ricefield

i built ricefield with my two cofounders from the end of my sophomore year to probably around the second semester of my junior year. it was a failed startup, and i learned so much from it.

i started building ricefield as a "rebound" of my past startup, apprese. the rebound idea came after i talked to a few friends of mine and we all agreed that college communication and social media were too scattered. we wanted to have a place that would be more centralized, focused on the current happening at school, classes, dorms, dining halls, and anywhere on campus. in fact, we chose the name "ricefield" partly because we all are vietnamese, but also we wanted to incorporate the word "cook" into our startup and culture dictionary.

the first few months was great. we spent time building and hanging out with each other, but after all, i felt that progress was not catching up. we launched the very first scrappy, shitty version after working on the prototype for around 5 months. we had around 200 users, but engagement wasn't there.

this is where we made the biggest mistake that every startup could ever imagine. instead of talking to people around campus and even users to figure out why they used the product or why they chose not to, we just "guessed" that the ui was too bad and people didn't like it, so we went back to refine everything.

we were selected for the school's final round of the pitch competition. we hit 600 users around that time. we didn't win the competition, but ended up receiving $500 as a "pre-seed" funding.

but, after all, that wasn't enough to keep us moving forward. we ended up sharing different visions and ideologies, and our future paths were also unaligned. because of such great mismatches, we all decided to part ways.