Why we decided to relaunch our startup (…just in time)
By: James Baird
Tags: Lessons Learned, Business, Startup

My co-founder Benjamin and I started Threeple because of two core beliefs.

Firstly, we believe that a trusted recommendation is the gold standard for connecting people to the things they want. Whether it is a candidate for a job, new headphones, a restaurant, hotels, recipes or Netflix shows; a trusted recommendation wins every single day of the week.

Secondly, we believe that no one has come close to creating an online system of trust that accurately reflects the complex and nuanced nature of trusted relationships as they exist in the real world.

We want to change that.

Our vision has always been for Threeple to be a place where people go to get trusted recommendations for anything at all.

This includes trusted recommendations about people’s strengths, skills and personal qualities. This was the reason we built Threeple as it exists today.

By answering the question “who trusts who for what?” Threeple captures trusted insights about people and their strengths.

Threeple as you know it today

Incidentally this use case is also why we called it Threeple: there are always three people (three-ple) in a trusted recommendation (i.e. person 1 recommends person 2 to person 3).

Now or never

The people insights Threeple captures through peer feedback can be used to support HR, performance management and recruitment. And while this is a niche use case compared to our bigger vision, we knew from past experience that we could sell this data to businesses.

By focussing on this niche our aim was to generate revenue, become sustainable and have the optionality and resources to then build to our north star vision down the track. Sounds good right?

The upshot is that the deeper into building the peer feedback loop we got, the further away from our vision we moved.

I’m sure we are not the first founders to decide to build to a niche use case with the aim of getting to the bigger vision later, only to discover the many layers of complexity within that niche.

My experience building software is that these layers of complexity tend to reveal themselves over time, and so it is with peer feedback that we have slowly come to the realisation that building a successful product for this market is probably going to be a good decade of focussed effort.

With limited time and money left we found ourselves at a “now or never” juncture. We needed to make a call and to make it fast.

Option 1: We spend the next decade building an HR platform that at its core answers the question “who recommends who for what skills and qualities?”

Option 2: We spend the next decade building a social platform that at its core answers the question “who can recommend me…[insert anything at all that I want]?”

We chose option 2, deciding to pursue our north star vision of redefining how trusted relationships are created online.

While we still firmly believe in the value of a peer recommendation as the ultimate source of truth about a person and their strengths, it’s something that we’ll need to revisit another day.

Ultimately it is flawed to think (as I did) that you can build one thing, make some money, and then get back to building the thing you actually want to exist in a year or so…it’s just not going to happen.

Another way to put it is that we’ve been leading with our heads and now we’re leading with our hearts. In hindsight it seems so frustratingly obvious, but nothing beats learning through experience.

A quick thank you

Now I don’t want to over inflate the impact of this decision on the world, especially the world as we know it in 2020.

However, in our Threeple world it is a big decision and that is in no small part because of the 400+ people that jumped in and became our early users.

We are deeply grateful to you all for taking the time out of your busy days to explore and use what we’ve started at Threeple.

What next

The last few months have been a hard won reminder about the importance of sticking to your vision.

Building software is hard and doing anything well is going to take many years. You should spend those years building what you’re passionate about.

So that’s what we’re doing. We know what we want to exist in the world and we’re now, finally, building it.

Everyday we are collecting new trusted insights from the people around us on any number of different topics. But there is no way for us to bring these insights together into a single place that we can access when needed. Instead, recommendations get lost in chats, threads, emails and the blur of old conversations. Then when the need arises we ask people again, take a chance or fall back to google search, social posting and product reviews from people we don’t know, let alone trust.

To complicate things, trust itself is highly subjective and contextual. That is to say for example, you might trust one friend’s opinion when it comes to the best city bars; but because they are single and don’t have kids, you do not value their opinion nearly as much when it comes to recommending a family friendly restaurant.

The problem with traditional social networks is that their notion of a “friend”, “connection” or “follower” is one dimensional, and they fail to capture the highly subjective, contextual and nuanced nature of trust.

Threeple is different. It’s a new type of social network for sharing recommendations with friends, family, colleagues and connections.

Most importantly, it’s built on trust the way it exists in the real world.

The next phase of Threeple

If you’re like me and find yourself regularly asking questions that start with “I wonder what a good…” or “I wonder who knows someone that could…” or “I wonder where would be a good place to go for…” then register your email with threeple.com and we’ll let you know when the new Threeple app is live.

We’d love to have you on board 😊.