Ask HN: Stories of startup persistence | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Stories of startup persistence

25 pointsexampledotcom15 comments

I've recently closed the doors on my 6th bootstrapped startup in 15 years. This is in addition to many, many side projects that i wouldn't consider calling a startup. I've never been able to find product/market fit. I'm getting better, and thanks to ideas from lean startup, each attempt is taking less time and resources, but i cant help but wonder if I'm cut out for this. Are there any examples of founders who tried and failed multiple times before getting their big success?

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Can you give us some details of what your start-ups where? Where you think you may have gone wrong?

I'll give you my details:

1) ZiFiMusic - First start-up was a pandora type music service - taught myself to code, but never got traction and struggled to do a good job at music recommendation. I shut it down after about 6 months.

2) HearWhere - Took the code from the music service and turned it into a concert listing service. HearWhere was the largest database of concerts world-wide and had 25k visits per day (if I recall correctly). Our widget was embedded in Blender's homepage. Sadly, I was never able to make enough money through the affiliate links and I shut it down after 3 years.

3) NextWeeQ - an online staff scheduling system. I spoke to potential customers before building anything, got requirements and built a v1. Gave access to 5 of the companies I had spoken to. Only 1 used it, and stopped using it after a week. Following up, everybody asked for more features, but the site as it was did more than their excel spreadsheet (the existing technology) did, I provided a few of the requested features and continued to wait for usage. They never stared using, always asking for more features. I decided this wasn't a good business to be in.

4) Kitchon - ohhh...kitchon. An app that would sort out the messy timing of figuring out how to cook multiple recipes and have all the food done at the right time. The more I coded, the worse it got. Lots of interest, but I never found a business model, and never got a product into the market (aside from a few alpha tests)

5) Bucket52 - Challenge you to do one interesting/memorable thing every week. Built in one day (Dec 30th) and launched on new years. A nice bit of interest, good feedback and adoption. But, man it was hard for people to complete it! Most users gave up around mid-Feb, which is standard for New Years resolutions I guess. I shut it down at the end of the year.

Current - Doarama - lots of users, industry leading and just starting to monetize.

Funny, I had the same exact idea of kitchon in my head after trying to cook a number of complex dishes all at once. Having only one timer was a problem.

I agree it might be hard to find a market and monetize this. But still I think it is a very useful idea.

Awesome! Just a heads up, your ssl certificate shows invalid.

Do you mean on the Doarama domain? Chrome is showing valid for me, what browser are you using?

Yeah, doarama. I am using chrome as well.

For me, it shows mixed content warning rather than invalid cert on FF.

Still waiting on the big success:

1. Texfyre - Attempt to replace 4th-8th grade textbooks with interactive stories with embedded testing. Was in talks with Gates Foundation, but they pushed towards big publishers instead of start-ups. Bootstrapped then closed in 2013 (6 years).

2. Wizely (current) - Social network of contextual wisdom. API 90% complete, working on security and iOS app. Bootstrapped. (4 years in development and with good reasons for taking my time)

As long as you keep having ideas, keep going. My advice to you: Design and develop it for yourself first and foremost. If it is useful to you, it will be useful to others.

If you design and develop for others, you will be much more disappointed. I usually design things based on my own needs and share them with the world. If no one is using it, I'm using it for myself, at least, so I'm my biggest fan.

I wouldn't say I've had too many failures, although I'm just getting started. However, I've done some testing the past few years and put out some free products out there and tweeted about them only. Then I waited and watched.

In 2015 I created a product called https://mypost.io which allows anyone to have a web page up on the Internet in seconds. It is a very simple blogging / web page creation platform that even lets people use HTML and CSS to design their pages. The test was: Will people find it useful and actually use it? I added OWA so I could see the location of where people were using it from and I've seen people as far as Russia using it.

This let me know at least I was on the right track to creating something useful. I'm sure if I had the funds to really market and advertise my products, I'd be able to push them much further, but the hope for now is that people share it if they find it useful.

While I wouldn't say that I'm monetarily successful at this moment, I did build a popular website, and was able to gain and use that traffic to drive attention towards things I'm doing.

Failure is what eventually leads to success. The reason it keeps getting better for you is because you are learning from your mistakes and constantly changing for the better. If you didn't do that, than I might be more concerned and might tell you its time to call it quits. But your perseverance, ambition, and desire for success is going to work out greatly in your favor when the time comes.

> Design and develop it for yourself first and foremost. If it is useful to you, it will be useful to others.

If everyone does this, we would have 6 million note apps, and no garbage truck scheduling software. Meaning there is no money in note apps and tons of money in garbage truck scheduling software.

Pick something where money is. The top reason apps die from bootstrappers is no path to money. Get paid on day 1.

If only it was as easy as that.

The reason that there would be no garbage truck software is that most developers don't know or want to the understand the garbage business.

While it's important to pick an idea where their is money, it's equally important that you pick an idea where you have a clue of what to build, or have access to people that you can talk too about what they need, and can sign as customers.

A large number of software projects start as consulting projects, where someone sees a way to turn the project into something that might be wanted by more than just the initial client. If you don't have any consulting like this, you can always try browsing the job boards and see what people are hiring people to build, and see if those idea's might be something you can turn into a product.

What is your definition of "success"?

I have to say, if you've been able to fund your lifestyle in a sustainable way for 15 years, generate an income on your own, etc then you are doing pretty well.

Of course, if your goal is to make a billion dollars then you're not succeeding yet.

Ray Kroc strikes me as a good example of someone who failed many times before finding an opportunity at 50+ years of age and scaling it to become immensely wealthy.

Anyway, curious to hear how you're defining success and happy to share more thoughts!

What were each of them in a nutshell?

Really good question the OP should answer. It mskes a great difference if the ideas have been facebook for dogs or a smaller target audience therefore marketing being very hard.

Milton Hershey, founder of Hershey:

https://www.hersheys.com/en_us/our-story.html

Our founder, Milton Hershey believed in making happiness accessible to all. That belief, along with tremendous passion, perseverance, and vision, helped him grow the Hershey Company, so that millions could enjoy his delicious chocolates.

My recollection is that he tried multiple sweets related businesses before he got something that worked.

According to Wikipedia:

Early years[edit]

After an apprenticeship to a confectioner in 1873, Milton S. Hershey founded a candy shop in Philadelphia. This candy shop was only open for six years, after which Hershey apprenticed with another confectioner in Denver, where he learned to make caramel.[7] After another failed business attempt in New York, Hershey returned to Pennsylvania, where in 1886 he founded the Lancaster Caramel Company. The use of fresh milk in caramels proved successful,[8] and in 1900, after seeing chocolate-making machines for the first time at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Hershey sold his caramel company for $1,000,000[8] (equal to $28,788,000 today), and began to concentrate on chocolate manufacturing, stating to people who questioned him, "Caramels are just a fad, but chocolate is a permanent thing."

In 1896, Milton built a milk-processing plant so he could create and refine a recipe for milk chocolate candies. In 1899, he developed the Hershey process which is less sensitive to milk quality than traditional methods, and in 1900, he began manufacturing Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bars, also called Hershey's Bars or Hershey Bars.

I also found JR Simplot's biography inspiring. He quit school at age 14 and hunted wild horses to feed piglets that he got from farmers who were going to kill them rather than feed them because of a glut on the market. He then sold dehydrated onions. He later went into making French fries and became a supplier for McDonald's.

https://portal.clubrunner.ca/994/Stories/making-of-a-french-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Simplot

You might also enjoy reading up on the founder of KFC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders

Now that you mention it, Henry Ford also started two car companies (both failures) before he started the Ford company.

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