After lots of introspection and sleepless nights, we’ve decided to put Grinnit on a permanent hiatus.

 We thought the best way to seek closure would be to share our story with the world.

 We’re going to lay out our lessons learned with Grinnit, in hopes that others in the startup community working on bringing their passions to market can use our “folding” as a means of self-reflection.

For all of you toiling away, across the street from the graveyard, let’s chat. Self doubt is a natural part of this journey. A need to ‘change the world’ gets you only so far. An irregular, and often irrational, notion of invincibility often leads you down a rabbit hole. You can’t turn around, so you keep burrowing. 

Take 5 minutes and read below. Sound familiar? Then take another 10 minutes to take a walk and reflect.

1. Understand where you fit in your market

Know your competition well without letting it cloud your judgement or distract you.  It’s important to know your market inside and out, and how your product is/will be positioned. In the photo space, and more specifically photo collaboration, we saw competitors quickly emerge since we started down this path in October. Each approaches solving photo collaboration differently, and each brings about a new problem: photo noise. 

 

2. Focus on the problem you are solving

When we first started Grinnit (then called Invizual), we wanted to solve a costly collaboration problem for businesses that rely on photographic information from distributed teams.  We kept it LEAN, and through customer discovery and pre-sales evaluations, realized we were solving a problem for a relatively small market that required costly client acquisition and retention costs.

With the help of our new colleagues in the MassChallenge companies, we realized we had the capability to solve a much larger perceived problem of gathering and organizing photos from a group of people near and far, but focused around a common event or theme - and Grinnit was born.

Some might call it a “Pivot” but we called it “listening to smart people and trying to solve their larger problems.”

And we did it.  Grinnit’s Alpha software got everyone’s photos together, whether taken with our smartphone app or a DSLR, and put them in one place and organized them.  Problem solved.

What we realized, through our experiments and use of the projects by our emerging competition, is that this then raises a few new issues:

• Empty, impersonal galleries suck - nobody wants to be the first to add a photo.  There needs to be something in there, or the gallery needs to be created by a person that is close to the contributor or content that resonates.  This is why when you check out the public galleries on competing products, you see empty content containers.
• When you have a “successful” gallery, you end up with a new problem: too many unimportant / low quality photos.  We had galleries with participation so high that there would be hundreds and hundreds of photos from only a handful of contributors.  Nobody wanted to look through this, let alone curate their own version.  Time on site and bounce rates were abysmal because people opened the window, checked out a couple, and closed the window.  Our competitors are also facing the same problem.
• This then creates a “filtering” problem: either the user behavior (due to product branding or user experience) prompts contributors to only add photos that are high quality / high relevancy - what we came to call a “front end filter,” or there needs to be a sophisticated “back end filter” technology, preferably personalized, that lets you hide the content that’s not important to you.
• Personalized filtering, or rather the “interestingness” of photos becomes an issue when large batches of photos are shared amongst a group of people, large or small. The more photos, the more of a distraction the data set becomes (and the less likely the user will find the content to be personally relevant). We saw where the market is going, and realized we were ill-equipped to tackle a BIG, hairy filtering problem that encompasses machine learning, sexy algorithms, and a bit of magic.  The Corporate R&D departments and University researchers working on this problem are going to eventually solve it.  Our solutions were just not robust enough for us to be satisfied.
• When we arrived at the filtering problem, we realized that we had solved the collaboration problem.

 

3. Trust your founders and hold each other accountable

On January 20th, we drafted founders agreements that detailed our commitments to one another and accomplishments we felt were necessary for success, and a pledge to re-evaluate in 6 months - which was Monday, June 20th.  We hit many of our milestones and commitments, but there were many pieces of the puzzle missing. Sure, we could have overlooked them, but it would have been a disservice to each other and those that supported us.

