I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900 | Hacker News Reader

I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

reddit.com

123 pointsdanso86 comments

This is hilarious. Ten weeks.

Ten weeks?

To build a community?

To build a base of dedicated users and begin to reap the network effect that keeps existing users on the site, and draws in new years?

In the early 2000s, I launched something like an early "social networking" site for geek dating.

We built a strong community and actually were pretty profitable with direct subscriber revenue, though it was never quite enough to quit my day job and I eventually (reluctantly) moved on because of other things happening in my life.

Anyway, we were open for THREE YEARS before I charged a dime.

That's how long it took me to build a community.

I focused on community building/management while I built out the site's functionality. This was very active, hands-on community management on my part. Now, three years is a long time. Maybe somebody could do it in less time. Especially if you had a partner or a team.... I was a lone wolf who was also working some consulting gigs to pay bills.

Maybe it doesn't need to be 3 years, but 10 weeks is beyond a joke.

Thank you for this. The only waste of time here was a result of this individual’s lack of commitment (sorry, but it’s true) and misinformed understanding of the efforts involved in the launch process of any business, let alone his. I hope he sees this and realizes all hope is not lost if he sticks with it, evolves it, and plans for the ramp period accordingly. Success is never guaranteed, but you have to give it a chance.

Just to clarify, are you saying that if you build a copy of reddit I won't become a millionaire overnight?

Bloody hell, I wasted 11 weeks and $2600 so far.

I wasted 1 day and $5 and failed to create and alternative to Google. Never again!

Only because it was Russian. If they'd pivoted to Albania -- boom, instant billionaires.

I built a forum from scratch starting in 2006. Spent most of that year sockpuppeting it to fake activity, slowly growing users, guerilla-shilling on other forums, etc. Took about two years total for it to really hit its stride with the critical mass necessary to be a bustling forum without my intervention.

Thankfully I was about 17 years old thus had the time and energy to do it.

To go from nothing to a self sustaining community in 3 years is good going.

I had a project that I worked on with a friend, we already had a small audience that we where bringing over from a previous project so we weren't starting from scratch. Even with all this help it took at least a year before there was a decent community of regulars.

This post talks a lot about the chicken and egg problem, and the inventors of Reddit faced the same problem - no one will come to your homepage for the internet if it doesn't look like the homepage for the internet.

Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it. Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted.

Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it took off.

Reddit was built on lies and you can too :)

Are there any archives to see what their fake content looked like?

In Alexis ohanian’s book he says you can still find them if you go back far enough on the site.

The subreddit r/MuseumOfReddit is basically an archive of most reddit posts. This is the very first reddit post apparently.[0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/1hrzax/the_...

I never heard there was thousands of fake posts, just when they posted articles they used fake accounts. Also there were no fake comments as Reddit launched without the ability to leave comments.

I remember when I built my own social network as well (www.thecaucus.net). The core feature was fancy algorithms similar to pagerank, that calculated a score for each post. This is in contrast to Reddit where the score is directly proportional to the number of people who liked it. I posted a link to it on HN, and got angrily chewed out by someone for misleading people about the number of people using my site. I wonder what they would make out of Reddit literally flooding their site with fake accounts.

Although a bit harsh in writing, JustStartNoob's comment [0] is honestly a good analysis. The guy had an idea and tried to force it through as hastily as possible with the sole goal of 'making it.' Unsurprisingly, it didn't work out.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/dkyq92/how_i_was...

> "I spent stupid money throwing shit at a non-stick wall, realized the wall was non-stick, so started spending money throwing shit at a different non-stick wall instead".

This is the worst possible interpretation of OP's venture, and must be written by a 12 year old if $1900 is "stupid money"

Edit: I'm not saying that $1900 is not a significant amount of money to many people in the world. But it is NOT a lot of money in the context of developing/marketing a tech product in the first world.

For the benefit of others, the totality of that comment is much richer and more thoughtful than the snarky snippet you quoted.

I didn't add the "snark" to that snippet, and no, the rest is no better.

> If OP had done any research, he would have realised "Russian Reddit clone" was not a good idea with a real likelihood of success. Way too ambitious.

> If OP had planned, he wouldn't have stumbled around aimlessly for 10 weeks and would have understood success, especially when growing any type of "community" based project, takes time.

