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The trench coat — This British design of heavy weather coat became popular during and after the Great War. It replaced a lot of bulkier, less efficient coats and is still fashionable a century later.The Wrist watch — This was invented during the Great War by the French to replace traditional pocket watches that had to be fumbled with to get the time. Nowadays, we are determining how to create a personal computing device that is as easy to access as a wristwatch instead of distracting you while driving, as a pocket watch or phone will do.The American “field jacket” — Designed in 1941, this jacket outfitted the new American army that was to fight World War II. It was developed by an American general to be comfortable and useful working in the open, standing, sitting, or lying prone. Fashion designers thought it looked too disheveled and relaxed. However, it became the template for men’s light outerwear around the world after the war and even most heavier coats in our era share design elements with it.The Jeep — This was the first four-wheel drive utility vehicle to achieve large scale production and worldwide distribution. Some six hundred thousand were produced during World War II and millions of soldiers and civilians from a dozen nations learned to drive them. They became a symbol of the American military effort during the war and were driven on six continents during the war and long after. All other four-wheel drive utility vehicles created since the 1940s were intended to gain a share of the niche market created by the original Jeep. In the 21st Century, Land Rover and Toyota are the world leaders in this field, but the Jeep brand is still in the market.The Red Cross — In 1859, John Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman, was so appalled at the conditions he discovered at the Battle of Solerfino, part of the Italian Wars of Reunification, that he worked to create an non-governmental organization to provide care for those afflicted by war and to set international standards for medical treatment of wounded soldiers. The organization he founded, the International Committee of the Red Cross, eventually became ubiquitous in peace time crises all over the world, wherever national disasters, man-made disasters, and political disruption generated mass human suffering.The Red Cross operated in parallel with the efforts of governments and local private charities and proved so successful that it eventually began serving as a neutral “go-between” in conflicts and crises, communicating and mediating among factions and people. Dozens of other “NGOs” operate in our modern century, patterned after the Red Cross. They serve to aid the needed and act moral and cultural restraints on governments.Trucks and Roads — These are not considered a modern invention, but good ones definitely are. Quite often, even during World War I in Europe, the only hard-surfaced roads on a given battlefield were Roman roads some eighteen hundred years old.The western allies in the Great War were the first armies to use trucks in large numbers to support and move troops. Most of the world still relied on railroads and canal and river barges for bulk transport and wagons and carts for moving goods through rural areas, with horses, asses, oxen, goats, and people pulling them. Large parts of the world still relied on animals and people as draft animals. Interest in improving rural road networks and using cars and trucks grew during the 20s and 30s, with the United States, with its vast spaces and vast resources, taking the lead in creating modern production techniques for vehicles and civil engineering for roads.In the late 1930s, the British and American armies committed themselves to fully motorizing their ground forces, utilizing horses and pack trains only for remote and rugged terrain. Some of this “motorization” involved moving troops around, but it was far more important in upgrading logistics and supply. Both governments purchased large numbers of light and heavy trucks and also heavy tractors and similar vehicles for moving tanks, artillery, and construction and bridging equipment.The British had an excellent industrial infrastructure for vehicle production by 1940, but the loss of virtually all their heavy equipment in the Dunkirk Evacuation left them strapped. Fortunately, the Roosevelt administration used Dunkirk as political leverage to push massive rearmament bills through the American congress. While Roosevelt ran his political campaign for 1940 on a defense platform, British military purchasing teams were quietly and urgently working with their counterparts in the American military to get factories built and contracts laid for the production of hundreds of thousands of trucks and other vehicles. When the Lend Lease act passed in March of 1941, the floodgates of American wealth opened up for the American military, the British military, and eventually the military forces of the Soviet Union, France, Australia, India, China, and a dozen other combatants.American factories turned out over eight hundred thousand 2 1/2 ton trucks during the war, along with a million 1 ton and 1/2 ton trucks and related vehicles. British and Commonwealth contributed hundreds of thousands of vehicles of their own design.Just as importantly, having your military dependent on trucks requires you to build roads and bridges and logistical networks to support them. American and Commonwealth engineers swarmed across the inhabited territory of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific, turning tracks and jungle into hard-surfaced and gravel roads, while building docks and warehouses and workshops to support their fleets of trucks. After the war, while redundant warships were scraped and hundreds of aircraft were dropped into the ocean, used trucks remained in use from Africa to Siberia. The poorer regions of the world