 

4. Know thy strengths & weaknesses

None of our founding team had ever completed the crash course within a consumer web startup.  Much of our journey was spent better understanding user behavior and coming up to speed in a highly competitive, quickly evolving space.  We ultimately came to the conclusion that our weaknesses coupled with a few constraints would hinder our ability to 1) successfully compete and 2) win within the market. Believe us, we like to win, but know when to pull our bets from the table. That brings us to…

 

5. Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em

Poker players call it Pot Committed: it’s psychologically easier to keep your hand if you’re financially/personally vested, than to fold. You’re not willing to cut the cord, hoping an unforseen circumstance will rekindle the magic. Pot Committed players almost always lose big.  In the end, stick to your gut before you’re belly up.

 

Maybe you’ve never been in this situation, but maybe you know someone that is.

Spread. The. Word.

Help others in a similar situation.
By all means, don’t let our story dissuade you from pursuing your dreams - just take a mature look at whether it’s worth the sacrifice you’re making.

If you want to talk, DM us on Twitter @grinnit. If you’re in Boston, tell us your story over a beer, we’d like to hear it.

Sincerely,

The Grinnit Guys

Whether you’re running an enterprise or consumer startup, it’s always important to engage your community. Here are a few tips the Grinnit team lives by on a day-to-day basis.

Do: 

1. Keep responses to comments or concerns in a public forum positive. It’s easy to take gripes personally, but don’t let it effect your business demeanor. You’re better off not responding if you don’t think you can keep your emotions in-check.
2. Answer every form of communication, whether it’s a tweet, facebook comment, or email. Someone took the time to reach out to your business. The very least you could do is pay them respect with a response.
3. Take every request into consideration. It may seem trivial to you, but a request from a customer always trumps your own opinion.
4. Personalize a ‘thank you’. We can never stress this enough, but it’s worth revisiting. Someone has something nice to say, or does you/your business a favor. Reach out with a ‘thank you’ and make sure it’s personalized. If possible, send a hand written note.

Community management take time and resources, but it’s critical to the success of a fledgling business, and should never be under-played.

That being said, have a little fun with it. Get your customers talking and use community communication as a great way to build brand equity.

… and about 50 stories in the Parking Lot

Startups are lonely.  

While going with your gut is imperative in early phases of product development, that isolation means you run the risk of losing touch with the real world outside.

At the same time, seeking perspective from someone that doesn’t get what you’re working on can be a total waste of time.

That’s why we’re stoked to have a new friend, Aman Loomba, who was introduced to us through some friends because he’s working on a different facet of collaborative albums.

Aman’s experience in product management, as well as his understanding of our space, made us primed to kick around some ideas.

So, we had a brainstorming session. We retooled and reprioritized our stories. We cut features - and then cut some more.  A reality check helped us steer clear of the vacuum.

You know what? Coopetition is awesome. Don’t be afraid of your “competitors” - embrace that as startups, we’re all in this together. We have the cards stacked against us, the odds are not in our favor, and chances are that if someone succeeds, it’s not in spite of you, it’s because they were doing something different or their timing was better or they executed better.

The goal posts are now closer.

As many of you know, we spent March and April in a heavy development cycle: 

• Putting the finishing touches on  the first release of the Grinnit API
• Pushing our Alpha builds for iOS in Testflight (ten builds in the month of March alone!)
• Building our first version of the email interface
• Tying it all together with analytics 

Then, we spent the month of May doing tests, breaking things, and then fixing them.  And then breaking them again.

What did we learn?  A whole heck of a lot.  

• We thought it was important to try and become the camera of choice for a user - turns out that what compels people to participate is how relevant an album is to them, and then whether it contains meaningful content that they then want to contribute.
• Content piles up very quickly in active collaborative albums, and then the user ends up with a filtering problem.
• Email is a great way to lower an installation barrier - but not if you spam people (sorry Josh Chris).

So what does this mean to you?

• In the coming weeks, we’re going to roll out a new iOS app - built from the ground up (and without Three20).  If you want in on the testflight, join the Beta team here.
• We’re adding functionality such as creating an album to the mobile web app, so you can play a bit more.
• We’ve been working on a desktop web design so you can enjoy photos on your computer.

In the meantime, we’re also working on some fun, unique exploration experiences for the desktop browser and iOS, as well as album customization.

