I knew it would take drastic action.  Nearly two decades of attempts had fallen flat.  It was the 21st century, and my mom was still not on the internet.

I first got online in 1994.  Seventeen years later, my mom still had a paralyzing fear of even turning a computer on, let alone surfing the web.

More time went by with no progress.  Excuses begat more excuses.  I needed something so compelling that she would have no choice but to capitulate.

Finally, I hit on a solution: I would play to the fears of a parent being disconnected from a child’s life.  It was the spring of 2011, and I was about to leave Minnesota on a 6-month trip to every state and province.  I told my mom that I would not tell her anything about the trip on the phone. She would need to read about it on my blog.

It’s possible that she thought I was bluffing (I wasn’t), but regardless, she quickly got on board with the idea of acquiring internet access.

My sister gave her an older laptop, I did the initial system setup, and my mom subscribed to Clear.  In no time at all, she was leaving mom-esque comments on my trip blog.

Success!

(This is the third in a three-part series. It was originally going to be named “Startups are not simple, part 3 of 3″. You may want to start at the beginning)

Blurity, my startup‘s main product, is dead.  It will go offline when the server it’s on gets pulled in early October.  Poor Blurity. I had such grand visions at the start.

The demise was a long time in coming.  The viability of the product (or lack thereof) had been apparent since the spring of 2011, but it took a summer of denial to reach this conclusion.  I kept telling myself that “if only the product were better, it would take off.”  In other words, I lied to myself.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the product, Blurity removed the blur from blurry photos. The user would upload a blurry photo to the web site, Blurity would process it, and it would return the sharp photo to the user.  If the user liked the results, a small fee would remove a watermark from the image.

So what went wrong?  Let’s look at the three main problems.

#1 Poor match between market needs and product capabilities

Over the course of a year and a half, I built three totally separate blur removal engines.  While the first version was worse than useless (and super slow), the third version was pretty good at removing motion blur.  If only the market cared about motion blur.

Over that period of time, I talked with friends and strangers, professional and amateur photographers alike, about the idea of blur removal.  The frustrating consensus was that the blur removal was a neat trick, but it wasn’t something that they would use.  Most said that they either didn’t have problems with motion blur or that they captured enough frames to mitigate the risk of having some be motion blurred.

I also did some limited Adwords advertising, which drove a few thousand people to the site.  About 45% of people who arrived at the site from the ads gave Blurity a try: they uploaded a photo and kicked off the deblurring.  (I was surprised by the high visit-to-trial conversion rate.) More importantly, that gave me a great sample of what users considered to be blurry photos.

Unfortunately, my idea of a blurred photo did not correspond well to the users’ ideas of blurred photos.  Here’s a breakdown of the user-submitted photos by the most significant fault in each image:

• 40% Focus blur
• 30% Trying to enlarge a small image
• 10% Motion blur
• 10% Horribly over-/under-exposed
• 10% Other (including pixelation of faces, JPEG compression artifacts, and large sharp well-exposed images)

Since Blurity worked best on motion blur, that left a lot of disappointed users.  Some people made purchases, but often times those “successful” results were no better than the user might have gotten from “unsharp mask” in Photoshop.

# 2 Unsustainable cost structure

The funnel looked like this:

• 45% of visitors to the site tried uploading a photo
• 2% of visitors who uploaded a photo made a purchase
• 5% of visitors who made a purchase asked for a refund

You might be thinking, “Those numbers aren’t really that bad.  A 0.9% conversion from visit to purchase is decent.”  True, but with a purchase price per image of $1.99, which became $1.8405 after payment fees, I wasn’t exactly rolling in cash.  I wasn’t even covering the hosting fees, let alone any advertising costs.

I could have made it if I had traffic, but I didn’t have traffic.  I needed thousands of visitors every month, ideally tens of thousands, but I had only hundreds. Blurity was not getting traction.

#3 I lost interest

As the months wore on, I began to get discouraged.  Then I ran low on money and turned to consulting to earn more.

I’m tempted to blame my loss of interest on the distraction of a full-time consulting gig, but that isn’t true.  I managed to put together a total redesign of the site and build an entirely new deblurring engine during the evenings and weekends in late 2010 and early 2011.  What’s more, after my consulting gig ended but before my road trip to every state and every province began, I had all the time in the world — but I felt almost no motivation to work on Blurity.

No, I simply lost interest.  I no longer believed that Blurity would change the world, and I no longer saw a way that Blurity would lead to financial independence.

As I mentioned earlier, I was battling a bit of denial, too.  I didn’t want to admit to failure.

But you know what?  I feel fine.  I learned a lot about image processing, multithreaded programming, Ruby, and Rails along the way.  I came to understand that the rules about product-market fit do apply to me.  I met many other interesting entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists.

I took a shot, I missed, and life will go on.

So what comes next?

Put simply, I’m not sure what will come next.  I learned a lot about image processing while building Blurity, so with the coming rise of computational photography, including lightfield cameras, I might make another play in that area.  Or I might punt and go back to doing consulting.  We’ll see.

The important thing is that I will no longer be weighed down by the sinking ship that was Blurity.

Over the past couple of years, I have become increasingly aware of a curious phenomenon: when I sleep on my back, I tend to have more vivid dreams than when I sleep on my side or chest.  I don’t mean vivid as in “nightmare” — it’s been a long time since I’ve had a nightmare — I just mean that they seem more colorful, have better plots, have better sound, and generally are more intense.

