Why Dart-Frog Failed, What to Do Differently

This isn’t the easiest thing to write, but I know it will help someone else who has had a failed venture or is about to face one; also, writing things out helps me reflect. So, the virtual tour service that I started in 2018, Dart-Frog 3D, is no longer active. While it was not my first failed venture, it was the one that taught me the most and gave me a glimpse of what I am capable of. For this post, I’m going to gloss over the 2-3 year period, what went wrong, what has to be done differently on my next go-around, and what the next step is going to be.

For some context, my past business attempts have been a social media marketing agency (Trinikit, 2017), a fitness blog I started with my friends that was geared towards beginners that would create content and generate revenue through affiliate supplement sales (Startlifting.us, 2018), then started Dart-Frog 3D in 2018. I don’t remember doing Start Lifting and Dart-Frog at the same time, but that’s what the GoDaddy domain receipts say.

Here’s a short timeline of what happened in Dart-Frog 3D:

2018: $0 Revenue

• Doing a lot of free work, going door to door to businesses asking if I can take 360 photos
• Still doing free work, completed my first full Google Street View tour for the gym I was a member of
• In the fall, began as a remote marketing intern for GeoCV (3D scanning tech)
• Chose gyms as my niche, spent a lot of December going door to door to gyms in Kenton and Findlay trying to get appointments

2019: $800 Revenue

• April: The Big Break - First paid Google Street View Job with a car dealership
• Still doing some free projects
• Summer: Josh joined a partner, we split the cost of a 3D scanner from GeoCV and started selling
• First paid 3D virtual tour for a car dealership
• Foundation for a huge deal happened here that led to a large chunk of revenue the following year

2020: >$19,000 Revenue in Q1+Q2, losses in Q3+Q4

• Doing large volume projects
• Getting traction
• Balancing the business and my job caused a minor rift with my boss
• This was where my problems caught up with me – Bad habits, mental health

2021: Dead

• Our 3D solution GeoCV was officially offline
• All momentum was lost
• Josh and I decided to move on to something else.

I was going to write a short version, but I’m just going to include all the details. If you want to read them, great. If not, the main message is what to do differently, so no big deal.

2018

This year involved a lot of free work with a cheap 360 camera just to get the status of Google Trusted Photographer. This gave me the exclusive ability to make fully connected 360 virtual tours directly on a Google Street View listing. I was just going door to door to businesses asking if I could take some 360 pictures and post to their Listing. The only place that ever had a problem with it was the McDonald’s in Kenton. From there, I did my first full virtual tour of the old location of the Fitness Elite gym in Upper Sandusky. It was still free work, but I knew I needed to have at least one full-on virtual tour in my portfolio if I was going to try to sell this to anyone.

With that job done, I spent most of December started going door to door to gyms in Kenton and Findlay trying to get meetings. Looking back that was probably technically illegal but oh well. Having to memorize a pitch and possible responses was the biggest thing I learned here. I also learned how prevent mess-ups in a pitch when there were distractions. For example, when I was pitching Iron Fit Gym in Kenton, there was one of my favorite Five Finger Death Punch songs playing over the speakers and I got distracted by it and messed up a little bit. So, when I got home, I practiced pitching with my favorite songs and really distracting songs so loud that I couldn’t hear myself and it helped a ton.

Other than rejections and facing the “I’ll think about it,” I met a gym owner who knew exactly what I did, wanted what I had, but was moving gym locations soon so it didn’t make sense to get a virtual tour for the place. I gave him my card and moved on (This interaction came in handy in 2020 in my first competitive bid).

2019

Later in April 2019, I got my first big break and paid job for a car dealership that found me on the Google Trusted pro registry. They called me, I came in and gave an estimate, did the tour, and collected my first check. I now had indisputable evidence that I could make money and it was a great confidence booster.

After that, I had more free projects that I was putting out into the world and also using my 360 camera to do before & after photos for the house painting company I worked for. At this point, Dart-Frog 3D was starting to get a little attention and I put more time towards it doing cold calls, cold emails, the standard stuff. None of it was really good material, but you have to start somewhere. 

In the beginning of summer, my friend that I had known since junior high, Josh, had been keeping an eye on what I was doing and he saw the value in it. He pretty much just brought up one day that he was interested in getting involved with and investing in the company. At the time, I was still a one-man band and didn’t have enough things to outsource at the time, so I initially said something like, “There’s not a ton of stuff to do at the moment, but whenever I do, I’ll let you know.” I didn’t even know if this company was going to work so I didn’t want to take his money and just lose it. But I believe it was the day after that conversation, I was told that I would be able to buy a 3D scanner from GeoCV; but I didn’t have all the money to get the scanner myself. So, I went back to Josh and said, “Hey if you want to go in with me on the scanner we can do a 51/49 split,” and we got to work.  