So stay tuned on our blog or our newsletter to find out how to be one of the first to try out the cool stuff we’re creating in the Grinnit laboratories.

As a result of community support, we’re once again humbled to have been selected for the VenCorps Top 9 (along with fellow Boston hustlers Rentabilities). The concept behind VenCorps - community powered capital - is fairly unique.

Each month, community members vote, or rather invest points, in their favorite startup. The more each member contributes to the community, the more influential they become. 

The startup with the most investment points in each round is given a $25K investment from VenCorps, which above all includes mentoring, strategic guidance, and follow-on funding.

Want to support team Grinnit out so we can afford name brand cereal? You can help by doing the following:

If you’re not a VenCorps member, you can go here to sign up: 

http://www.vencorps.com/User/Register

Once you’re logged in, you can check out how many ‘investment points’ you have by going to your profile here. If you’ve never logged in/contributed before, your ‘net worth’ on the right hand side of you profile should be at 25 pts.

To invest in Grinnit to help us win $25K:

1. Click “Startups” then “Phase 3” from the homepage, or just click here
2. Allocate any or all of your points to Grinnit. Note: if you have 25 points, that’s all you can ‘invest’
3. Scroll to the bottom and click “update”

That’s it, you’re done, investment points are in the bank!

Voting ends June 15th at midnight.

Thanks!

Email alex@grinnit.com with questions.

Today marks team Grinnit’s last day at 1 Marina Park Dr in Boston’s Seaport district. We’ve been enjoying sunrises, sunsets, and the occasional maelstrom that blows in off the outer banks since August 2nd of last year.

It’s by far the best place to hold a meeting in Boston (have a better conf room pic? Show us).

We’ve been super fortunate to share the space with insanely smart, driven teams ranging from the online rental space (Rentabilities) to custom bras (Zyrra). As an accelerator / incubator, the diversity of teams far surpasses anything else in Boston. Tech startups probably account for ~50% of the companies - so it’s also been a great testing bed for Grinnit customers outside of the early adopter crowd. 

It also holds the longest continuous whiteboard in the world (no big deal).

MassChallenge (along with TechStars, Dogpatch Labs, Microsoft NERD, & others) has been a monumental catalyst in boiling Boston’s startup culture up to the top, bringing the likes of Governor Patrick and Senator Kerry to our humble office (among hundreds of other successful entrepreneur & investors).

But in the end, it’s not really an office. It’s a gathering space, a meetup destination for local nerds. It’s more of an auditorium, or even the best place to organize a pirate puppet show. It’s a startup oasis of sorts, situated below a reputable law firm and steps away from Boston’s largest court house. For some it’s been home away from home.

For a lucky few, it’s been a place to realize dreams. Here’s a hat tip to the 2011 MassChallenge finalists.

We’ve been lucky at Grinnit that outstanding advisors have taken an interest in our team; if you’re one of them and you’re reading this, thank you.

Upon returning from New York, we spent much of Thursday meeting listening to sagely advice.

• Listen to the data: Now that we have functional technology and implemented analytics, we need to beef up some more of our internal reporting systems and start to interpret user behavior.
• Quiet some of the noise: Because people contribute so heavily to our albums, duplication is quickly getting noisy - so we need to start thinking about automation to save users time zeroing in on the photos they want.
• Start planning a Beta launch: As we get closer to our next round of beta releases, what can we do to ensure we get the highest participation rate possible?

Have you had to tangle with any of these before?  Are you willing to spend less than an hour a week (often MUCH less) to share your wisdom and guide us along the path?

If so, we’d love to hear from you.  You can find more details at http://grinn.it/AdvisorReqs and if you’re interested you can email us or just provide some basic info at http://grinn.it/AdviseUs. 

Last week, team Grinnit bussed it down to NYC for a few days of rubbing elbows (and couch surfing) in NYC.

We’ve been hearing that NY’s consumer web innovation is busting through the seams and would be great launch pad for Grinnit. We got a chance to catch up with Doug from Hyperpublic & Colin from Challengepost along the way, crashed a TechStars happy hour, and were fortunate enough to grab some office space from the Alot.com crew.

