🐤 This app was shut down because it was doing too well

Hey Founders,

Welcome to The Runway Ventures, a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into startup mistakes and lessons learned to help you become a better founder.

Let’s get to it! 🚀

☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Flappy Bird

🚀 The Rise of Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird was created by Dong Nguyen in May 2013, a Vietnamese indie game developer. It was an arcade-style game in which app users could control a pixelated bird called “Faby”.

🐤 The objective of the game was simple. Users got to prevent Faby from hitting pipes by controlling its elevation. If you hit a pipe, you died and game over. On the other hand, the more pipes you passed through, the more points you’d get.

Back then, Angry Birds (another famous mobile app) was already launched in 2009. But Nguyen felt the game was too complicated. So he created Flappy Bird to make it easy for users to play anytime and anywhere. The game was designed to be simple yet challenging.

Within 2-3 days, Nguyen built Flappy Bird and launched it in the iOS App Store in May 2013. However, the app went silent for the next few months. It’s only after the famous YouTuber (Pewdiepie) reviewed the game on his YouTube channel, that it began to take off as everyone was talking about the game on social media and wanting to beat their high scores.

🔥 By the end of January 2014, Flappy Bird became the most downloaded iOS app. Nguyen also released the app in Android version on 30th January 2014. Within a few weeks, the app went viral. Flappy Bird became an overnight success that had 90 million downloads in its lifetime with a very strong fan base.

Because of the huge user base, Nguyen made $50,000 a day from its in-app advertisements.

📉 The Fall of Flappy Bird

Surprisingly, Nguyen announced on Twitter on 9th February 2014 that he would be taking down Flappy Bird permanently from all app stores — just 9 days after launching the Android version.

Based on his interview with Forbes, Nguyen shared his reasons for taking down Flappy Bird:

In short, Nguyen felt guilty because Flappy Bird was so addictive to users that some people just kept playing the game for long hours, bringing more harm than good to their lives.

📸 Beyond that, Nguyen also faced a lot of pressure from local and international media outlets and paparazzi. Even worse, he received a lot of online harassment and backlash from parents for creating a new addiction for their children.

All these took a toll on Nguyen’s mental health and he took refuge in his parents’ house.

After Flappy Bird was taken down, Nguyen launched another game (Flappy Bird Family) In August 2014 that was designed to be less addictive. He has since built and released many gaming apps with his software development company (DotGears) based in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Despite Flappy Bird being taken down, it leaves a mark in the history of mobile gaming for many more years to come.

Want to learn more about Flappy Bird’s downfall?

• Why was Flappy Bird taken down?

• Inside the Brief Life and Untimely Death of Flappy Bird

⚠️ 2 Mistakes

Mistake 1: Lack of understanding of user behaviour

Nguyen created Flappy Bird with the goal of making it easy for users who were busy and on-the-go to play its game which was simple and challenging at the same time.

🧠 However, little did Nguyen know that his game design led to a change in user behaviour that kept them addicted to the game to constantly break their highest scores. The source of addiction caused a love-hate relationship between users and the game.

In the end, Nguyen’s intention of helping users relax by playing Flappy Bird backfired. Users hated it. Parents hated it. Schools hated it. Eventually, Nguyen hated it as well.

Mistake 2: Unable to use crisis as an opportunity

Nguyen's response to the game's success and the ensuing problems was to remove Flappy Bird from all app stores. This move, while understandable from a personal standpoint, reflected a lack of strategic crisis management that could have preserved the game's presence while addressing the concerns.

In hindsight, Nguyen could have used this crisis as an opportunity to continue iterating the game development that would make the experience better.

⚠️ For example, Nguyen could have explored ways to address the game's addictive nature, such as implementing features to limit playtime or providing warnings about excessive use.

🧠 3 Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Understand how your product could influence user behaviour

Every product is built based on certain user behaviour or to lead to certain user behaviour.

For example, Facebook is designed to let users scroll their feeds without ending. And the purpose is to make users spend more time using its social platform so that Facebook can continue showing ads to users.

More ads = More revenue

Lesson 2: Every crisis is an opportunity

Shit happens. And it happens more often than you think.

The good news is that every crisis is feedback for you to learn what doesn’t work. It’s an opportunity to fix things before a big disaster happens.

Lesson 3: Mental health is everything

Your mental health is the most important asset you have. Period.

In fact, I admire that Nguyen had the courage to take down Flappy Bird because his popularity brought him unwanted public harassment, media spotlight, and hateful comments, causing his mental health to deteriorate.

That's all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope it has helped you in some ways and brought you some peace of mind.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond

Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.