Hacker News Reader

Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

Failing is really the default for startups. A better question would be, why do you think you did not succeed. I'm guessing they simply did not make enough money, which is the norm.

EDIT: if you read the article, they "failed to monetize" so there's your answer. Because they failed to monetize, it's hard to know what they could have done differently to monetize.

View on HN

> A better question would be, why do you think you did not succeed.

Is that a different question than "why you failed?" from the GP?

Yes. "Why you failed?" implies they did something _dumb_, as opposed to simply not doing something genius.

fail "literally" means to be unsuccessful

it implies doing something dumb as much as 'not succeeding'

... which is to say, not at all

I wonder if they could have instead of shutting down, just raised prices to the point where they were profitable instead?

It seems to me some customers would prefer that to a shutdown.

Seems like a death spiral to me: they increase enough to be profitable with the current userbase, then half their clients move out due to the increased prices, they have to increase again, etc.

Right. So I would like to understand why customers did not pay?

Plenty of people don't pay me money _all of the time._ Most of them aren't even making a decision to do this, it just never would occur to them to pay me money.

The cost was likely not enough to justify the product. Same basic reason anyone wouldn’t pay for something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com