A few take-aways:

• Though NYC dwarfs Boston in terms of size, it’s tech community seems to be densely populated in Soho/East Village/Union Square/etc. From what we understand, you can’t walk around on the street without bumping into the next Foursquare, Hashable, or GroupMe. Though Boston’s tech community is extremely accessible, it seems to be a bit more spread out (though Kendall and Fort Point are seeing a big influx).

• Techstars mentors and alums are becoming more popular than local celebs (that or they’re becoming the celebs). The Techstars happy hour at Apple Restaurant & Bombar was absolutely jam packed - great young minds & a great sign of things to come. Each TS rep had no less than 5-10 eager young hustlers waiting to hear about the next “Google for XXX”. Reece Pacheco gave a great rundown of how to interact at industry events in the wake of Techstars For A Day.

• The NYC tech scene blends a bit more with the “normal crowd”. NY has been an advertising & media mainstay for decades and we’re beginning to see early startups disrupt the incumbents. Because industries are intertwined at some level, they’re exposed to the general public much more often. Also, the NY Times and TechCrunch are making NYC innovation much more approachable for the masses (though BostInnovation is doing a fantastic job at making sure Boston startups reach the limelight).

• The Ace Hotel is the place to be for consumer webpreneurs (unless you’re in stealth). Not two minutes after a meeting, someone tapped us inquiring about the subject of our meeting, what we were working on, and then proceeded to drop his exec summary. Great if you’re looking to share ideas, but not so great if you’re trying to keep things on the DL. 

All in all, it was a great couple of days, save for the rain. We’re looking forward to reconnecting and heading back down south sometime in the near future. Many thanks for all that made time for the Grinnit guys.

If you’re a NYC startup looking to connect up in Boston, feel free to email us founders[at]grinnit[dot]com.

Never ones to shy away from a good party, the team over at BostInnovation held a pre-summer kickoff last week for Cinco de Mayo at Tia’s. With well over 700 RSVPs, the event attracted area sponsors Where.com, fresh off their ebay acquisition, and award winning marketing & design agency Antler. Magners Hard Cider rounded off the beverage sponsorship for a thirsty crowd.

Team Grinnit decided this would be another great experiment using our alpha iPhone app and an easy email submission process for photos. BostInno gave us an early shout out before the event, and helped to round up the crew to drive in photos in real time - check out the events photos here on BostInno’s site. A great deal of value for the organizers was the ability to drive content to their page during the event in real time.

Many thanks go to our local supporters including Ben Dolgoff (Byte Ventures / Peekaboo Mobile), Aaron White (Boundless Learning / Proxlet), Liza Adams (decktOut), Nic Warren (formerly SCVNGR / now Perfect Fuel), Jake Cacciapaglia (Runkeeper), Jeremy Levin (StarStreet), Alex Patriquin (Performable), too many others to list and, of course, the BostInno crew.

BostInnovation CEO Chase Garbarino had this to say after the fact: 

Grinnit’s an awesome way for us to engage our community and allow them to contribute back with photos. If you’re at an event, chances are you want to see pictures of yourself, taken by your friends or maybe someone you haven’t even met yet. Grinnit allows BostInno to do that, both internally for our team and externally from our community.

Thanks Chase :)

Development: iOS App V2

In December / January, we started working on the Grinnit iOS app, with the help of our friend JP LaFond and some some guidance from Sam Chow of Mobyfab.

With a little magic from Testflight to get it onto testers’ phones, we went through 14 iterations with our Alpha and learned a whole heck of a lot - like that our whole premise of becoming “THE CAMERA” was out of whack with how people saw the value of our services.

Our testers wanted to add photos from the album browsing pane - so as you can see in these screenshots, JP has done some wizardry to add some camera and plus buttons with slick little drop-down menus.

If you want in on the Beta, click here to sign up using Testflight’s recruitment system, and we’ll let you know when it’s cooked up.

We’re really excited to share it with you.