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Comment by alixanderwang | Hacker News Reader

I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I took what I learned and succeeded".

What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS, failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which signals that persistence works --, or the stories are just never shared.

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I was planning to write something along the same lines, if I make it. I guess the reason of this happening is this - after you fail, you are too busy picking up the pieces, and trying to survive.

I have written so much about small wins at my previous startup. And when it shut down, I was just trying to avoid falling.

In the current one, we built and failed with 5 products. And then got more traction in 10 days than we'd ever had ! When I put it this way, it sound like the story of success (in the making).

But it isn't. It is (if I write it), the story of how we got it wrong, and what not to do. The bonus is that we make it.

Check out LightCat.io to see what got traction eventually.

You guys are smart - yes, this is a shameless plug. I am poor and cheap, and this is all I've got.

> yes, this is a shameless plug. I am poor and cheap, and this is all I've got.

It will be difficult for you to know how much I empathize with this statement. Beautifully put.

Good luck to you Utkarsh.

This kind of describes @patio11's career. I still want to build my own SAAS though.

Does it, though? He's sold SaaS businesses for non-trivial sums (though much less than you'd expect if you read strictly his descriptions of it), and spent most of his time consulting and writing before going to Stripe.

I did that in 2010/11. Made all the mistakes you read about (not talking enough to customers, launching too late, not iterating, not doing effective customer development...), a year later went and got a job.

Haven't made more than £1k on the side since (not for lack of thinking about trying). Will potentially launch something soon, but am almost certain I won't ever want it to be my "main thing" again.

At least in the EU (in my experience ofcourse), people won't openly talk about that. It's still a shameful thing if you went properly bankrupt (not just quit, but with actual declaring bankruptcy legally; 3 times for me out of 20something companies).

If people went 'big' announcing their 'thing' so everyone knows about it and it failed (bankrupt or just quit), they downplay it as 'sabbatical', 'helping out a mate with his weird dream' or 'over the top hobby' or something like that. Almost all my friends tried the entrepreneur path and all of them found that it was not worth it; 16-18 hour days on their own dream with no guaranteed pay vs 6-8 hours/day for a boss with guaranteed pay mostly got them to go for the latter eventually. They never mention it, ever.

I don't give up though and just keep building things. They usually make enough money to live even if they fail.

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for before I haven't retired, but I had a successful side project, quit my job to try to make a living off it, failed to make enough money off it, and went back to a traditional development job. I'm overall happy working for a steady paycheck and benefits again, although there is part of me that is always itching to try again someday. I don't think I will, though. Maybe I'll write about it at some point.

You definitely should, your experience would be valuable to learn from and interesting to read.

I would suggest that the stories are never shared. SaaS are REALLY difficult to get off the ground.

“But I learned something” Is an extremely low bar for evaluating an outcome.

“But I learned something and applied it to make the next effort a success” is the natural valuable contribution...that we (quite tellingly) almost never hear about.

> “But I learned something and applied it to make the next effort a success” is the natural valuable contribution...that we (quite tellingly) almost never hear about.

This is literally every "success" blog post out there. They always start with an early failure and how that launched/pushed/pulled them toward later success.

That’s because anyone who writes about a SaaS, failed or not, is ultimately successful.

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