Sharkius: Lessons from the fall of an $80k/Month Startup

If you have to gain some experience, you don’t necessarily have to watch or learn from your own failure. Picking some lessons from the experience of others is less hurtful and painful. This interview I read on Failory about the failure of Sharkius, a startup that was making $80k per year in its early days will certainly impart some sense to almost every startup founder. Let’s begin with a little info about the man behind the startup. David Kramaley was the founder and let’s introduce him.

He is a serial techpreneur whose interests span a wide range of tech products. He founded Sharkius in 2007 while he was just 20 years old. Due to some external and internal circumstances, the startup packed up and went from making about $80k per month in revenue to becoming non-existent. This was due to some critical marketing and management mistakes. David has learned his lessons and his current project Chessable is billed to help people learn chess in the most simple ways.

2007 was a great year for developers on Facebook. It was in this year that 20-year-old David Kramaley founded his startup and he was one of that early bird that caught the fattest of worms. Facebook offered enough traffic and the revenue was skyrocketing. Rather than look into other means of marketing, the team invested all of its time and resources into building and developing compelling games with the intention that this was all that was needed for success.

While the company enjoyed enough traffic from Facebook, changes in the social media platform saw the traffic reduced to the barest minimum. This is, of course, expcted to impact revenue and profit generation.This lack of a marketing plan coupled with the effect of bad human management and resources management led to the avoidable death and failure of the promising startup in its early days. Sharkius grew at a fast pace and nosedived also at a fast pace.

So, what happens when you fall, you simply rise up again. David Kramaley is unbothered and has now gone pat that failure. He is currently working on Chessable. Chessable is an ed-tech startup with a focus on making the learning of chess easy for people of all race and categories.

David admits his mistake and has learned from it. You do not have to repeat those mistakes again in your businesses. He emphasizes the importance of co-founder and mentors for accountability in a startup. He advised founders to be receptive and have an open mind for learning. Of the books he recommends for people, The Lean Startup, Founders at Work, and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) are the most important. Having others walk through a path is the best way to learn from experience. You don’t necessarily have to make same mistakes. You can learn from the failures of Sharkius and improve on the good it seems to have.