playcafe.com网站失败教训

网络上面看到的，对那些互联网创业者们可以借鉴参考下，觉得很不错，所以转载了。

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PlayCafe

一年半前，我与公司联合创始人戴维·奈格（Dev Nag）一起创办了互联网电视游戏网站PlayCafe，我们野心勃勃地希望运营一个人人参与且高度交互的游戏秀。玩家可以观看我们的节目、回答问题、赢 取奖金、组建战队、实时聊天并运行他们自己的游戏，这是一项巨大的工程，尽管玩家参与热情很高——用户平均每场可观看87分钟的节目，有40%的用户会在 一周内再次访问——但用户规模仍然较小。我们可能恢复运行，但目前而言，我们已决定暂停网站运营并将剩余资金返还投资者。

以下是我们对过去经验和教训的认识以及下次如何加以改善的反思，我感觉有许多创业者怯于谈论自己的失败，从而失去了一次重要的学习机会，我希望你能从 我们的教训中得到帮助。

1、首先寻找快钱

我们很幸运地认识了一些顶级投资人，但我们在投资条款的商议方面耗费了太多时间。硅谷仅有约30位顶级投资人，他们通常手头会有足够多的投资项目，并为将投资风险降到最低而静心等待。

资金比投资建议或者人脉更有价值。下次，我们将重点扩大投资人网络，瞄准那些愿意在企业早期阶段进行快速投资的人，哪怕他们没有多大名气。跟投资人召 开三次会议就算得上耗时太长了，说明你的关系网络还不够大。此外，名气较小的投资人也会给你更多时间。例如，投资人大卫·沈（David Shen）为我们的网站进行了全面的评估，而且他只开了一次会就决定给我们投钱了。所以，你得找到十个象大卫·沈这样的投资人。

而且，只要你的项目足够好，大牌投资人自然会找上门来。

2、不要自己做内容

每天制作高质量的内容是一项极其艰巨的工作，特别是实时内容。以电视为例，制片厂专注于生产内容，电视网络负责播放，产生这种模式的原因是电视的制作 和播放都是非常艰巨的工作。戴维和我都意识到，我们在内容制造方面完全是新手，但我们想当然地认为，找个美女在摄像机前和网友玩游戏是件轻而易举的事，但 事实证明我们错了，这种内容制作根本就不是我们的财力所能承受的。

以《美国偶像》为例，即使这种拥有丰富资源的节目也经常会出差错，例如音响故障、主持人或参赛者说话打结、摄像机角度不对等等。何况他们还不用应对 DOS攻击、服务器宕机、客户支持等我们面临的问题。

所以说，我建议那些有意进军内容制作的创业家或者投资人三思而后行。内容制作比技术开发要难上一个重量级。YouTube上没有一位内容制作者能够赚 到16.5亿美元的百分之一（注：16.5亿美元是谷歌收购YouTube的金额）。此外，数字录像技术DVR和媒体共享技术的普及使得内容制作者的收入 减少，按效果付费广告的出现也使得市场上大量无效的广告投放减少。因此说，制作内容的主要、甚至可以说唯一的理由就是，你纯粹为爱好而做。

3、在速度和稳定间做取舍

PlayCafe的另一个失败教训是：同时开发优秀的内容和技术耗时太多。我们想让网站既复杂又稳定，但这种做法在一个以创新和娱乐为基础的行业注定 无法成功。

有一个隐喻我很喜欢：如果允许一个新手一次走两步，他甚至可以击败象棋大师。尽管这种做法一般会导致bug增加，并激怒那些完美主义者，但正如 LinkedIn联合创始人雷德·霍夫曼（Reid Hoffman）所言，如果你回头看自己网站的第一个版本而不感到汗颜，说明你当初为这个版本耗费了太多时间。

但有种情况是例外，那就是你的产品是为用户完成特定任务，例如eBay出故障就会给用户造成巨大损失，而Twitter出点差错只会成为人们的笑谈。 eBay必须谨小慎微，是因为有130万企业要依赖它服务的稳定性，因此不容出错。

4、时间就是金钱

知名天使投资人保罗·格拉汉姆（Paul Graham）有句话说得好，优秀的企业家会吝啬地使用自己的资源。我有一个坏毛病，就是喜欢为了好玩而讨价还价。例如为了省下100美元的无线上网费， 我会花上3个小时去砍价。相对我们的融资规模而言，这种做法简直是浪费时间。为一点小钱讨价还价实际上是忽略了时间的真正价值。

时间比金钱更有价值，因为你没法融到时间。戴维就曾建议为我们的时间标价。你可以按照薪水、剩余融资或公司总值来计算你的工作时间。我们是每小时价值 50美元。如果我要花上5个小时去谈判砍价，就必须至少砍下250美元。而随着你的融资增长，你的时间的价格还要水涨船高。