I've now pasted 60% of the comment, and none of it is useful or actionable and is all rather insulting..."stumbled around aimlessly", "not a good idea", "throwing shit at a wall", these are trash statements and no budding entrepreneur should listen to them.

I'll also add that OPs approach is a typical "move fast and break things" method of finding a product-market fit, and it seems to me that OP did stumble upon a product and a market in a discussion platform for cancer patients. They need a monetisation strategy, but for somebody to turn around and say this is "shit" and was "aimless" is useless and shouldn't be encouraged.

The point of having a plan and realistic estimate (or even considered guess) of how long it might take for a community to take off is that it might preclude 2 pivots after less than a month each, especially if nascent traction emerged in one of them but no lightning bolt of monetization spontaneously emerged.

How long might it take for a self-sustaining community to emerge? Surely longer than 6 weeks unless you pour a massive amount of money into ads or other pump-primers.

To be honest, the approach did resonate as fairly “aimless” to me. You may have a different opinion and that’s also ok.

Edit to add: “throwing shit against a wall and seeing what sticks” is an idiom of sorts. It does not mean that the literal thing being tried is being called “shit”.

> must be written by a 12 year old if $1900 is "stupid money"

Well, many people cannot get their hands on $2k readily to just burn away. I mean there are many articles like [0] and that is only the US, this is ofcourse far far worse in poorer countries so for a lot (majority?) of people in this world $2k is in fact "stupid money". And these people are not 12.

[0] https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/18/pf/lack-of-savings-cover-un...

I don't think that's really relevant to the question of "how much" $1900 is, really.

I'd say most people "choose not to" save $1k than "cannot". I saved up a reasonable amount of money on $14/hr in Boston after graduation by living with roommates, not having a car, living frugally, etc. And conversely, I know plenty of people (developers even, who make lots of money!) who don't have that much saved.

Well, if you google the 'issue' about people being able to get $1000 if they really need it is pretty dismal reading. When you check reddit groups about finance as well; savings or not, most people cannot get $1000 today if they really needed to. People who make lots of money theoretically (developers etc) in western countries can get to $1000 any time even without savings. Other jobs, not so much. Also in non western countries (where developer wages average $500/mo for instance) this is very different. I work with a Russian devs daily and they simply don't make so much, especially in certain parts of Russia. With kids and mortgage having the luxury to pull 2k$ out while not working for money is a big issue for many people.

I agree with you having savings or not might not be relevant of how much $1900 is, but that article was only one example and to me it seems relevant because if you don't have it in savings, how would you risk quitting your job? The tone of the reddit post shows that this person considers this actually to be a lot of money and from what I see I would say most people on earth would consider it a lot of money. The fact that you or I don't consider it to be a lot is kind of the echo chamber of HN we are in.

The lack of finacial education combined with lack of self control really is dismal, but more a reflection of cultural and intellectual neglect than actual available funds for those who need them. High schools currently provide no monatary guidance, and its a farce.

Or you know, someone who doesn't share your living standards.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

$1900 is "stupid money" (as in hella expensive) for 1/3rd of the world's population. For some, it's more than they make in a year -- and yes, those places still have digital entrepreneurs.

And even in more economically advanced countries, $1900 can still be a lot for many demographics, even in the US, for e.g. a student or someone barely making the rent.

This all goes without saying. However we're talking about developing and marketing a product in the first world. In this context, $1900 is not only nothing, it's a bargain given the experience OP gained.

OP is in Russia, from the sound of it. $1900 is a good amount of money there--the average annual salary is about $8500.

I'd like to point out that OP is from Russia. I wonder if he still lives in Russia?

In 2018, the minimum wage in Russia was 11163 rubles per month, which is $174.6 per month. So, it would take a person working for a minimum wage 10.8 months to earn $1900.

For comparison, the minimum wage in California is $11/hour, so assuming a 40 hour work week, in 10.8 months a minimum wage worker in California would make $19,008. I'd guess that you would consider $19k to be a significant amount of money to spend on a project like this?

My point is, while you are right that $1900 is not "stupid money", it might still be a significant amount of money if the OP lives in Russia.

In fact, I'd think that a lot of people living in the United States would think that $1900 is a significant amount of money, especially for a risky side project.

