6 things that killed Waifmail (another Diary of another Failed Startup) | Hacker News Reader

6 things that killed Waifmail (another Diary of another Failed Startup)

expatsoftware.com

27 pointsjasonkester12 comments

Jason, It may sound harsh, but I'm pretty sure that you didn't learn any lesson from your failed startup - or learned the wrong ones.

1. Your target audience was not small.

2. Your lack of marketing had nothing to do with your failure.

3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.

4. Shared hosting wasn't the cause - you just chose a bad host.

5. It's possible to gain people's trust if you position yourself correctly, if your product looks legitimate enough, if you have enough word of mouth or buzz, and if your product is just plain good.

6. Gmail didn't kill Waifmail. There is plenty of room for competition in mail.

I may be completely wrong, but from reading your post, my guess is that:

1. You gave up too quickly. 2. You weren't able to estimate what users would want correctly or at all. Or, you weren't dedicated to figuring it out. 3. You couldn't execute the idea correctly, either with design and/or code. 4. As a result of not understanding your user, you weren't able to keep innovating. 4. You weren't able to understand your user because your vision wasn't exactly right

I think you're right on some fronts, Allan-- tho:

"4. Shared hosting wasn't the cause - you just chose a bad host."

Seriously? Hosting an email app (that needs near-perfect reliability) on a shared hosting account? No.

But yeah-- the is probably missing a few items on the list of reason why he failed and is including a few that he shouldn't.

> 3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.

Exactly. LAMP is a good, safe choice. Many of the largest websites are LAMP (Slashdot, Wikipedia) and its the others that have the most scalability problems (EBay, Twitter).

From the article: I come from a Microsoft background, and you can say what you want about Microsoft, but their development tools and libraries are rock solid. If they have a library called System.Web.Mail, you can rest assured that it will actually send emails when you ask it to. Unfortunately, this is not the case with PHP.

I'm astounded by this comment. Some Hotmail's most spectacular outages were from failed attempts to migrate away from a Unix MTA.

I prefer this kind of failure chronicle to the ones usually listed here. It talks about specific, obvious problems encountered and doesn't try to extrapolate any huge overarching themes about startups in general, which are usually somewhat misleading.

"2. Impossible to gain users' trust"

HN, Is this a pervasive problem you guys are having with your app? If so, how do you build user trust?

"5. Really sad marketing"

Hmm...I would have leveraged my communities for feedback, and ask them to spread the word if they like it.

"6. Small target audience"

I remember DHH encouraging the community to focus on tiny markets. http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-...

cool article, but... gmail has 3-5% of the market or something. Doubt that had anything to do with killing the app.

it died for one single reason: was it the name?

j/k - good post, thanks for sharing this, and glad to about the recent success of your other ventures.

The answer is 'yes'.

I actually might have used that. I have three accounts I check regularly, five I'd check every so often.

Any app out there like this now? Does Gmail handle that now?

Gmail lets you read other POP and IMAP accounts now, so it's most of the way to where we were 4 years ago. They don't yet offer support for Hotmail's wacky WEBDAV interface, but that's not really a problem since most everybody has abondoned Hotmail in the last few years.

"most everybody has abondoned Hotmail in the last few years"

You should tell that to our users... about 80% of them (unfortunately) still use Hotmail.

Development on shared hosting? Shudder.

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