5、营销非小事

PlayCafe失败的主要原因就在于营销失策。戴维和我都出自一家几乎敌视营销的公司PayPal。我们在SEO（搜索引擎优化）和SEM（搜索引 擎营销）等方面的努力还算有成果，但要想吸引用户观看实时节目还需要进行持续、技巧高超的营销活动。

与内容制作一样，我现在不再认为营销是那些聪明的新手用业余时间就可以琢磨出来的把戏了。随着互联网变得超级饱和，营销可以创造差别。而营销又是一门 深奥的学问，不是门外汉能轻易驾驭的。

但也有例外，特别是一对多的产品，在这种产品的使用过程中会产生新的用户。这里指的不是口口相传、需要用户替你宣传的产品。

下次创业，我们会融到足够多的资金，在创业初期就聘请一位营销专家。

6、控制和计算用户获得成本

我们最初把营销想成一种极为创造性的活动：制作宣传视频、发起营销活动等。这种想法只是部分正确，最好的营销应该是可控和精确的。如果你确切地算出了 获得新用户的成本，并且掌控了整个过程，就会知道需要多少资金和收入，这样可以将模糊的猜测转变为清晰的数学公式。

在找到一位营销专家前，你可以利用AdWords关键字工具来开始自己的营销，它会告诉你有多少人会在谷歌上搜索某个关键词。另外还有一个工具叫 Traffic Estimator，它会粗略计算在谷歌购买某个广告关键词的成本。雅虎也有类似的工具。一个理想的关键词每个月的搜索次数应该在1万次以上、投放该关键 词广告的竞争对手不能超过三家、且它与你的网站有较高的关联性。

另外，我不会在公关公司、CPM（每千人成本）、广告牌、电视／广播方面投放广告。我们曾给一个推广人投了5000美元，在毫无效果后，他竟然说我们 再投5000美元才能看到效果。

7、重视你的合作伙伴

合作关系的两个劣势是：合作伙伴反应迟缓，而且你无法控制他们。但除了提升用户数量和营收，合作伙伴也有别的用处，他们能扩张你的关系网络、教你如何 营销、帮你发现潜在的竞争对手、成为你的潜在收购者。

由于我们过于相信自己的实力，结果怠慢了一些合作伙伴。他们后来表示，如果我们当初跟他们结成更紧密的合作关系，并证实自己的价值，也许他们会收购我 们。

我们还学到，只用花上一点时间就可以建立非正式的合作关系。尽早会晤合作方的决策者、跟他们保持联系、并真诚地帮助他们都有助于加强双方的关系和合作 意愿。这种关系的建立需要远见和持之以恒，“结婚前恋爱”确实有助于建立更稳健的关系。

8、不要低估支出

尽管我怀疑更多融资可能会使我们有不同的结局，但钱多了总能让我们尝试更多的策略。当初我们制定了详细的财务方案，但我低估了成本。下次创业，我们会 更好地计算出实际成本，并会稍微融到多一些的钱，这样就可以避免在缺钱时再度融资。

你可以找一些成功的创业家要他们之前制定的财务计划作为参考。我不赞同财务计划是废纸一张的说法，因为它能帮助你估算员工数量、融资规模、收支平衡 等，判断你的商业模式是否算得上疯狂。

9、谈判要留有后手

我所得到的最有用的建议来自于LiveOps创始人比尔·特伦查德（Bill Trenchard），他认为：“永远要留后路”。

作为创始人或CEO，你所做的每件事情几乎都与谈判有关：接触投资人、聘请员工、签署合作协议等等。说服谈判对手的最佳途径是以明确或暗示的方式表明 你有许多选择，有两个选择就足够了。

10、知易行难

最让人沮丧的是，我和戴维对上述理论所知甚多。我们都曾分别在三个创业公司中工作了10年之久（但此前从未全面负责过）。如果两年前我把上述理论发给 自己，相信我的想法和你们中的大多数一样，即这些说法纯属陈词滥调。

对我而言，最新的教训就是知易行难。硅谷充斥着各种建议，但就像一个只有理论知识却从未动过手术的外科医生一样，我认为需要许多亲身实践的经历才能了 解创业的复杂性和变数。

许多有用的建议都相互矛盾，例如了解你的用户以及按自己的想法运营、不要过多融资以及不要融资太少等等。对于这些问题，最好的答案就是因地制宜。建议 不是象代码一样可以轻易执行，而是象地图坐标一样，需要有技能和参照物才能看懂。我希望，我们的经验能帮助自己以及你们更接近成功。

（译者：肖恩）

【对于翻译的文章，我总是尽可能的附上“原文”，这一次也不例 外。

10 lessons from a failed startup

Mark Goldenson

A year and a half ago, my co-founder Dev Nag and I started an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe. Our ambitious plan was to run highly interactive game shows in which everyone was a contestant. Players could watch our hosts, answer questions, win prizes, form teams, call our studio, live chat, and run their own games. It was a huge undertaking, but despite great engagement — users watched for 87 minutes per session and 40 percent returned within a week — we didn’t reach enough users. We may revive it in the future, but for now, we’ve placed the site in hibernation and returned remaining funds to our investors.