became as dependent on imported oil as the developed world. Food and hard goods moved from place to place by ship and truck. Mechanical skills spread through rural populations and every nation became part of world trade in fuel and vehicles.Airliners and Air Travel — A handbook for a game based on H. P. Lovecraft’s stories noted that the 1920s and 1930s were an interesting era because there were cultures interacting around the world that included Stone Age, pre-industrial, sailing ships, horse-drawn farm equipment, diesel-powered ships and vehicles, and propeller-driven, jet-driven, and rocket-propelled flying machines.While rocket propulsion began in the 1920s and took man to the moon only forty years later, flight and air technology from World War II that revolutionized all of society was based on four key inventions that matured during the war.All-metal enclosed air frames - Dwight Eisenhower named the DC-3, known to the military as the C-47 Skytrain or Dakota or “Gooney Bird,” one of the five most important weapons of World War II. Before the DC-3 came into service in 1935, cross-country air travel had to be done in daylight, flights could be made only in good weather, and travel had to be in hops of no more then a few hundred miles. Very little cargo could be moved by air, as most aircraft lacked the capacity to move anything in bulk. Further, large aircraft of the time were not physically strong. Even the best of them left passengers constantly aware of how fragile flying was. The C-47 reversed all of that. It could carry two dozen passengers or three tons of cargo. Accidents and breakdowns were rare enough that you could schedule a wing of these transports to supply an island outpost or isolated infantry division for weeks or months. The structural elements of the DC-3 are still part of modern aircraft design and hundreds of DC-3s are still in commercial use in the 21st Century.Pressurized aircraft cabins — The B-29 Superfortess was the only large aircraft of World War II to have completely sealed and pressurized internal spaces in the fuselage. While this was a direct development of the all-metal skinned concept the DC-3 helped pioneer, the engineering of the B-29 took four years to work out. It allowed the aircraft to operate at altitudes of thirty-thousand feet and higher with passengers on board not specially equipped and trained for the freezing temperatures and low air pressures at those altitudes. After World War II, the age of modern airline travel could begin, as the pressurized cabin meant long-distance flights at 30,000 to 40,000 feet were now possible for mundane passengers. Transcontinental and trans-oceanic flight became a reality for the entire developed world.Jet Engines — While the famous Me-262 was the best known jet of World War II and the only one to see substantial combat, British and American designers were working on their own designs. Within five years of the end of the war, jet fighter aircraft replaced propeller planes in major air forces. Jet engine bombers came along at the same time. Most importantly, jet engine airliners first appeared in 1952. From the first, these aircraft could manage speeds in excess of 400 mph and lacked the intense vibration of propeller driven aircraft. This made single day trans-oceanic travel possible and something any adult or child could handle without stress or exhaustion. These aircraft captured the international travel market from ocean liners and made air travel a shared experience for people in every developed economy.Radar -- First developed as a secret military weapon by the British and Germans, among others, in the 1930s, radar became ubiquitous among modern military forces during the war. After, it made day to day air travel possible for civilian cargo and passenger traffic without making every flight subject to the whim of local weather conditions. Dependable scheduled flights became possible and air travelers were no longer fearful of every passing cloud or rainshower putting their lives in danger. With radar, it became possible for air travel to be nearly as safe and dependable as rail travel, which, by the 1960s, led air to replace rail as the first choice of middle and upper class travelers around the world.

We recently shut down Treehouse Logic and I thought I’d share some insight on where we went wrong. Treehouse was a visual configurator platform company that helped retailers and brands quickly build product customization experiences on their ecommerce sites. We originally set out to be "the SurveyMonkey of configurators."First I will mention the irony that in most ways we accomplished exactly what we set out to do. In 2009 we sat down with Timbuk2 and learned about the weaknesses of first-generation Flash configurators. Our theory was that the SMB brands of the world were ready to include configurators in their marketing strategy, but at lower prices. We identified the main problems that retailers had with legacy configurators. They were· Performance (Flash can be slow. Server-based configurators require browser refresh)· Cost – custom code· Not editable· Not mobile friendly· Not social friendly, ie not sharable· Not guided – no rules (Most customers abandon configurators because they get creatively frustrated)· Time to market – take 9 months to ship· Difficult to integrate with ecommerce systemsHere's how we solved those problems· Performance (Client-based configurator, Javascript)· Cost – a fraction the cost of custom coding our boutique agencies.· Editable - Our clients could edit their configurator daily.· Mobile friendly - HTML, not Flash· Social friendly - every configuration is defined by the URL parameters· Guided - a rules engine for compatibility and constraints. Customer proof.