Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
I guess no body is doing this, everyone talks about making money.
So, let's use this post to share our failed projects and the learnings with other founders.
At first I was going to commit 100% to the deception. There wasn’t going to be real multiplayer in the game at all, it would all be fake. But then I realized the riot I would have on my hands if I actually tried to sell it as a multiplayer game and there wasn’t real multiplayer. So I wrote real multiplayer. By the end, the project was big enough for a team of 100. I was making cinematics, running a Discord server, trying to figure out how to train an AI to play my increasingly complicated game, it was insane. I ran out of money.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/QnMz27nPbB4
Code: https://github.com/etodd/lasercrabs
Dev blog: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=49277
Edited to add: I think I've played two games where the bots turned out to be people. The second game was much longer, and I never finished it - I only learned that the bots were people from a YouTube video later on.
This is a good idea, and it is under-explored!
Spoiler: VGhlIGdhbWVzIGFyZSBKb3VybmV5IGFuZCBOZWlyOiBBdXRvbWF0YS4gVGhlc2UgZXh0cmEgY2hhcmFjdGVycyBoZXJlIGFyZSBiZWNhdXNlIEkga25vdyB5J2FsbCBjYW4gcmVhZCBiYXNlIDY0IGluIHlvdXIgaGVhZHMu
It’s a cool twist on the PvP of the game where you can be invaded by a player at almost any time but you can usually opt out of the PvP but this particular encounter is needed to progress.
For April Fools, they rolled out "Advanced Bots", which were actually another group of 5 humans, but with their username replaced with "<Character> Bot". Word got out pretty fast, but it was super funny queuing up for a game you'd normally win easily and being surprised at how smart those bots have gotten...
Yep, I ran a failed Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/et1337/deceiver-philoso...
Kickstarter is a lot tougher these days, it’s not as novel as it once was and a lot of people have been burned. You basically have to bring your own fan base of people ready to pay.
It's pretty insane what you did and already had finished!
In Super Mario you don't actually need to kill anyone to finish the first level so I thought it would be quite fun to see what happens.
You might have to prime them with that the AI-system is broken and that is why enemies have so different patterns... or maybe people play very similarly?
The issue: many PTs are VERY analog—sheets of papers with exercise, very few touch points, no data collection, etc.
The solution: modern patient management system for doctors, a mobile app that will remind you to do your prescribed exercises, track your response, have reminder videos so you’re doing everything right, and feed difficulty levels, etc to the doctor in real time to monitor recovery.
The problem: selling to doctors is hard. Replacing their entire day to day interface for their whole staff is a giant barrier to pass. Many patient management systems bundle in handling insurance, so his ended up being a “solve everything, then we’ll talk” type of system.
What I’ve learned: you need to make sure you’re MVP is ACTUALLY viable. We talked to a lot of PTs, and they were interested but not forthcoming with exactly what they would need to switch—still not sure how to pry out that info. Vertical saas is a double edged sword: the customers are bigger and stickier, but the sales process is slower and harder. Doubly so if you are trying to dethrone other deeply ingrained saas businesses from day one. A better approach likely would have been an extension to improve existing ones, then our own system.
One thing was completely clear---this was not as close to product market fit as we expected it to be, so we decided to back away from the project instead of raising money and doubling down on trying to force a solution to a problem that wasn't very important to our direct customers. In other fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the bottom line in some way. Physical Therapy is less of a sales business and more of a referrals business (from other docs), so we didn't have much impact. If anything, we may have prevented business by increasing exercise adherence and improving outcomes, therefore cutting "recurring business" (decreasing the amount of visits/injury, or the overall amount of recurring injuries).
Very insightful - whatever solution you have must actually drive enough $ for someone to really want to give it a try. Which is a huge ask if someone’s business isn’t really tech oriented and they don’t really believe the optimization is worth breaking through existing ways of doing things.
The problem is that she works for a large chain and the people with purchasing power are not clinicians.
It seems to me that really successful entrepreneurship requires enough time in that field to really understand the rough edges of the domain, but not so much time in the field that you actually start to accept the existing solutions as “good enough” in a sort of stockholm syndrome.
You need to be an expert with a beginner’s mind, which is extremely difficult.
They've been building it in public for the past year, but I haven't seen updates for a few weeks:
My PT uses a software exactly like this, and that made it possible that my progress was tracked during my months long vacation too, all online.
The app: https://medbase.physiapp.com/ (in German)
PS. it worked, my back problems are gone.
And don't be sorry! Most people who have a successful startup have many failed startups behind them, there's only one way to learn most of these lessons.
We already had 4000+ people sign up to play once it hit beta, and even had local news cover us: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-n...
We vastly underestimated our ability to market the game and to influence people, even our own friends.
We should have shipped a somewhat slow and buggy beta version to those 4000 people who signed up to beta test.
Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping.
Or maybe we just had a bad idea
It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha.
We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners; . They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago.
Good luck on your game endeavors!
You may probably tell what went in hindsight, but even then, it's just one if in the lifetime of the project.
"Oh, we could've released when x was done". Maybe, but maybe not too.
