YongoPal was riding high when it took home top honors in the University of Washington business plan competition last May. But the young founders of the Seattle company, which provides online English language training to South Korean students, are discovering some of the challenges of executing in the real world.

In a fabulously frank blog post today, YongoPal co-founder Darien Brown apologized to users for ongoing technical problems and admitted that the product "sucked." He pledged that the company would do better with a new version of YongoPal that is set to launch November 1.

In the meantime, the company has stopped taking registrations until the new site is available. It has also inked a partnership with a South Korean company which will help its network of language learners and teachers.

Brown's post serves as a stark reminder of the importance of rolling out a product which actually works, an important lesson given the rush by many startups these days to ship services in hopes of winning early customers.

"...The last few months have served as a hard-won lesson in the perils of rushing to demonstrate revenue traction at the expense of product quality," writes Brown.

He continued:

Things haven’t gone exactly to plan and until recently we only knew half the reason why: We pushed our product out the door too early. Our interface was buggy and unintuitive. Our system often ran too slowly. Our push messages were unreliable and often looked like spam, causing written communication between students and their conversation partners to fall apart. To put it mildly, our product sucked and we were asking students to pay to use it.

For the past several months we have been working on a complete rebuild, which fixes these underlying issues and will ultimately make the service live up to our promise to you as a conversation partner: that you can make money while making a difference.

It is refreshing to see a startup founder admit to dropping the ball. And it is even better to see someone acting on the mistakes and pledging to do something about it.

Here's a video of Brown discussing the YongoPal concept at the UW business plan competition earlier this year.