Why being a Wiki-site was the wrong approach

SideReel CEO and founder Roman Arzhintar's failures and lessons on being scrappy

One of the best jobs I have is to interview great entrepreneurs to find out what went wrong during their early years. Failure, after all, is a right of passage for entrepreneurs. As Google's Eric Schmidt said during a conference recently, "We celebrate our failures." Schmidt was referring to the closure of Wave.

In this interview with Roman Arzhintar, the CEO and founder of SideReel talks about some of the assumptions he and his team made in their early days. And, how they proved wrong. Without recognizing those mistakes and pivoting, SideReel might not have been in the position to be acquired by Rovi. That deal was made publie last week. 

"We were infatuated with the concept of Wikipedia," Roman recalled. The lesson: It's really hard to get people to contribute to your site at length. The result: SideReel had to hire people to add information.

This may not be a surprise to anyone today. Most Wiki-like sites do count on hordes of hired hands to add information to make it look like the world is contributing, but in actuality it's just a small percent. While SideReel still allows people to contribute content, it's a nice-to-have feature for its users. 

Additionally, SideReel had also banked on older movies to become more readily available online on an ad-supported basis. While this has happened with TV shows, movies are not going online as quickly as they had hoped.

Finally, Roman talks about his lessons on being scrappy. SideReel raised $1.5 million in funding since 2007. Today, they're profitable with 15 full-time staffers working at competitive rates, said Roman. The site has half-a-million TV episodes and just passed 1 million unique visitors per day. How did the site manage to do so well on so little, I asked?

"Not raising too much money does give you a certain discipline," said Roman. "It helped us focus on getting what we need to get done." SideReel didn't have the luxury to hire people, he said. I'd add, they also didn't have the opportunity to spend foolishly.

As for his advice to entrepreneurs, Roman would say that if he could do it all again, he would narrow down the "value proposition to its absolute core component" and release quickly. "We were afraid to kill functionality."

To this end, if you released the absolute component, also known as a minimum viable product, and test the adoption, you'll know easily enough to keep it or kill it.

(There's a lot happening in this space. Just last week, SideReel was acquired by Rovi, and Clicker was bought by CBS Interactive. Read: The battle of the remote.)