop a few months later.
This implies that "people" think much about the business behind the products they use. I'm not convinced people put that much thought into whether or not to test something out.
Person 1: "have you seen this new app?"
Person 2: "Oh, cool. I'd try it out, but I read on [insert tech blog] that they're practicing lean startup methodology so I'll wait to install it until after their series-A"
Yes, I know that's a strawman argument, but I have a hard time seeing people really thinking like this at all.
I think it depends who you are targeting. Even though Oink was targeting regular consumers, it does no favours for the reputation of start-ups trying to target businesses. I'm trying to sell a B2B startup's product into my office: one of the questions I'm asked is "it's a startup, what do we do if they shut it down in a few months"? Continuity can be a very important factor for certain types of startups.
from a personal example: I was really invested in the pool party app from Slide. Create groups and share pictures with groups of people, I convinced my friends to switch over. After they shut down, yeah I got my pictures off the service, but I will never invest in a new service like this again. Theres probably a lot of stories like this, and hes absolutely right that it doesn't help anyone.
I think they do though, not like that but. They will just generalise to all new products coming from places other than big well know companies. It will be more like "I started using [photo sharing app x] but then they shut down and I had to move my photos, I'll just stick to Facebook."
I can completely understand the way you feel, used to feel the same way many moons ago.
What changed it for me was to look at it differently:
1. If all products that were ever built were 100% good and successful, we'd be living in a different world. But, we don't. Fact is that most of us make a few good products (if we are lucky) and a lot of bad ones. It is the natural way of things, you can't control it. What you can control is how we go about doing it and how much it costs.
2. Money is raised for a lot of reasons. Money is spent for a lot of reasons. Not all worthy causes/products get funded well, same is the case for the unworthy ones. A lot of money, be it that most of it is wasted, tills the ground better and raises the odds for something good to come out of the flood of bad ones. Would you rather have no good ones at all in trying to ensure ONLY good ideas get funded and sustained?
3. You can use the same $$$s in different ways: blow it all up in one go, make different (smaller) attempts at it with clearly defined parameters for failure and success. Those two parameters are very subjective. Especially as product people we tend to keep products alive for much longer than we deserve to keep them.
4. Most important perspective for me: if you think you can do it differently, stop talking about it and have a go at it. Attempting (and even failing) to do half of most of the people we love to criticize brings about a sea change in perspective. It is always different in the trenches.
Were the investors throwing money at oink or at milk? If it is the latter this decision makes sense.
Using money to fund ideas that may or may not pan out is an interesting concept and kind of cool and if they decide to throw out ideas that don't work rather than stick to it that just defines what milk is.
So as a consumer, why would anyone ever even try Milk's products until they clearly become viable? You are being asked to give tons of your time and energy to build out their product (user generated content), recommend it to your friends, and do their word of mouth marketing, and in return the company has no loyalty to you unless its spectacularly successful.
And in contrast to the Milk model, you have sites like Delicious, Flickr, and even Digg itself which still operate even after the original founders have moved on.
What percentage of Oink users knew Milk's philosophy? What percentage of them cared?
More to the point, what percentage of potential users for their next app will know about Milk's philosophy (or care) when they see it in the App Store's "Featured" section?
It might make the news, and it's a good talking point, but I can't help feeling the naysayers are just stuck in an echo chamber on this.
I'm super surprised by this, and Kevin Rose just lost a couple of points of respect in my book. Must be nice to have investors who will throw money at you, so that you can give a half-hearted effort at something (or maybe less than half) only to shut it down a few months later to "try something else".
It's like ADD at the business level.
Terrible decision. I don't even think anyone even tried to make this a success.