Previous articles have talked about a start-up which has worked and one that failed. Today I'm looking at one that was working but unfortunately went for the money at just the wrong time when the Internet bubble burst.

One of the most satisfying things in any company is taking a new idea and building that from scratch. This is something that was possible when I joined up with a guy who had been involved in running his own recruitment agency for a few years and was then purchased. The idea he had was to create a new online service for IT recruitment using the internet but allowing clients and candidates to communicate more directly, thus cutting out the middle man agencies. These systems are pretty common today but back in 1999 there was virtually nothing else around.

At the start there was the founder and myself putting the requirements and architecture together and I also started to build up a small team of developers to get the work underway. We kept the system simple and easy to use, which was very important for our user base, and introduced a rules engine which would allow better filtering of candidates.

The system was developed and went live inside seven months. It started to gain traction and several companies came onboard and were using the system to find suitable candidates. It was great seeing the system working and even better having people pay to use the system.

From this we were able to gain a lot of feedback from users at the early stages and feed this back into the development of the product very quickly. We listened to our users, not just the fee paying ones but also the candidates who had free access to the system.

We made a lot of progress but at the same time we were going up against some of the big boys in the recruitment industry, most notably Jobserve, who saw this model as a threat to their systems. They made attempt to shut things down and it was a distraction. Funny that today they have a similar system for candidates and companies!

Unfortunately as the owner started on the next funding round to take the company to the next level it was at the time the Internet bubble was bursting. Which in turn meant that all the investors were rapidly closing their doors to virtually every idea out there. It meant that while we had a revenue, albeit quite small, with no additional investment we were not able to continue the product. Once this became known in the industry the product was quickly snapped up by one of the larger recruitment agencies. They then took parts of the system and integrated it into their own solution.

Was the company a success? I'd say yes and no. We created a product which started to gain some traction and was working for those that used it and other companies were interested in the solution. The architecture that I implemented was a simple Microsoft solution which meant we had something that was extensible moving forwards. The initial investor got back his money but as for a mega success no it wasn't, the wrong time.

So what did I learn from the experience?
- Listen to your users and act of that feedback
- KIS - Keep It Simple, this is something I have continually used throughout my career and seems obvious, but techies love to complicate things.
- Be careful when taking on your competitors who have deeper pockets, instead focus on what will win users
- Don't get hung up on technology, it is the product solution that people are buying into, how it is implemented is not important to them as long as it works
- Review your marketing spend very carefully don't get carried away on things that will not work.

It was a shame we were not able to get the investment at the right time and got wrapped up in the bubble, but that's life.