Trust, but verify

I made an amateur mistake. I joined a project that was doomed from the start. My partner was the slick guy from college. You know the type; the salesman who could sell ice to Eskimos and make it look good. He told me that he had clients on board, and the idea needed a little tweaking, but was mostly ready. I trusted him, and started working on a prototype. After two weeks, I still hadn’t gotten a term sheet from him, and despite displaying progress with development, he was reluctant to share which clients were already lined up. This was the first red flag, and I while I should have paid attention to it, I’m honestly glad I didn’t.

After several months of active development, I decided that I was fed up with working nights on this project, and left my day job. It was a stupid decision, fueled by my hopes of greater income, independence, and “we’re almost there” from my partner. Once I started working on the project fulltime, I paid more attention to the business side, and pressured him into revealing one of our clients. They were huge, and really interested. It reassured me that he knew what he was doing and we were set for profitability within a month or two of launch.

As time progressed, we brought on another developer, a design person, and several sales people, all working for equity. I was upfront with my developer, and told him exactly how much equity he was getting. I left the rest of the team management to my partner. He kept telling me that the product was coming along nicely, but it just wasn’t enough to show to clients yet. He would regale me with stories of sales trips, and how frequent they were.

Eventually, though, I was anxious to show the product to clients and get feedback. He pushed back and outright refused. We got in a shouting match, and I finally got out of him that he would be willing to show it to clients if I implemented one minor feature we had scheduled for months after then. I built it in 24 hours, and gave him a copy the next evening. He said he’d go on a sales trip the next night.

A week later, he told the entire team that we were making great progress, and we all agreed to launch on New Years. With a target date in mind, we set out on a frantic pace to develop everything, and polish all the rough edges. I was so busy with the development, I didn’t even notice that we weren’t getting emails about sales, or new clients. Or anything, in fact. He was silent except during meetings, or if pressured to produce a comment.

A week before New Years, I was doing my last walkthrough of the product. The UI was beautiful, having been polished against the advice of no less than 30 friends and family. Some of their comments were positive, but some were scathing criticism. We dealt with all the comments, and our product was a much better one for it. The database for our product was almost nonexistent, though. I called him up almost every night for a week before it became obvious that he hadn’t prepared a client list. When we pressed him, he kept coming back to that one big client. That was when it clicked.

I had never verified any of his claims. I never called a client myself. I never talked with them directly. All I had to go on was him calling up a number in his phone and a friend of his answering. I didn’t even know if he represented the client. When we started digging further, we discovered that he hadn’t done any of the sales trips (Google Analytics is a great thing, especially in development projects), or at least had never opened the product outside of a team meeting.

He denied everything, of course. He said he had opened it, and that GA must be wrong. That the database was ready, and he just needed to go over it one last time before sharing it with the rest of the team.

When we tried to salvage the venture, he refused to back down or leave, and once I did the market survey myself, I realized that it wasn’t profitable at all. I shared this with the rest of the team and we left as friends.

To be honest, I’m not sorry that I ignored the red flags. I learned from the experience. I took a product from the roughest design all the way to being a polished application. Even though we never launched, and I get questions from friends and family about what happened, I just say “It’s dead. The reasons don’t matter”. Because they don’t; what matters is that I grew.

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