You correctly point out the non-trivial nature of $1,900, including for many millions of Americans, based on duration just to earn the $1,900 in terms of income.

It's even more dramatic than that however. The person earning minimum wage in Russia will never possess $1,900 in loose capital to spend on such a venture, as they don't have enough buffer beyond expenses to accumulate it. At $174 per month, saving 20% of that, it would take five years, and during those five years something would inevitably happen to consume the savings base (stray emergency need or other life event).

It's one aspect of the brutality of being poor, whether in Russia or the US or wherever. You rarely have breathing room above basic life expenses to accumulate anything. Opportunity almost always has a financial cost associated with it, a get-through-the-door dollar cost (whether that's buying equipment, renting commercial space, or just affording the free time to do a thing).

For the majority of the world $1,900 is more savings in terms of liquid cash (eg in a bank account), than they will ever have at a given point during their lifetimes. It's exceptionally hard for the majority of people to put that together.

Which isn't saying much. For the majority of the people in the world $100 would tick the same box.

Perhaps off-topic / nitpicking, but is Russia considered first world? By the original definition Russia is _the_ second world, and I'm not sure that it is a first world now.

Ten weeks to try and build 3 communities... So a little more than 3 weeks each.

3 weeks. And they declared it a failure. Wow. I know "failing fast" can be a virtue in letting you move on to the next thing, but this is too much.

Getting even nominal amounts of free traffic and engagement in that time period is a "win". Give it 6 months of grass roots, a bit of time for network effects to appear at all. Why would they have any sticky users when there is practically no content yet? Let the slow free traffic gradually build some. Then maybe get some paid traffic, who will have a reason to stay around.

Sure, they still might have failed then too, but then at least it would have been a true failure, for the right reasons.

This reminds me that fateful question that we, software engineers, use to hear from our moms/dads/family: "Why don't you start a facebook?"

This amuses me to no end, I have never got that question, the closest thing was "you do websites right? do you know how to hack someone's Facebook?"

Or even "can you fix my printer?"

Haha classic. For me that'd be: "I've got an app idea."

I got this one from one of my mates in school: "Can you please install Gentoo on my toaster?"

I've heard this a few times. I know some friends had this question too. There are some variance, but the context is the same: "Look this guy, he started facebook when he was 19 and he's now a billionaire, why don't you try the same?"

Maybe it's my social context...

I run an email security business, we do fraud prevention and monitoring for businesses and brands. I get multiple inquiries a week to "hack a mailbox"...

I get sent articles with stories like '16 year old creates app, becomes millionaire' with the email title 'you make apps, don't you? So I have an idea...'. And yes, also, at every birthday party; 'can you hack into blah and deface that fraud, because he scammed me!'.

the "can you hack X" I get most often. But also questions to help with random programs I sometimes never even heard of, that they use at their job or whatever :D

Used to work for an agency where we often had people asking us to build their grand new idea.

There would be NDAs and lawyers and dire warnings of secrecy until we finally got to the bottom of what they wanted. Basically Facebook or Google, but on a budget of about 50p and the vague offer of some stock.

Unsurprisingly, we’d tell them where to go.

I worked on a project where it had been outsourced before we got it - the original requirements were to copy an existing system but make it look like facebook.

It was a disaster :)

Can be a lot worse, the CEO in a company I used to work at asked a group of IT people why are you guys not successful like WhatsApp, you are the same number of people (it was just after their exit)? None of the people in the room were employed as a developer. This was a first meeting of the group with the new CEO.

He had an idea and tested it. 3 month and $1900 sounds about right. I don't think you can test product ideas with significantly less time and money investment.

Nah - he had 3 ideas over 3 months. 3-4 weeks each - That's way too short.

The trick is to make a list of all the ways it could fail and test these first. Have two personas, one that assumes it will fail and one that is enthusiast. Set the tasks priorities so the enthusiast one starts coding tasks that disproves the failure hypotheses of the skeptical one. If you can't get past one, don't switch to the "easier" stuff. Put the project in "hibernation" mode and switch to another one until you get another insight, usually from reading a totally unrelated thing, that will unblock you.

>Let me draw the bottom line. 10 weeks are spent to create and test 3 different hypotheses.