Josh’s job was mainly organization, taxes, numbers, finances, etc. because that was his specialty. As we got more work, we both had equal skills on the scanner and scanner interface. I focused more on the sales, marketing, and the post-processing of the virtual tours.

At the beginning of this 2019 summer, I had my first successful sales process. I landed a car dealership with a cold call that got me an in-person appointment and then I closed on the deal after the meet-up and quote for the job. This was our first 3D project, so we finally got to test it out in a real-world scenario. It was way more frustrating than I thought it would be because its hard to scan spaces when you have people walking through your pictures.

So now, I knew that I could sell, and I was one step closer to finding a sales style that worked and that I was comfortable with performing. For the rest of that summer, I used the 3D scanner to do some cool before and after models for the painting company I was working for. It wasn’t a really busy year, but it was a year where I had a moment of extreme doubt and almost dropped everything while also experiencing a moment of extreme confidence all within 2 days of each other.

This brings us to 2019 Fall. Even though we had gotten some 3D jobs and I was still out there selling, we weren’t really getting anywhere. After taking some marketing classes, I realized one of the reasons why I was having such a difficult time: the majority of my research was based on internet research and educated guesses. I had a good idea of the pain points of the business owners that I was targeting, but I hadn’t actually done any primary research in my area. So, taking what I learned from a consumer behavior class I took at BGSU (Shoutout Dr. Titus), I made a bunch of interview questions that would get me the answers I needed. I even met with Dr. Titus, and he helped me rework some questions that would get me the information I wanted.

With this, I had an outline that I could adjust to interview any potential customer segment. I decided that we should turn our focus to real estate customers, so I got interviews with two property managers and a real estate agent. For the real estate agents, I just called up the Danberry office here in Bowling Green and set up an interview with one of the realtors. This was where the moment of extreme doubt came in.

After asking my questions and showing what the 3D virtual tour product did, I don’t remember the exact words, but the main idea of the opinion that was given was, “Realtors around here just won’t use this. It’s cool but I can’t see how investing in this for a property is worth it.” I can’t say whether it was because I explained it poorly or they were just set in their ways, but I remember going home after this and I just got really emotional. It killed me, this tool was literally made for real estate and it seemed like it just wasn’t going to do well in my market. I can’t believe I almost thought about quitting at that point. Needless to say, I’m a lot better with rejection and stuff like that does not phase me anymore. The next day, I got the other end of the spectrum.

After that meeting with the realtor, I had a meeting with a property manager. I got a lot of really good information about their buying process, how they make decisions, where their attention is, etc. But once I showed them the product, they were instantly hooked. I gave them some material so they could explain it to their clients and sell them on it, and it was successful. So, after that I was ridiculously excited for what was coming. Just like I learned to handle bad news without getting too low, I learned how to handle good news without getting too high. After going home from the interview, we did a lot of work for that account in 2020.

At the end of the year in the winter, I saw that the gym owner that I talked to in 2018 had almost finished building their new location, so I reached back out. Turns out he had lost my business card in the move, so he was really glad I contacted him. He was looking around for different providers and another Google Street View photographer had reached out with a bid; long story short, the photographer’s bid was lower than mine, but I proved that I was going to deliver a lot more than him, so we won that job.

2020

Q1 and Q2 of 2020 were the best performing periods for Dart-Frog 3D from a revenue perspective and just how things worked out, but it also happened to be the year where all of the personal problems I had put off dealing with came back up. Something great that happened was that I cold called a bigger property manager in Columbus in early 2020, I met with the marketing director and everything but they decided not to go for it and would contact me if they changed their mind. The virtual tour was a “nice to have,” but they just weren’t going through with it right now. The pandemic was in the news, but nothing crazy had happened yet. Then, when universities sent people home and Ohio started putting out mandates, it was obvious that this was here to stay. So, I got an e-mail back from that marketing director saying they changed their mind; I had a great laugh with Josh because the virtual tour was all-of-a-sudden no longer a “nice to have,” it was a necessity. This ended up being one of our largest accounts, and it was a lot of fun and frustration to deal with. I was still in school at this time, but with everything being forced online, it was perfect for me.

