Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

Like someone mentioned, I don't want to increase my competition, so I'm not going to get into the details, but I'll say that I started doing consulting after work in 2007 to bootstrap my own project. I had absolutely no business background.

In 2008 I spent $7000 that I had made off consulting and 8 months of my free time to build my first project. It was a miserable failure. I've made about $80 off of it, so I'm still down about $6920... 3 years later.

In 2009 I built my second attempt. This time I spent about $1000 building it and it took me about 4 months to build it. I've made about $150 off that one, so I still lost money, but much less than the first time.

In 2010 I made my third attempt. This one I built at no cost, and 2 weeks of my free time. To date this one has made over $20,000.

I'm now in the 5th year since I first started on this journey and for the first time, I wrote myself a profit check last month.

Hang in there. You'll figure it out if you keep trying.

Any advice on what changed through time? More focused attempts, better grasp of the demand, or just more productive programming?

I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the previous.

The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are doing. 99% of successful businesses work this way. This may seem obvious to a lot of people, but I kept spinning my wheels trying to invent something instead of doing market research and building something that I know people need or want.

Most innovation happens this way. Get some existing idea, develop on it and market/sell it off as a better alternative. Seems simple. If only.

"If only" - totally agree.

Just building something people need/want, or improving upon what works, is a deceptively simple generalization. It boils down to execution, and that's where our originality still comes into play.

I agree as well. I wasn't suggesting that's all it takes, but rather, that was the missing ingredient for me. I think different people are missing different ingredients to success, and that was the one that I was missing.

So I assume that your third attempt based on "becoming their competitor or improving upon" strategy.

If so, how difficult was it (or how long did it take) to get organic traffic/customers through google, etc. Since I would think your competitors were more "established" in the pagerank, seo etc.

Basically, I'm just wondering how hard is it to get traction against entrenched players. Even if your product were superior, you still need to draw traffic to sell and prove it.

It actually happened immediately. I only have one real competitor, and my product is superior, and I still haven't overtaken them. That's part of what I learned from this. They were making enough that if I just took 5% of their income I could still make a lot of money. Sometimes being #2 is OK.

I have had a very similar experience.

First 1 I spent 12 months developing and only generated a few hundred dollars.

Few more in between all not generating much interest.

One took a few weeks of dev time and a bit coming out of it, still big potential there so I will pursue it, it just involves getting out to more businesses.

The most recent one built in a day to test the waters. Lots of positive feedback, 1 more day to polish the site (ie. make it look pretty) and now a large company is getting on board and lots of small businesses jumping in. (2 days work total) Obviously I have a lot more days of dev to keep expanding it.

I think the actual thing you learn is don't reinvent the wheel, just do something better than everyone else. And second start VERY simple, then build. Otherwise the app is too complex to get a quick and rapid user base who will then spend the time to use your app more.

Yes. This is exactly what I did. Seems to be a common formula.

What type of costs added up to $7k for your first attempt? Did you use outsource'd talent?

Yes I did outsource. It was a huge website with a lot of bells and whistles (this was my first mistake)... At the time, I was a C++ guy trying to get into the web, so I hired an outsourced designer and then hired a php guy in India to implement it.

What ended up happening by the end is that I fired the php guy for trying to sell my code to another company and then I rewrote most of the site myself since by then I was proficient in php/mysql and the code that was written was so inefficient that google crawling the site was crushing it. Lots of lessons learned in there.

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