10 weeks are a little more than two months. That's nothing, wouldn't even be enough to build something good enough, much less to test it, and even less to test it 3 times.

So let me rephrase: "Only 10 weeks are spent to create a minimal product, and shallow barely-test 3 different hypotheses before giving up".

It can take years (plural) for such a service to pick up.

You can quickly test, of course, but don't expect this "10 whole weeks" of testing to tell you anything insightful...

You just know that your service didn't hit the jackpot and became viral from day one...

>Everything began from the moment a severe Reddit addiction started to develop, it went so far that I fully stopped visiting Instagram and Facebook.

I also LOLed at this in the intro. The problem with the Reddit addiction was that it prevented ...being as addicted to two other social platforms...

I think there is a problem with the current thinking on MVPs where you quickly hack together a product, launch it, and drop it if it doesn't gain traction immediately.

This approach is probably especially damaging if the product is a social platform that you are starting from scratch.

Still, MVPs are not supposed to be "10 weeks total to build, and test 3 hypothesis" either...

An MVP could be a year long or more process -- it's just about not building excess functionality not needed to test the waters.

In my mind social networks are probably one of the hardest things to crack. People are only attracted to it if there are already lots of other people and activity there. It's like a chicken and egg problem and your job is how to make one of them appear out of thin air

Now I want to make Facebook stylised fabergé eggs.

One of my favorite stories is how the founders of reddit would create all the posts themselves, but submit them under fake users to give the appearance of popularity.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

The chicken is called advertising.

It is of course a discipline in it's own right, which deserves to be done well. Bad advertising profits you nothing, like badly done anything else profits you zilch.

The egg is of course the (main) activity that people are doing on your respective social network.

Again, this has to be done well. People need a reason to stay. GooglePlus circles is something, you know, people ain't like that.

Look at Gab.com and other successes based on Mastodon. They are very different, but most of them have the same reason for their success: people can post things there, that would get them banned on FB or Twitter.

Look at Microblog.com, you have to pay. People like that, because it makes sure only serious people are on there, which means your connections tend to be more serious.

I think anything that involves lots of other people (e.g. multiplayer games) are a hard nut to crack. Although Social Networks are easier it's easier to fake other users than fake, say, bots.

I built a forum around 2001 for people in the state of Maine who loved cars. I seeded it with friends, I put fliers on interesting cars I found around the state, hosted meet ups, etc. It took a ton of effort to get that fly wheel to spin, but I made a few hundred dollars a month in ads from local business (car dealers, mechanics). Tons of fun, met great people and set me on a course that has served me to this day. I was a bit early for hyper niche communities though :)

Creating a better Reddit has been a brain storm side project I’ve been working on for years. The Internet needs it now more than ever. But after my $100k bet on VR I’m now more deliberate.

Anyway, this kid spending ten weeks on his side project is pulled out of a different era. Such experiments may have yielded fruit a decade or two ago.

What was your $100k bet on VR?

I co-founded, and bootstrapped, a VR company [1] back in 2016. We launched three games, got some funding by HTC, but weren't able to raise venture. I keep meaning to do one of those "10 things I learned" sort of posts.

[1]https://www.RLTYCHK.co

I respect anyone who is able to accept the sunk cost and walk away after doing the correct analysis.

My startup is still preseed and I have a few angel investors. When I pitched I had done some research but didn't truly understand the market. Basically the industry I'm is massively fragmented, and each segment has very different access requirements.

There's still money to be made, but not the sort of money that attracts VC and no express rainbow to a pot of gold. I would have done things very differently had I known what I know now, but a revenue generating business that could break even in a couple years is a pretty hard sunk cost to swallow.

Honestly, they could have done much worse than waste 10 weeks and $1900, so they may have been one of the lucky ones.

Six years and $18 billion.

That's other people's money though.

The best kind!

But it’d make a way more dramatic headline.

And he will receive commission!

Indeed. I've wasted far, far more time and money on bad ideas than that.

So many founders have warped expectations of overnight success, myself included. This probably comes from all the Techcrunch style articles we read about viral product launches and massive raises. 10 weeks is not a lot of time, especially if you are bootstrapping a social network. I've been doing it for about two years and only now am I starting to see some traction and figure out how it all works. I don't mind though because it's a labour of love that I fund thorugh my day job.

