Trump

Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States - despair for many, hope for others.

I voted for Hillary. Many of my friends also voted for her. For us, she was clearly the better choice, though she has many flaws.  For us, Trump - the American Berlusconi - is too dangerous for the presidency. But the people decided otherwise. 

Unfortunately, there are bigger issues in America after this election than Trump being president.

  • Many Americans are more sexist than racist, and many are already terribly racist.  They would rather elect a guy who is sexist, racist with bad temperament, who flipped flop throughout his campaign than a woman.   
  • We, the Silicon Valley people and many people who live in metropolitans who voted for Hillary, did not understand the rest of the country.  There are two versions of America in this election, and it had been like this for some time. There was a large population of Americans, many are whites who did not go to college, who suffered with jobs, who demanded a patriotic and hawkish image of America, voted for Trump.  If we wanted to change the country for the better by voting for Hillary, we must understand the people who voted for Trump.   
  • The internet and the media gave the Clinton’s campaign and Clinton’s supporters the wrong signals - they predicted that Hillary Clinton will cruise herself to victory.  The result on Election night told us otherwise.   
  • In the startup world, we rely on the data to measure and understand customers’ behaviors and to figure out solutions.  Clearly, data science did not work in this election.  Many Trump supporters were clearly embarrassed about his personalities, and did not publicly show their support for him.  They however decided to look past his personal flaws and elected him.  The data of Trump’s preference was hidden and invisible. How could we detect this signal must earlier?  And what could we do if we had learned sooner about the hidden preference of Trump’s supporters? 
  • Many Americans preferred entertainment over news and facts.  This election result proved that many were sick and tired of the American political correctness.  Trump was not dumb, he understood what people wanted to hear and he played his entertainment cards to maximize his chance. It was a double-edged sword but in the end he won.  If people were looking at facts, data and how he had lied throughout his campaign, they would not even picked him to be the Republican nomination.  


The New York Times forecasts of the 2016 Presidential Election 


The result stunned many. But given how we elected presidents in the past, it was not a surprise to see an underdog, a fresh face being elected president - that were how Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, George W Bush and Obama got elected in the first place.  What shocking this time was that the American people were willing to elect a sexist, racist demagogue like Donald Trump to be president. Why? Because for many, this was hope.  And what was there in life if there was no hope. 

For those who believe this election result is a disaster, there is still a silver lining here.  Trump is right and blunt about many things, he now has to come up with solutions for them. Even if he does not, democracy has taken its course, and we can all hope that it will correct itself. 

Why we failed

In 2013, my co-founder and I started Zoute, a public transit platform that provides real-time departure and routing information to help get transit riders from point A to point B quickly and efficiently, using mobile apps. Our service operated in 100+ metropolitan areas in the US, Canada and Australia and acquired many users.  But at the end, we failed to take our vision further.  We eventually got acquired by another startup in San Francisco and shut down our service. I still think about these lessons daily.   

There are many reasons why we failed.  Building a startup is hard. Even when you have a great product, a great team and a great timing, you could still fail. Like Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder put it, "Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down”.  Even when we know that there is a high chance that we will fail, failure sucks!  And we’d rather not fail.  But if we get to do this over, we definitely would. So it is important to draw some great lessons on why we failed.  

No plan to make money

We did not have a solid plan to make money.  For us, there are two possible options to make money: The first option is to sell our products to public transit agencies; this includes provide real-time tracking solutions and mobile ticket solutions for them. The second option is to get a lot of users so we could monetize by ads.  

First,  it turns out that government agencies have very long sales cycle. Because government agencies do not have a single decision maker, they tend to move things very slowly and conservatively.  Their goal is to avoid any screw up, and not to innovate.  Someone warned us about this before, but because this is our first company and we felt a strong conviction of improving the experience for transit riders, we decided to do it anyway. 

Second, in order to make money from mobile advertising, we have to have a lot of users, and we need users to spend a lot of time on our apps.  We have neither one at the beginning. It makes it impossible to monetize from Day 1. Plus ads sucks!  So we would only go with this option if all else failed. 

Competition

We should have done better research on competitions. Instead, as first time founders,  we were blindly excited to start building the idea and did not do our homework. It is very important that you understand the market and the competition very well.  Even if you decide to ignore competitions, and clearly sometimes you should to avoid distraction when executing your vision, you should still need to understand the war that you are fighting.  When there is competition, your product has to be at least 10x better for people to leave their existing service to join you.  

Talk to your users, not your friends!

One of the biggest mistakes that we made was not talking to our users.  I meant users, the people who need and use your product!  For our case, it is the transit agencies and the people who take public transit daily.  We only talked to a few of them, but these conversations gave us great insights on how we should build the product.  But we should had done this a lot more before we even started writing the first line of code.

We made another huge mistake - we talked to many of our friends.  The problem with talking to friends is that they are afraid to hurt you, especially when they know that you've gambled your full time job, your life and your time into this venture.  Many times when you ask them, they are going to tell you that the idea is brilliant.  I don’t think they purposely not to tell you the truth. The problem is, they are not your users and to them, the idea actually sounds good.

I cannot stress how important it is to talk to your users early.  The reason is real users are not afraid to tell you the truth and what they really look for in your product.  You desperately need these honest feedback.

We failed.  But we have learned many things, and if we have to take this journey all over again, we would.