I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it?
Perhaps this is true. There can also be pain associated with shipping too early: gnarly bugs, data migrations from hell, technical debt to name a few.
If you're ok with sharing, I'd be interested in learning more about why you believe that. Did you hear that from former beta customers later on down the line? Is it an intuition you have from your reflections on the period?
Also, what brand of "perfectionism" are were talking about here? Chasing down minor performance boosts? Gold-plating existing features?
Regarding perfectionism: the game was very rough around the edges in regards to in-game assets. Performance was also a concern, both on the device and the back-end. The device could slow to 1-2 FPS if there were enough assets (100s of troops firing at once - which was easy to do with a few friends playing together at once) animating at once. The server would slow to 4s+ response times if there was enough activity in a single geographic area.
I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't.
Maybe on a different timeline, you would have regretted shipping too early - because first impression matters, too and many people who walk away, after the first try will not come back for second try.
The trick is, to find the right time.
Maybe, but from the little I read, it seems like it might have been more the technical challenges (performance) too hard to overcome with the given ressources/target hardware.
Ultimately, failure was always the mostly likely outcome here, even if we had millions to spend.
The most unfortunate part for me is that we didn't ever get to learn if people actually liked or disliked the game, since we didn't release it outside our own circles.
The failure reasons were all the same: business partners who sat on money and did nothing.
These people were not incompetent. They've built companies before. They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. They've dedicated decades of their careers to building these connections. I personally burned my credibility setting up some of these meetings.
The problem was they didn't show up. Why didn't they show up?
"The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them."
Nobody is naturally too lazy to take money that's lying in front of them. These people have been conditioned to think that work is for fools. They love doing strategic shit like picking domain names and researching target market. They'll never actually talk to the target market though. One entrepreneur even hired a "personal assistant" to do the talking, except the assistant was incompetent and just pissed everyone off.
Laziness is fine. Arrogance is fine. But anyone with a contempt for hard work will not get anywhere.
I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership.
I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning towards the idea that you're looking for the wrong indicators.
My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success
You captured it well in your next sentence:
> My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success
An RX-8 back when I knew the guy would cost about 25% of a good tech salary (senior big tech, or tech lead/CxO on a smaller one), on a 9 year loan. It's not a family car. And it's the cheaper of the three.
I bought my first car at 32, with a manager job, and that was with quite a lot of arguments with my wife. It's a cheapish MPV.
I have some emotional anchors to those cars. Partly because I ride with them going to a client's office. Partly because it's the last thing I see from them.
As for partnering with them, there's a longer story and every story is different, but it's not car related. Most had proven themselves to some extent. In some cases they had already had the deal on the table, and just needed a prototype. And somehow I went from prototype guy to only person who cared. It's why I couldn't close some of those deals myself.
Given the context, I can't blame you for assigning significance to a car.
What indicators are you looking for to avoid making the partnerships you described?
I think the best model is personality + incentive. It's probably worth a couple chapters to discuss. But basically incentive is the time domain - can you continually incentivize them on such a slope to act in your interest?
Personality is what kind of incentive they expect. Some people would lose their jobs for an affair. Some just want to appear successful. I know a guy whose life was changed by meditation, so he gave up his whole career and traveled the world helping people with stress. Everyone is a mix of things and place different weights on different things.
So you want to model people and see that they align with whatever your specific venture is. Someone suited to one venture may not be suited for another. And there's a time component too, so someone great 5 years ago may be unsuitable now.
Sorry to say but this explanation got me thinking.
Maybe those people actually had real insight that these ventures were not good investments. So I would not be so demeaning because they stopped being interested when it turned out there is a lot of work to be done and a lot of money to be spent. That it was good business idea for you - as you mention your time seemed to be worth less - it was not a good idea for them.
From reading both comments it seemed that you could benefit greatly from those deals and for them putting focus/money elsewhere was more beneficial.
As you wrote that comment and seem to have grudge against them, they took easy way out by not confronting you directly on that.
I still might be wrong but maybe they were gracious enough to leave you alone and not shatter your dreams.
I have seen in developed countries if you are sales person with a shiny car like BMW they will not deal with you and better strategy is to get high end VW to have nice stuff inside but from outside to seem like a decent person not a flashy sales scammer.
GP would judge me as financially unsuccessful and not pay me any mind if I needed a problem solved.
GP has been played by these "mercedes having" people and GP's own pre-conceived immature notions about status-signaling.
If anything, the data makes me biased against people with nice cars. I expected most of the outrage to be from those who bought expensive cars.
Many of the relatively successful ones have been partners who owned no cars, though one guy has a very nice MPV.
I drive a 12 year old car that has been reliable as any new car I've owned and drives pretty much as well too. The fact that I am not impressing anyone as a consequence is something I've grown to be comfortable with as I have gotten older.
You listed at least 4 ventures this was the cause of. I hope you have realized what you need to change as well.
One failed because nobody wanted to fund it, right during a crypto boom. It might be a bad idea too. Who knows? But everyone moved on to better projects.
One failed because we tried to clone Blue Apron but local logistics and payment infra wasn't mature enough.
