Ask HN: What is your failed project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your failed project?

10 pointsyitchelle16 comments

I recently pulled the plug on a side project after I realised that I was not able to give the time it needs. I am sharing it so that whoever has more time than me can take the idea and run with it, if they want.

The project was a guided Q&A website where participants are guided through a series of brain exercises. The concept is to work the brain muscle so that it continues to grow, to stay sharp and nimble. The website would keep stats on the well the participants are doing. It's based on the ten ideas a day concept originated by James Altucher.

Before building it, I ran a survey and got some initial reaction. Based on that, I started building it but family items caught up with me. So I am letting it go.

What's your failed idea?

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Ha! I'll limit myself just to the last four out of a zillion past projects.

http://kidisms.com - kid quotes

http://linkpackets.com - groups of links packed up by topic

http://imadefood.com - versioned recipes

http://abbr.press - abbreviated, bulleted news articles

Lots more ideas in the pipeline of course :)

Thanks for sharing. Always wondered when you knew it was time to let it go. When did you know?

Eh, just looking at analytics. It's cheap to keep things up and running, so I guess I never really "let them go". Each project is a learning experience that builds upon the last one. If I learn something new further down the line, I'll update an old project and see what happens. When I see traffic tailing off after some months, I'll move onto the next idea. Never stop learning!

I like the idea behind imadefood.com, it's like github for recipes. I wonder if being more github like (forking) would help?

Hi, thanks for the response, yes I've heard the "github for recipes" a few times. My intention is not to make it that complex(target audience is not always a technical developer), however the feature to "fork" is already part of the current implementation. Simply clicking copy, will create a version under your profile, with a reference to the parent recipe.

http://LittleGoal.com - progress tracking for mastermind groups. http://carpe.email - tinyletter-style support.

Both still online, and I still use/update them both from time to time. Both "failed" due to lack of getting the word out, to get users, to test market fit.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-content-calendar-lite/ - A simple content calendar for WordPress. 1 year old. Def didn't get the traction I was expecting. :)

I liked this idea, especially the suggest feature in your Pro version. Have you thought about integrating it with soemthing like Hittail (https://www.hittail.com/) to help with ideas to generate the content.

Hey thanks! I actually built something with the plugin itself that does exactly this. Lost motivation to see it through though. Might just go ahead and release pro on code canyon now.

https://askdns.com - Reverse Domain/IP Lookup

It was fun learning about large datasets and stuff but it can be expensive hosting it. Still needs lots of work on the frontend but was waiting to see what interest it got first which isn't much, but Google are still slowly crawling.

Did you get any buyers for your datasets?

Nope

A 2 sided marketplace to find a group exercise PT. Had no idea what I was doing on the business side of things and tried hard to build a product without figuring out if anyone wanted it.

Turns out, they did not.

I was building http://bewolo.com I slowly started loosing interest in it. It was a market place for experiences.

It was http://gamedevr.com

A curated link agregator for gamedevs. I eventualy got bored of updating it.

It realy needs some love.

doxygit.com - A service that clones your repo to generate the documentation with Doxygen.

Doxygen uses many separate programs in the background (like LateX), preventing XSS and server-side hacks would have been really difficult for a team of 2.

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