What follows is a post-mortem of what we did right and wrong and how we will improve next time. I feel too many entrepreneurs are afraid to discuss their failures, locking up important lessons. I hope you find some of this useful.

1. Find quick money first. We were fortunate to know several top investors but we spun our wheels pitching too early and trying to optimize terms. Many entrepreneurs seek A-list investors first; quick （but not dumb） money is more valuable. There are only about 30 high-profile investors in the Valley, they all know each other, and they generally have enough deal flow to wait until risk is minimized. Money is more valuable than advice or connections since there are easier sources for the latter.

Next time, we’ll focus on strengthening our network of investors who are comfortable at the earliest stage and invest quickly, even if they don’t have a high profile （as long as there aren’t red flags）. More than three meetings is too long and indicates your network isn’t broad enough or your pitch is poor.

Lesser-known investors also often have more time to give you. David Shen, previously unknown to us, initiated multiple deals and a site-wide design evaluation for us; it took one meeting for David to commit. You want to find 10 David Shens. Once you have traction, the Reid Hoffmans and Ron Conways will find you anyway.

2. Content businesses suck （or: do it for love and expect to lose money）. Producing quality content every day is a herculean task, especially live. The idea of creating both the content and technology for PlayCafe seemed achievable, but TV networks focus on distribution and studios on production for good reason: both are hard. Dev and I knew we were production novices but we thought live-filming a pretty girl delivering trivia with one camera guy was simple enough. We were wrong; the business was beyond our pay grade.

Watch American Idol, the country’s most popular show, and you’ll see how often they screw up despite massive resources: sound and video fail, hosts and contestants stammer, camera angles are wrong, stretches get boring, and it happens despite a reality format that is simpler than live sports or news. They also don’t have to deal with DOS attacks, server downtime, scalability, or customer support like we did.

I would advise any entrepreneur or investor considering content to think twice, as Howard Lindzon from Wallstrip warned us. Content is an order of magnitude harder than technology with an order less upside; no YouTube producer will earn within a hundredth of $1.65 billion. This will only become more true as DVRs and media-sharing reduce revenues and pay-for-performance ads eliminate inefficient ad spend, of which there is a lot. The main and perhaps only reason to do content should be the love of creating it.

3. Know when to value speed vs. stability. Another reason PlayCafe’s complexity hurt us is that developing good content and technology simultaneously required too much time. We tried to make each deep and stable — important, we thought, given our live nature — but we were too slow to iterate in a novelty- and entertainment-based business.

A metaphor I like is that a chess novice can defeat a master if moving twice each round. This generally increases bugs and offends perfectionists, but I agree with Reid Hoffman that if you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.

An exception is when your product is mission-critical for users. An eBay outage is a catastrophe while a Twitter one is a joke. eBay iterates slowly partly because 1.3 million businesses depend on it. It has to get it right.

4. Set a dollar value on your time. I agree with Paul Graham that good entrepreneurs are relentlessly resourceful, but I have a bad habit of bargain-hunting for sport. I spent three hours negotiating our wireless bill down $100, which was a poor use of time given our funding. The mantra to pinch pennies ignores the value of time.

Time is arguably more valuable than money because you can’t raise more time. Dev suggested pricing our hours. You can divide your available work hours by salary, remaining funding, or total company costs. Ours was around $50/hour. If I was going to spend 5 hours negotiating, I’d have to save at least $250. This value should increase as you gain funding and traction. For anything greater than $500 at any stage, I’d still strive for NPR: Never Pay Retail.

5. Marketing requires constant expertise. The main failure of PlayCafe was marketing. Dev and I came from PayPal, a strongly viral product at a company almost hostile to marketing. Our efforts in SEO, SEM, virality, platforms, PR, and partnerships weren’t terrible, but drawing users to a live event requires constant, skillful work.

Like creating content, I no longer think marketing is something smart novices can figure out part-time. As the web gets super-saturated, marketing is the difference-maker, and it’s too deep a skill to leave to amateurs.

An exception is inherently viral ideas, especially one-to-many virality, where normal use of your product reaches new users, not “word-of-mouth” viral that requires users to advocate you. With inherent virality, a barely adequate product might suffice, though even then marketing should accelerate growth. Next time we’ll raise enough to hire a marketing expert early.

6. Control and calculate your user acquisition costs. We initially conceived of marketing as a wildly creative exercise: filming viral videos, launching clever campaigns, pitching media players. That’s partly true, but the best marketing is controlled and calculated. If you know exactly how much it costs to acquire a user and you control the entire process, you then know how much capital and revenue you need, reducing your marketing plan from fuzzy guesswork to a clean formula.

