The first idea I started was travel related. I had a notebook full of ideas on features I would do. :) I jotted down all our discussions, but we were biting off more than we can chew. We felt we could beat an NP hard problem with some heuristics. After an year, we had to concede it was not going to happen and drop it.
The second one was more to scratch a personal itch. We wanted to build something that had good infrastructure from the ground up. So, the actual functionality received much less attention. A month or two in, I realized I was going to burn out and put the project on back burner. We revisited it again a few months later and this time, we did things that would not scale. We worked only on the absolute essentials. I am happy to say, the product works for our usecase.
The next project was to provide technical infrastructure for a close associate for a business they were working on. Unfortunately the business side of it did not work out. So did not see much out of it. Had quite a bit of learnings from that one.
For the next project, I decided we are going to do work on features that are not too ambitious. It was supposed to be a 2 month project, but it went on to become a year and half project. Still this is the first project we followed to completion. For the first time, I worked on the backend, frontend and deployment of a project together. We also did some research prior to development to make sure people needed it. The result is https://www.niftyword.com .
Now, I am on to the next idea :)
The most important learning? Reading a hundred posts on Dos and Don'ts still does not prepare you for ground realities. Not that one should not read such posts, only one should never assume "Thats so obvious. I will not make those mistakes!" , cause when you are in the thick of things, your perspective changes. The sunken cost fallacy is real.
My first web based failure was an e-mail marketing startup. Think a cheaper version of Mailchimp.
It didn't go well. It folded in under a year. We had a few hundred signups and very few paying customers. Most of whom were spammers.
At the time, my software development skills were not up to the task and I was leaning on a team of outsourced developers. Not great.
I didn't talk to my customers enough and I didn't market aggressively enough. I got hung up on the technical problems.
I'm hoping my current projects -
fare a little better! :D
'A definition MUST be written as a complete, grammatically correct English sentence.', 'A definition MUST be an ìf and only if statement.', 'A definition MUST have a clearly stated genus and a clearly stated species .', 'The quantifiers in a good definition MUST be explicitly and clearly stated.', 'The term being defined MUST be underlined.'