At this point in the spring and summer, Josh and I were doing steady work every week between the two large accounts and cash flow was great. I was getting stuff done on time and balancing the business with my day job of the house painting company I had worked for seasonally since 2015. However, because I had to take calls or respond to emails promptly in the middle of the work day, it started to cause a rift between my boss and I. I had to see where this road would take me, so we had a conversation: I pretty much had to pick a street and he understood because he would do the same thing if he had to choose between a job and his painting business.

He actually had a similar scenario when he was farming with his uncle and painting at the same time, so he had the same conversation and chose the riskier bet. 2020 was the first summer I hadn’t painted since 2015, and it felt so weird and was a little scary leaving the safety of my weekly paycheck for the summer, but I knew I had to see this through.

For a while, I was doing pretty well. Still doing jobs, sending e-mails, cold calling, but I made a big mistake. I didn’t have any real systems to follow or benchmarks to make sure that I was on track to produce the results we needed to keep growing. I’m really good at just doing things and getting things started. And that skill is extremely important if you’re starting a business or anything at all; but it will only get you so far. Being a dog chasing cars got us to a good spot, but it’s not sustainable. Having systems with repeatable processes in place is the only way to scale success.

A couple things happened over the summer. Because I was just kind of drifting around just doing random things for the business all week, I felt lost. One day I would be writing scripts, one day I’d be writing marketing material and never finish it, things like that. Even when I spent an entire day making a schedule that would get things done every week, I just couldn’t stick to it. Also, I had to find a sublease to live in for the summer and I lived with an ex-girlfriend because the house happened to have an opening and I figured it was easier to just go there instead of trying to find people to live with in a Facebook group; needless to say, issues occurred and part of my brain was taken up dealing with that or worrying about things that would happen. I was also constantly working or trying to get back on track after being distracted from working. Because of this, I didn’t see a lot of people that summer.

So, I also learned the toll that isolation and loneliness takes on someone. Other than most of my friends being away, I wouldn’t go out of my way to hang out with my friends or family because “I had so much work to do,” but even when I avoided being social, I still sometimes didn’t get things done. Contrary to what I though, constantly working didn’t lead to better work or more productivity, it only led me to feeling burnt out. Basically, I lost all of my structure that I had in my life like getting up for my job every morning at 6:00 but wasn’t prepared for it. Everything I did on a daily basis was completely up to me, but I failed to plan what that looked like to avoid drifting around. Combining this with other issues that that been following me around for years that I had not resolved, there were a lot of days that summer where I wouldn’t even get out of bed. I was still doing virtual tour shoots when needed, but I would pretty much just shoot, come home, edit the tour, send it to the customer, and get back into bed. Sometimes I would drink, watch movies, or sometimes I’d burn the rest of the day playing Xbox (I became God-like on the Friday the 13th game).

It was a pretty interesting cycle to be in: I didn’t have the energy to do what I needed to do, so I escaped with distractions; then I felt bad the entire time doing those distractions because I knew what I should be doing, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to do it.

Gyms were also closed during most of this, which is something I do almost daily, so I didn’t even have that; I ran sometimes and did pushups, but those exercises didn’t have the same effect on me as weight training; I just don’t enjoy them as much.

As you can guess, this pretty much destroyed any momentum we had and it was completely my fault. We still serviced existing customers, but we weren’t doing a lot of new business. Then, about two weeks before classes started again, I had paid the last rent on my sublease and I had paid the rent for August in the new apartment, but after that I was going to be pretty tight on money because Josh and I didn’t take a lot of distributions from the business. It’s important to keep in mind that my parents would help me out if I needed it, but that is something that I have never liked doing even while in high school. So if there were problems like that, they’d be the last to know. Realizing the situation I was going to be in, I was looking for a job; but anything in Bowling Green like fast food mathematically would not work for my expenses, I had already worked at Wendy’s earlier that year and $10 an hour doesn’t go too far. So I looked around for door to door sales jobs because those seemed the most lucrative and even if it didn’t work out, doing door to door was something that would help me out professionally.

I was invited to interview for a door to door sales job in Toledo selling for a Gas and Electric supplier. The job was commission-only and we worked from 9:00am-7:30pm when you consider  time in the office and time in the field. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but the commissions and bonuses were insane. I did this job from the end of August to about November and between the hours, school, and someone I was seeing at the time, I left very little time for Dart-Frog 3D. I got so deep in the sales job (MLM structure), that I remember texting Josh, “I think if I can do this, build a team, and open an office this can be a whole new stream for us.” Thankfully, I didn’t drop school or the business to pursue that. I met a lot of great people and learned a lot, but I knew it just wasn’t my path. My realization of what was happening to Dart-Frog 3D came before I quit that job in November.

