My Second Venture: C!ub App

After 21 months of hard work during the pandemic, I’m happy to announce that — my first startup C!ub officially failed…

Below is our story.

As a freshman, I had a hard time finding interesting clubs to join on campus:
1. I looked up club information on the school’s website, but more than half of the club information listed there was outdated.
2. I went to the school’s club fair, but it was way too crowded and loud for me to engage in any conversations there. And many students missed attending it because some of them were having classes with their classmates.

In spring 2020, I talked to over 100 students on campus and discovered that all of them had faced the same problem. Despite the COVID-19 outbreak that made me return from the U.S. to Shanghai, China, I was very excited about identifying this real problem. The pandemic made it even more urgent to have a digitalized, up-to-date club engagement platform.

So the following summer, I had the idea of creating an app that directly connects students with on-campus clubs to solve this particular problem. I had my best friends from home (Christopher Shih, Kelvin Mo) and college (Jan-Michael Marshall) join me on this venture. For the next year, our team continued recruiting more talented college students (friends of friends). Alongside the outsourcing team, we built two MVPs together as our members were conducting user interviews with school officials/club leaders/regular students, updating UIUX designs, creating marketing posts, and implementing some specific features. Every Saturday, 15 of us would join each other on Zoom meetings from 5 different time zones and update our progress to the team.

Our second MVP was able to attract more than 300 students and a dozen clubs in the first few months. But 3 months later, our DAU dropped to 0. We wondered why. So we kept on interviewing club leaders and members. What we found out was that
- the idea of club participation itself is not that urgent for people… or in other words, the problem is not painful enough for people
- people tend to give less shit about clubs as they move toward graduation & after they received job offers

The main lesson that I learned from this experience is that you should try to solve a problem that
- is more URGENT and
- happens more FREQUENTLY.

Shout out to Jason Kuperberg from OthersideAI for the great advice: Startups should be building and testing their prototypes in the quickest and cheapest possible way to validate or change their hypotheses (utilizing no-code platforms) at the early stage.

It was a huge honor to work with our amazing team members: Anushka Tandon, Olivia Wu, Jonathan Shih, Rich Chuang, Kin Hang Kong, Anita Huang, Fan-Chi Wu, Elaine Su, Bryce Yao, Courtney Qi, Jialin Z., and Yifei Yang.

After today's 78th weekly meeting, we as a team decided to move on and we are excited to apply what we’ve learned so far to our next adventurous journey. Stay tuned for the new product!