· Time to market – In some cases 3 weeks to ship· Integration - easily done by passing URL parameters. No need for APIs.These legacy problems lead to really low sales conversion rates for custom-coded configurators. The data showed that we had accomplished what we set out to do: Some of our Treehouse Logic clients saw up to 6% conversion rates - as good or better than Amazon! Sadly, solving those customer pain points didn't lead to a sustainable, scalable business as I’ll explain below.Business modelMost of our potential clients wanted a self-service dashboard, like Wordpress for blogging or Surveymonkey for surveys. They were running a Shopify or Magento shop (or BigCommerce or 3Dcart) and wanted to handle almost everything themselves. They expect a configurator plug-in to be free or $200 and they expect it to let them easily build and brand any kind of configurator. They didn’t want expensive agency services. Rather, they wanted a self-serve platform like WordPress.Everyone expects free or cheap plug-ins on top of a framework, but we had accidentally built a services company that delivered configurators based on our internal customization platform. We couldn't find a way to standardize customization so that a template or self-service CMS with limited options made sense for a broad enough audience. The configurator landscape is too diverse and fragmented, unlike the survey market (SurveyMonkey) or the blog market (Wordpress). We chose flexibility and feature-rich over constrained and marketing-friendly. One reason flexibility seemed like a good choice in the beginning was that above all, brands are concerned with the integrity of their brand. They won't accept a templatized solution for something so strategic to their brand identify.A good analogy is that we built extremely flexible kitchens that can be assembled very quickly for any type of restaurant. But clients also need chefs, waiters, restaurant managers, dishwashers and someone to buy their groceries. Clients just want a finished restaurant and they rarely have all the skills to put it all together. But of course a restaurant-in-box model won’t work for most restaurants either, because each restaurant has their own kitchen experience in mind.ChannelRelated, we wanted to hitch our horse to an ecommerce platform like Magento or BigCommerce. Since we didn’t have a full agency team or sales force, finding the right channel was important. Ecommerce platforms are still very fragmented. There are 200 shopping cart solutions out there and many shops still develop their own from scratch.We really thought partnering with the right Magneto dev shop was the right model for us. We just couldn't make the economics work. Those dev shops don't want to pay for a platform and split the client budget. In the end they'd rather 'fake it' by stitching together a hand-coded configurator and make more money on services. Our platform only made sense to agencies if its cheap and saves them time / money.We wanted to stay small and partner with vendors but the value chain was too complex and we didn't have any desire to build ourselves up as a full-service agency since we are product developers at heart, not creatives services guys.Customer acquisitionWe crushed the free SEO piece (our blog was our secret sauce, in terms of marketing). We literally got 1 lead per day, even after we shut down. Inbound marketing is great for start-ups with no budget. It’s the opposite of the enterprise sales model where you have high paid, dedicated sales people pursuing big companies. But, the quality of leads was really bad. We get the mom-and-pop shops that see what NIKE did with design-a-shoe (for $1M) and want to imitate it for $200. “My wife and I want to sell custom jewelry online…”If we are going to serve small businesses, we need a way to let these SMBs on-board quickly with minimal interaction. Many of these leads were a good fit but we still struggled to ship the configurator quickly. More on that later.Related, we confused interest with traction. We got a lot of attention from industry thought leaders and customers, but interest is not the same as traction. I heard “you are exactly what I’m looking for!” almost daily which was encouraging, but often didn’t lead to money in the bank in the short-term. Traction is when you are successfully converting interest to revenue, and learning how to scale your business (ie reduce costs and increase revenue)Big companies are a pain alsoWe had a few big name retailers lined up, at least initiatlly. But that doesn't mean that they had high budget or prioritized the configurator. It usually means long sales cycle and lots of red tape which we couldn’t afford to deal with. They will bleed you dry. It’s tempting to think that all we need is a few big clients with big budgets and we will be well paid and not have to deal with a high volume of difficult small clients, but it’s a myth. The best model is to on-board a high volume of clients with as little manual interaction as possible. More on that later.Build vs. BuyMany potential customers are convinced that their technology is their key strategic asset, so they build everything from scratch. Even small fashion startups with 3 people think of their technology as their primary asset. Any company that is serious about customization wants to own the experience and technology. They think technology is their IP. Our pitch was that it’s better to let a technology company handle the technology. They are in the fashion business, not the technology business.We had tons of potential clients who said "I wish I had met you 1 year ago!" Most clients who are dealing with rubbish code end up deciding to keep babysitting it rather than ripping and replacing it. Some of these clients even got funded with a rubbish configurator! The reason is that the configurator turns out to be mostly conceptual, ie “look, customers can design it themselves!” rather than actually being the backbone of the business.PricingSomeone in India can always do it for $5000First-gen configurators like Nike ID and Timbuk2 used to cost $500K to build, with Treehouse