Ordinarily, I find my sides and my chest to be more comfortable than my back for sleeping, but every once in a while some good back sleep fits the bill.  Sometimes I’ll drift off to sleep while on my back.  Other times I’ll go to sleep not on my back but wake up mid-dream and find myself on my back.

There are a variety of potential issues with my observed back-sleep–vivid-dreams correlation:

1. There could be a strong reporting bias — if I sleep on my back and don’t have  a vivid dream, the event passes unnoticed.
2. The occurrence of vivid dreams on the back could be no higher than in any other position, but they might seem more notable because I tend not to sleep on my back.
3. Dreams are highly personal experiences, so external observation and objective measurement are impossible.
4. Correlation is not causation — perhaps having vivid dreams causes me to sleep on my back, not the other way around.
5. The back dreams might not actually be any more vivid than dreams in other positions, as quantifying dream vividness is fraught with challenges.
6. There might be something about sleeping on my back that simply makes me more likely to remember my dreams.

The final item in the list could be crucial: what if something about me sleeping on my back simply makes me more likely to remember a dream?  That implies that something is causing me to wake up during the dream.  As it turns out, I am aware of just such a thing: snoring.

I snore.  I’ve never heard myself snore, but I know from the accounts of others (and midnight jabs in the side) that I snore.  (If I snore like my grandpa snored, then — well, I apologize.  I hope it isn’t that bad.)  Anyway, I’ve noticed that I’m more likely to snore when I sleep on my back.  Assuming that I really am having more vivid dreams while sleeping on my back, perhaps they are related to my snoring.

Maybe the snoring noise is seeding the dreams with information on which to operate. Perhaps my snoring is waking me up, causing me to remember the dreams.  Perhaps my snoring wakes other people up, which causes them to jab me and wake me up, which would also lead me to remember the dreams.  Or maybe something about the snoring is affecting oxygen levels in my brain and thus its behavior.

I post this not because I have answers but because I have questions.  A search of the literature produced no promising leads, so the next step is to find out: am I alone?  Have others experienced predictable dreaming changes based on their bodies’ positions during sleep?

As a reminder, all updates related to my road trip to every US state and Canadian province will be exclusively on stoppingineverystate.com.  I have syndicated several posts from there to here, but I will not be doing so from now on.  Just trying to reduce clutter.

Hope to see you over there!

Update December 20, 2012: The trip was completed successfully! Now resuming regular blog service…

A while back, there was a paper by Ericsson et al. that claimed that about 10 years of focused practice and experience were necessary to become an expert in something.  Gladwell converted that figure to 10,000 hours, and some guy is trying out the theory investing that much time in learning golf.  (Should be interesting to see if he gets more than fodder for a book out of the experience.)  I’ve been thinking about how much time I’ve put into my own pursuits, and the numbers turned out to be surprisingly small.

Take hockey goaltending.  I started playing goalie when I was 22 after graduating from Rose.  I started from zero experience.  I knew how to skate (though not well), and I had played some inline hockey, but I had never played organized ice hockey, and I certainly had never played goalie.  That was seven years ago.  I played for three seasons in Minnesota, didn’t play much for the two seasons I was in California, played off-and-on the first year I was back in Minnesota, and played a lot this past season.

I tallied up the various organized games, pick-up games, practices, coaching sessions, and so on, and I figured out that I have spent just 295 hours playing goalie.  In my entire life.

That doesn’t seem like much.  Consider that two months of full-time work at your office job will bring you to about 300 hours: would you consider yourself an expert in your profession after just two months?  Or, looking at it a bit differently, what level of expertise does a summer intern have several weeks before the completion of his internship?

One might reasonably ask if that time, on rink or in office, was spent in an active, conscious attempt to improve.  When I was an intern, I wasn’t even sure what I should be improving let alone actually improving it.  With goaltending, I’ve been taking lessons over the past year, and I think that the deliberate practice and professional feedback has significantly improved my game.  Unfortunately, that dedicated practice time has amounted to only a small fraction of my already limited experience on the ice.

Another example is backpacking.  I think of myself as a capable backpacker.  I’m comfortable in the woods, and I’ve spent lots of nights on solo trips in the wilderness.  But am I an expert?

The numbers would suggest not. I’ve been doing regular backpacking trips only since 2007 (plus one trip to Philmont as a Scout in 1998).  Excluding day-hiking, I figure I’ve covered about 280 miles while backpacking, over about 25 nights.  Of those, about half were solo adventures, the most hazardous being my off-trail Badlands loop.

So, about a month, give or take, and well under 1000 miles.  I feel more qualified than the numbers show, but I don’t think I’m anywhere near mastery.  Maybe my confidence is due to the fact that I’m prepared when I go out; the 10 essentials have a permanent home in my pack.  Perhaps it’s the amount of reading I’ve done on the subject, which has precipitated a significant evolution in my backpacking technique over the brief period I’ve been active.  Still, an expert I am not.

Fortunately, I don’t rely on hockey or backpacking for my livelihood.  My efforts to improve, particularly with hockey, are motivated simply by my desire to enjoy the activities more.

The thousands of hours spent studying, playing with, and working on computer technology, particularly software, are what have made me, if not a world-renowned expert, at least somebody competent in the field.