I realized that we had enough cash to last 4 months. I think we had one job in Q3 and then no new work in Q4. My grades were also tanking due to all the time I was spending elsewhere, so I left the job. But by that time, both Josh and I decided that we weren’t going to be running this business after we graduated that following Spring. We both had wanted to get involved with something that involved a clothing brand or something more consumer centric, so we started brainstorming what that would look like next year. We had pretty much mentally checked out of 3D virtual tour service mode at that point, our goal was just to tie up loose ends.

Coincidentally around this time, Josh and I found out the final fate of our 3D solution, GeoCV. We had known that there was a patent infringement lawsuit going between them and Matterport (a competitor), but we were still able to process tours. In my opinion, the GeoCV product was better, and you could do more with it, so I wasn’t going to use Matterport unless I really had to or unless requested. But then, we got the news that the GeoCV servers would be shut down in a couple of months at the end of March 2021. We could still shoot tours before then, but our time was limited. We saw this as our cue to exit. There are other tour solutions out there to use, but by that time I had just lost my fire for running a virtual tour business. I didn’t love it anymore.

I just uploaded the virtual tours to our own servers, so our customers didn’t lose them and that’s pretty much the end of it. We’re still able to coordinate virtual tour projects for our existing customers that still need more, but it’s really just a matter of outsourcing and it’s not the main part of the business anymore.

So what’s next? I’m getting back to what I like to do, fitness and entertaining people. Josh and I are now running an Instagram page called Monday Iron; it’s just a meme page at this point, I do memes and video edits and so far it’s a lot of fun. Right now we’re building an audience and launching a shop when I know I can put out content consistently. (At the time of this article’s first draft, Monday Iron was a couple weeks old. We’re currently at 1,300 followers, I;ve met some amazing people that became a part of our community, and we’re launching the Shopify store this month. We even got a collab with a Japanese Muscle Girl Bar. It’s as dope as it sounds.)

So what went wrong with Dart-Frog 3D, and what has to be done differently?

What went wrong with Dart-Frog 3D:

1.      I let personal problems get in the way of my end of the business.

2.      I did not create an environment that allowed for delegation of tasks. Even if the systems were there, I still felt I had to do them myself.

3.      We did a great job of delaying gratification by not paying out too many distributions, but we let the money sit instead of rolling the money into assets that grew the business. I let over $4,000 disappear into our regular expenses.

4.      We didn’t track shit. We sometimes checked Google analytics to see who was viewing the site, but we did nothing with the data to make decisions, set goals, or make sure we were on the right track.

5.      We did not keep in contact enough or create solid relationships with our customers. It can be hard in B2B because you and your customers are all busy people, but we should have made it a point to stay on their radar at times other than when they needed us to shoot for them.

6.      I didn’t take scheduled time off. It just led to drifting and shittier work being spread out over longer periods of time.

7.      I did not schedule time for my friend and family. It just kind of happened when it happened, and this was terrible for my mental health.

What to do differently:

1.      If personal problems arise: Get help, get over it, get back to it.

a. See your therapist, talk to a friend, and stop thinking you can / have to handle it on your own.

2.      Be ready to delegate as soon as you have the process down.

a. Identify a process, create a system with clear standards and objectives, test & tweak the system, hand it off to someone you can hire or contract (Students, freelancers, etc.).

3.      We will continue to delay gratification by reinvesting most profits, but we will not let money just sit there. Every dollar has to have a job.

a. We need a map with large milestones and small details of how the business will advance and where dollars will go. We had the broad path mapped out, but got lost in the middle.

4.      Identify Key Performance Indicators to quantify performance and make decisions based on that data. Intuition goes a long way, but data will make you unstoppable.

5.      Communicate regularly with your business partner, our vendors, and our contractors. Stay on the radar of your people other when there’s a transaction.

6.      Set clear times and objectives for what you need to get done in a given period. Other than making it clear that you’re making progress, it will prevent you from drifting around from half-done task to half-done task.

7.      Set aside time that’s only for friends and family. Aside from maybe a work emergency, keeping those relationships with the people you care about is going to keep you from going insane.

That's all, on to the next one.