Logic platform it can be done for $40-50K. That's all-in, including design, CSS, images, and ecommerce integration. We couldn't land deals at $50K so we reduced our price to $5K plus $200/mo hosting / support fees. Most customers see the monthly hosting payment as an invisible tax that they want to avoid, even if we position it as "licensing and support." Our system was a hosted SaaS solution (likeCRM and Cloud Computing To Grow Your Business - Salesforce.com) but clients still think of it as a website that can be delivered for a one-time fee.Our main pitch was that using a platform is smarter than custom coding. Custom coding is a pain in the ass and prone to complication. Still, many clients will outsource to India because of the low sticker price and learn the hard way. Most clients still choose cheap over good.Most configurators are shipped and left alone in the corner of a website, ironically. It’s always a heart-breaker for the client when they realize how hard it is to add products or edit product data in their configurator, but they never realize that until it’s too late. Or they just don’t intend to edit it. Or they never spend any money promoting it and it goes unused and is left to die.Mission critical appsAlthough everyone and their brother wants a design-your-own section of their ecommerce website, it's rarely strategic compared to other hot ecommerce trends like social commerce (Pinterest / Instagram) or the fundamentals of ecommerce 1.0 (price, convenience, selection), or being on Fab.com | daily design for everyone, or having a flash sales deal, or good email marketing, or having a great Facebook engagement strategy. Often, configurators are just 'tick boxes' that set their brand apart from Amazon, give customers something to engage with, but they are not optimized for sales, nor they aren't fundamental to the definition of the brand.Consider ecommerce for a moment. Usually there are two ways to find products on an Amazon-like catalog site: Search and browse. Customization adds a third way to find and buy a product. Pretty soon you start asking yourself why there are so many ways to buy the product, shouldn't there be just one simple, guided, branded way to discover, research, select, and checkout (ie shop?)I’ve always argued that configurators are really engagement tools, so they will evolve into social commerce tools where shareability and aspirational shopping are the main ingredients. Ford is a great example, their mustang configurator is a Facebook app that means to power a contest. It’s not meant to generate sales. Burberry said the exact same thing about their custom trench coat tool. It's just a way to let you experience Burberry.Originally, configurators were sales tool for complex B2B products (like tractors and firetrucks), but enterprise configuration is a dying industry, and there are dozens of old fashioned enterprise companies from the 90s that do ugly drop-down window “sales quote tools.”No competitorsIt’s probably a bad sign when you don’t have any direct competitors. ;) Our main competitors were· Custom coded configurators.· Digital agencies· Sales quote configurator softwareI wouldn’t consider Adobe Scene7 a competitor since they mostly focus on image creation. Their system was never intended for ecommerce.BrandingOne reason generizing the configurator is problematic is that each brand wants a branded experience. The customization experience IS the brand. The branding of the customizer is just as important as the functionality or its contents. This is also why marketplaces like Zazzle, CafePress, and eBay struggle; they want brands to come to their domain, whereas on on-site, branded configurator is what most brands really want. Going off-domain makes sense for selling pre-defined products like books or DVD players.Should we focus on the configurator engine or offer full-service?We don't do windowsProbably the biggest reason we failed was “the project management nightmare.” Even if a client verbally confirms they want to work with us, we need to scope the entire project to make sure there are no custom features (there is always at least one feature we need to add to our platform for them), then we need to help them figure out-their images-their CSS-their ecommerce solution…all of which we don’t handle ourselves because we are agnostic about it. You can imagine how this pitch goes over: “Yes, we’re ready to start, just get your thousands of images up on FTP and put the links in the XML, hire a CSS specialist, and an ecommerce developer and we’re ready do go!”The reality is that the client expects full service and doesn't have a low level dev / creative team to complement our “unskinned configurator.” It's very confusing to them when we recommend 2-3 other vendors and form a virtual agency. And the cost creeps up.And not to point the finger but most of the time when we did bring in outside vendors they dropped the ball because the project wasn’t dead simple. I don’t think we ever used the same CSS, design, ecommerce, or image creation vendor twice because they all suck.Configurators are too complex to standardizeEach configurator is different and configurators can be very complex. We had an internal joke: “baby cribs are rocket science" because we had a client that sells baby cribs and they were really complex.Keep in mind that I'm not talking about technically complex. I'm talking about lots of data and moving parts complex. We rarely hit any technical speed bumps. Our technology was amazing, but its a good lesson to learn: technology doesn't necessarily solve the right problem for the customer.We were unable to platformize the configurator space, meaning we were unable to build one standard configurator that applies to many clients. This is mostly because each project is different. We built in an amazing amount of flexibility, but there is not "just upload" your content and you're all ready to go" model.Also I