*openmargin

Marc Köhlbrugge and two friends started *openmargin as a graduation project in 2009 at university. Their core insight was simple but powerful: a person's book collection and the notes they make within books are a genuine representation of who they are. From there, they pivoted from a simple note-taking iPhone app to a full e-reader platform when the first iPad launched, envisioning a social layer where readers could discuss and annotate books together.

The path from idea to product proved painfully slow. The team spent months debating architectural details—like whether discussions should be threaded or flat—without implementing anything. "Everything was very well thought through," Marc recalls, "but it took a long time for us to implement any of it." The team lacked balance; they were philosophers more than builders. Only when the graduation project deadline loomed did they rapidly prototype their main ideas. After graduating, they raised €130,000 in subsidies, which gave them runway and more importantly, deadlines that finally forced execution. They launched publicly in 2011 at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam—two and a half years after starting.

Marc's breakthrough came from a side project: he created BetaList, a website featuring up-and-coming startups. The press coverage BetaList attracted created a halo effect that drove significant traffic to *openmargin. However, traffic didn't convert to users. The fundamental problem emerged immediately: an e-reader app is only as good as the books available in it. Amazon's stranglehold on the ebook market through Kindle and DRM made it nearly impossible for other apps to access major publishers' books. Big publishers were still hesitant about ebooks at the time, making partnerships impossible. The team pivoted to partnering with indie authors and smaller publishers instead, pre-loading a handful of books to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of needing groups reading the same book simultaneously.

The partnerships with indie authors worked modestly, but the fundamental cold-start problem persisted: the probability that someone downloading the app would want to read one of the few pre-loaded books was very low. By year three, despite having "a ton of opportunities"—including a proposed deal to be the default e-reader on Samsung Galaxy Note, interest from Kevin Kelly, and an invitation to appear on Dutch national television—the team had no real traction. The subsidy-funded operations kept them alive, but motivation evaporated. The team had also grown unwieldy: three co-founders expanded to seven people including board members and freelancers, which "slowed things down to a crawl." Marc was simultaneously co-founding other startups (BetaList and PR.co), further diluting focus.

After three years of struggle, the team gradually lost motivation and disbanded. Marc identified three core failures: shipping too slowly while over-philosophizing product vision; being too early in a market where publishers still feared ebooks; and underestimating Amazon's insurmountable monopoly. He reflected that the team would have been better off either building a consultancy service (leveraging their multi-disciplinary skills) or recruiting stronger technical talent from the start. Despite the failure, Marc learned invaluable lessons about the importance of speed, market timing, and team structure that informed his later successful ventures like BetaList and WIP.