One thing I've realised though is that the barrier to entry for creating a social network has gone up significantly, because when users come to your network they expect the same experience that they get from other networks like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Github, LinkedIn, Medium and so on. Things like:

- A highly relevant, non-repetitive newsfeed of fresh stimulating content.

- Customizable and respectful notifications

- Super tight privacy

- Rich UIs for creating content and comments

- Openness (RSS, ActivityPub etc.)

If you aren't able to deliver the same experience as venture funded social networks as a bootstrapped 2 person team, users typically bail. This in turn stops the network from growing and becoming more useful. Many companies like Quora, LinkedIn and Medium also pay people full-time salaries to produce content that brings people in.

> It is impossible to launch hundreds of communities all at once, that is why I started to choose the idea of the first community

This in itself is a good idea. It worked for Lobsters and HackerNews, and one of the things that went wrong with Voat:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/#too-man...

$190 per week, for 10 weeks, looks like a very small loss considering the experience and 'fun' of learning all this.

People are discussing the very short amount of time he spent, but what about the money?

A service that he created (I assume direct cost zero) without a big community (so server costs should be very low) and VK's advertisement with no engagement rate.

Did he spend almost 1900 in advertisement? Jeez...

And in the begining the advertising was pointless. No one was going to stick around when there was no content yet. They should have been grateful for the minimum amount of free traffic and engagement, covered server costs for 6 month or a year while it gradually built. Only then pay for advertising, when that traffic will find at least a minimal community to engage with. Yeah it's still hard and might fail, but you don't get a social community over night, or in the 3-4 weeks they spent on each attempt.

Don’t give up after the first try. I understand it costed you money and time. Money is what you need to survive. Do you have second thoughts? Dilemma? Like going back to it and trying again, this time slow and during your free time (=when not working) ??

I agree, he said 10 weeks and 3 tries.

That's hardly 1 normal attempt.

But 10 weeks for 3 ideas is not enough... 10 weeks for 1 idea, maybe... If it's something that sells something, like SaaS. These ideas did not even have real monetising strategies behind them from the looks of it.

> Everything began from the moment a severe Reddit addiction started to develop, it went so far that I fully stopped visiting Instagram and Facebook.

I like this quote. Like another Russian proverb meaning "fight fire with fire".

Well, 10 weeks is nothing. On top of that, you're trying to start with niche/limited communities. A student community focused on studying?

People want to communicate about what's fun, not about what's a hassle.

I don't remember how Reddit started but I remember one of the first r/s that got big was Aww.

There was a very nice example a couple of weeks ago on how before the network effects kick in you need to give people a reason to go to your site and use your service. Nothing like that happened here.

> I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

There are people spending more to learn less. Seems like good value to me. Best of luck with your next venture, if you're reading.

For many people today Internet = Facebook. Probably it would have more sense to start with a FB group instead of rolling out own reddit clone.

That's a good idea, if you want to build a social network, it probably makes sense to build an audience first.

So facebook for kittens didn't work out? :)

... but yet Fartbook was too successful

#letterkenny

In ten weeks even a fricking blog cannot get above a dozen of visitors each week. So an online community that needs momentum and a ton of visitors from the get go?

Did that guy really think you can go from scratch to success and fame in 2 months? Especially with such a small investment?

“Good news! Congratulations! You’ve got 10 weeks of learning and the amount of money lost is not so large! You’ve got subjected to a stressor and survived. Therefore, becoming stronger. Courage, experience, growth!”

I feel like the author had the right idea to try to form smaller subcommunities first, but there's something predatory about targeting people battling cancer.

The part that struck out to me was when OP said "Too many failures and destructive thoughts."

No amount of market research/planning/mvp asap will address that.

I don't think anything is wasted here.

Something is learned, on next fail something else could be learned, but third or fourth time big things can happen.

It isn't 2006 anymore obviously. If you want to create a viral social website in 2019 you will have to bribe Facebook, Twitter and Google with hundreds of thousands worth of ads within those 10 weeks and you will still never get the same reach you could get for free in 2009. The internet, since around 2014, has stagnated into a few protectionist tech world powers that pretend to be everything else.

There's still some cool stuff going on, if you go out of your way to find it... https://github.com/nehbit/aether

What does it do? It's not very clear from the readme.

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