Until you find a marketing expert, a place to start is the AdWords keyword tool, which shows you how many people Google for certain words, and the Traffic Estimator, which shows the rough cost of buying keyword ads on Google.com. Yahoo has similar tools. The ideal terms have a decent number of monthly searches （10,000+）, low number of competing advertisers （3 or less）, and strong relevance to your site.

For example, “game TV shows” has 12,100 monthly searches with 7 currently competing ads, while “2008 game show” has 14,800 monthly searches with only 1 ad. The relevance of these searchers is roughly the same so the latter is a better chance to acquire users cheaply. Your first users are the most expensive and can cost $10-20/user, but the cost should decline as your brand and word-of-mouth grows. The promised land is when you convert and monetize well enough to literally buy users.

Other tactics to control and calculate include A/B testing, tracking sign-up and purchase conversion, and creating landing pages to drive SEO and track different campaigns; look at the bottom of Mint.com for a good example. For fuzzier marketing tactics like blogs and press, knowing the time you spend on each, the value of your time, and your break-even acquisition cost will help you calculate efforts that aren’t cost-effective. A data-driven culture is a well-oiled machine.

I would also avoid money pits like PR firms, CPM ads, billboards, and TV/radio spots. We wasted $5,000 on a promoter who produced almost no buzz then said it takes a few $5,000 sprees to see results. Unless you control and calculate, these methods are mainly for marketers bad at math.

7. Form partner relationships early, even if informal. Two downsides of partnerships are that they’re slow and you lack control, but they do have advantages beyond driving users and revenues. Partners can make connections, teach you the market, flag potential competitors, and become potential acquirers. Believing we had little leverage, we de-prioritized several partners who later said they might have bought us if we had built a stronger relationship and proven our value.

We learned that you can build informal relationships with little time. Meeting decision-makers early, keeping them in the loop, and being genuinely helpful builds familiarity and goodwill, which reaps some of the above benefits without the pain of hashing out a deal. It takes foresight and maintenance, but dating before getting married also makes it more likely the partnership will be healthy.

8. Plan costs conservatively and err on the side of raising too much. While I’m doubtful more funding would have made the difference in our case, it would have let us try more tactics. We did a detailed financial plan, but I underestimated costs to fully expand. Next time we’ll better know real costs and likely bite the dilution bullet to raise a bit more than needed. This also prevents spending a lot of time raising extra rounds.

Glenn Kelman from Redfin has some nice common costs. To refine, ask a successful entrepreneur for a previous financial plan to vet yours. I disagree with folks who think financial plans are a waste. They are indeed wrong the moment you start, but they help you estimate headcount, fundraising, break-even, and whether your business model is insane.

9. The key to negotiating is having options. The single most useful piece of advice I got was from Bill Trenchard, founder of LiveOps: “Always have options.”

Almost everything you do as a founder/CEO involves negotiation: closing investors, hiring employees, signing partners, paying vendors, even advocating features internally. The best way to persuade your counter-parties is signaling — implicitly or explicitly — that you have viable options （also called BATNAs）. Just two can be enough. Being at the mercy of a lone option is a recipe for getting screwed.

The more humans are involved, the more negotiable the system. If you hear a human say “that’s our policy” without much reason, bells should go off that you have room to negotiate if you reach the right decision-maker. Be nice, ask to speak with a manager, and politely signal that your endurance will outpace their patience. Higher-ups know the value of time and make exceptions accordingly. Sales managers are especially persuadable because they’re social and work on commission.

That so much of a founder’s job involves negotiation also means work can get adversarial and lonely. It really helps to have a group of friends you don’t have to haggle with.

10. Knowing isn’t enough. Most frustrating is that Dev and I knew much of the above going in. We’ve been doing this for 10 years each across three startups （though this is our first significant one at the helm）. I could have sent this to myself two years ago and probably would have thought what many of you are thinking: this is nothing new.

What’s new for me is painfully experiencing the gap between knowing and doing. Advice is thrown liberally around the Valley, but like a surgeon who has studied but never practiced, I think it takes a lot of hands-on experience to learn intricacies and exceptions. I think advisers should more often say, “You probably won’t get what I’m saying until you screw it up.” Expertise takes time, and pithiness comes with a cost.

Plenty of useful advice conflicts for this reason: Know Your Customer vs. Build For Yourself, Don’t Raise Too Much vs. Don’t Raise Too Little. The better answer to these questions is It Depends. Advice isn’t like code that’s easily executed, but like map coordinates that require skill and context. My hope is that our experience brings us （and you） a little closer to that.

Mark Goldenson lives in Palo Alto, Calif. He is launching an innovative web venture in health care.

（原文链接：10 lessons from a failed startup）