Executive Producer Cass Phillipps took a moment to chat with speaker Ethan Bloch on what he felt one of the mistakes Flowtown made in it’s early development.  Ethan will be joining us on October 24th to discuss the importance (or lack of) for Business Plans now adays, and the common mistakes founders make with them.

CASS: What was the biggest mistake you made in the early development of Flowtown?

ETHAN: In Flowtown’s early days we were as a service company. We thought this would help us understand the problems small businesses were having when it came to online marketing. 
We wound up building a product we used ourselves to help us service our clients, it was a simple landing page tool. 
Then when we shut down the service part of our business and went full product we realized none of our clients knew how to use it themselves. We had built a tool for agencies (effectively what we were) to service businesses, not for small businesses to service themselves.
We thought we were practicing customer development and we sort of were, but with the a massive misunderstanding of our end user.
CASS: How did you recover from it?
 ETHAN: We wound up scrapping the entire product. You can read more about that here:http://www.flowtown.com/blog/why-we-scrapped-3-5-months-of-development
CASS: What advice would you have for early-stage founders to avoid this in their own companies?
 ETHAN: Get product in the hands of end users as early as possible. We waited 3 months with that first product. When I could have had high fidelity mocks in front of potential customers that first week.