would mention that some of our client projects were not finished after as long as TWO YEARS. It’s not that the project was complex or that we were the bottleneck, it’s that we were expecting something from the client like images or a review on their end or for them to have someone CSS style it. Often the project was out of our control after we did the heavy-lifting, and clients just left it hanging. It's so frustrating to not control the button that pushes the build live.Market fitMany potential customers wanted personalization, not customization. As many as 50% of our leads are inquiries for personalization, ie text overlay or image upload, which we don’t do. This is the online design tools vs. product configuration issue. Our platform was a rules engine at its core.We really build a platform for “configurator engineers,” which was another fatal flaw. One of our founders was a configurator support engineer at a large IT company and we mistakenly thought if we served his need we would serve the market’s need. What we should have done is served the self-service small business, similar to the Magento do-it-yourself model. Every time I brought this up we were reminded how complex configurators are and how we weren’t close to have a real self-serve platform.We spent so much time building a platform that we were convinced we could charge clients “for access to our platform.” The reality is that they don’t think of it as a platform, they think of it as a website. The platform is just a means to an end.The wrong problemWe mistakenly thought the primary problem to solve was guidance. Having a design-it-any-way configurator gives the user too much choice and leads to frustration, so we thought having rules would solve that problem. It turns out rules can be too constraining. Most clients just want a color picker configurator with no filters or rules.Guidance is still very much strategically important in the shopping market and it has manifested itself most recently in ecommerce models as curation. See Fab.com | daily design for everyone as an example of “hand-picked by design experts.” Keep in mind that customers want great products, not necessarily custom products. And convenience. Customizing a complex product (like a dress shirt) is a lot of work. Never make your customers do hard work.The key important lesson in the product customization market is that consumers THINK they want customization but they quickly get frustrated and seek out expert recommendations instead of actually building from scratch. We learned this in our first meeting with Timbuk2. Most customers flock to the configurator, get excited about the power of the Internet, then abandon the design process and buy a standard product that was designed by an expert. Your expertise is more valuable than anything. It's your story, it's your brand.Now this doesn't mean that customization isn't adding value to the brand experience. It is. I still believe that customization will part of EVERY shopping flow, but it won't be build-it-from-scratch customization, it will be light modifications right before check out. Empower the user but make the overall experience simple and fun.A few non-issues that advisors thought would be criticalIntegrationI should mention that the most challenging technical with configurators in the 90s was system integration. The main headache was the manufacturing process, ie how to get the ordering system to talk to the backend ERP system. We never had any issue with integration. It was a non-issue for us. As long as the ecommerce system could receive an order via HTTP from an external source we could integrate. The configurator talks to the ecommerce system which talks to the ERP system. I rarely saw any issue with this unless clients were using something bloated and archaic like NetSuite.Enterprise gradeMany clients were concerned that we weren’t “enterprise grade” but I’ve really found that whole discussion to be a misconception. Our system was hosted in the Google App Engine so we are just as enterprise-grade as Google or Amazon. In the end we passed any Enterprise grade questions with flying colors.Related, many clients would see how javascript based configurator and assume it was not enterprise grade or secure because it’s not server-based. In reality all client data is obfuscated and secure. Sometimes the visualization and impressive design gave engineers the impression that the tool was not enterprise software. Not sure why.Sales nightmaresI’ll add a few horror stories that we experienced on the sales sideLong sales cycleSometimes we had to do TWENTY mockup versions before we could get a contract signed. We had to define the entire project before either side could commit to it. Clients are obsessed with the user experience, which makes sense, and nailing the configurator flow is top priority.ExclusivityOne client loved everything we offered and was ready to sign but wanted exclusivity for his industry in a regional area. In the end we just couldn’t accept those terms since we were a platform that depends on enabling any viable client. Startups can’t afford exclusivity.Downtime insuranceOne client wanted us to sign terms that said that if the configurator went down we would pay them the equivalent of lost sales for the time the configurator was down. Again, not a good fit for a startup.Beta customersWe gave away our services for free to several early beta customers. Some of them never shipped because they couldn’t put together all the missing pieces like images and CSS styling.Bottom lineStartups fail when they are not solving a market problem. We were not solving a large enough problem that we could universally serve with a scalable solution. We had great technology, great data on shopping behavior, great reputation as a though leader, great expertise, great advisors, etc, but what we didn’t have was technology or business model that solved a pain point in a scalable way.