How To Build A Startup By Trying To Kill It

In 2011, Peter Reinhardt and his co-founder Ian Storm dropped out of school to join Y-Combinator with their idea for a classroom lecture tool. They built the product, raised a little funding from YC Demo Day, and deployed the tool in Universities in Boston. In Peter’s words, “it was a total disaster”.

In short, they built a product that nobody wanted or needed. This, according to many sophisticated data sources along with common sense knowledge, is the number one reason why most startups fail- and theirs did.

The co-founders had to come up with a new idea, quickly and Ian had the idea to build a business around the open-source javascript library they had built for personal use (which essentially took data from their website and sent it to various analytics platforms like Google Analytics and others).

Peter was not convinced. He didn’t see how an open-source library of roughly 100 lines of code could be a business. He explains, on an episode of the 20 Minute VC, how he recognized they only had about 6 months of runway left and couldn’t afford to waste time on this “little idea”. Then, he tried to kill it.

He asked himself a crucial and brilliant question:

“how do I kill this as fast as possible?”