One failed because of scope creep.
One failed because the CEO was bullshitting investors and they pulled out. It may not be related but probably is.
Some failed because I was the lazy one who didn't feel good about committing.
All of those did not fail from lack of hard work. But they're less interesting. Laziness is the one I'm really pissed about. It's also possible they'd fail later, but they did not get that far.
There's successes too, but that's off topic.
- https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine...
- https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star...
Any lesson to share?
Definitely worth it from my perspective - not in a revenue per hour sense, but I learnt things that I wouldn't have otherwise without going full time on a startup (imo).
I started with year-end reviews too. Hopefully next year will see me having some success as well.
I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job, in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I am even more certain this was the case.
Besides my partner, there was no one else to get things done. I wrote the proposal and most of the budget, selected and integrated many hardware components, learned to use a CNC and pour foam and solder 17-pin connectors. Constructed and operated an off-grid sensor site for a few months with great uptime. Lashed together an ETL system with Python and Postgres. Wrote and delivered briefings to potential gov and industry partners who knew A LOT more about the topic than I did. In the middle of the thing we were selected as finalists in a pitch contest, though didn’t win.
Gave me back a lot of confidence lost in that other job. I know I can jump into a relatively new area and do decent enough work as judged by experts in that area. I doubt we’ll get a Phase II (and sort of don’t want it as I’d pay myself dookie for two years with questionable payoff), but will crank through some leet code or something for a few weeks and have a eye-catching project on my resume!
The carcass of my attempt in dotnet: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow
I'm 100% sure it (or something like it) is desperately needed by the world. However, students aren't really well known for paying for software, so this remains a nights/weekends thing.
1. Adding offline support is very nontrivial. It (may) influence your choice of DB and your data schema. This is a type of master-master replication, since the user is the master of their data, and this is quite painful in RDBMS-land. I'm avoiding having to migrate my schema to support offline sync.
2. There already exist solutions that are online-first. E.g. Quizlet, mochi.cards, remnote. I find all their tools for collaboration lacking, despite being online-first... which is surprising. They don't even support something as basic as commenting on a card. This blows my mind. Imagine Github without issues/discussions/pull requests.
3. Users have repeatedly told me that they prefer offline-first. This is probably due to them coming from Anki - a popular open source offline-first program. Anki is my real "competition" - not billion-dollar Quizlet.
Also - hi, it's you! If you're willing to talk shop, you can reach me at my HN handle at gmail.com. Primarily, I'm curious why no one else is building what I am - Github for flashcards. I've met someone who's trying to build Wikipedia for flashcards... but for me personally I'm more interested in something more decentralized. Not like crypto-decentralized, but like "everyone can have their own card/definition of 'Proteus Syndrome'" - i.e. they don't defer to a central authority. I'd love to pick your brain :) No pressure, just an open invitation! My comment here [1] is still accurate:
> If there's only one thing you know about me, it should be that I want Spaced Repetition to become popular. I don't care who makes it popular - it simply needs to be popular. I'll happily talk shop with anyone building a tools-for-thought system and tell you all I've learned.
Also nothing wrong with that, but personally I like to think more about architecture than about the particular implementation.
I'm most familiar with F#, so I went with that and Blazor initially (to avoid learning JS). PostGres feels fairly uncontroversial. Perhaps I magpied from there to event sourcing - I still find it surprising that an indexdb-eventsourcing-wrapper doesn't exist. I considered ReScript given my F# background (the two share a similar philosophy/syntax).
Now though, I'm trying to "pick the best tool for the job" instead of "use what you know". AFAIK if you want offline syncing, the best tool for the job is CouchDb/PouchDb. If you want to avoid the VDom, Svelte or SolidJS are the most popular options.
Please let me know if I'm mistaken - perhaps I'm too lost in my own head.
Ps. https://martendb.io/ and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=232... ( Microsoft sync framework)
Unfortunately MartenDB is on PostGres (which makes it unviable for electron-style clients) and Microsoft Sync Framework looks dead.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
I'm not an architect or senior developer, and not saying my take is better, but my considerations would be very different.
First, I would want to have a reasonably clear idea of what you want. My first idea when I hear 'stackoverflow for flash cards' is that you want collections of flash cards. I suppose you need some discovery mechanism, and ways for users to upload and share collections. You mention syncing, I suppose that means that every user always has the last version of a collection. What happens if a user deletes all or most of the flash cards in a collection? Will it be lost for the user or will (s)he be able to use an older snapshot of the collection. This would probably make things more complicated.
Then, I would consider the architecture. It is natural to go for a client-server architecture (and at this point I would draw two circles with two arrows pointing both ways between them). This simple architecture is enough for most applications.
The arrows in this diagram represent dataflow. The choices you make determine the actual data that is sent "over" the arrows. In this case you would need a strategy to distribute the flash cards and update them. So, you define the types of messages that the client and server need to handle and define some data structures for them.
So, the next step is to pick an implementation. An obvious choice for the arrows is HTTP. The client and server can then be implement in any programming language, not necessarily the same. The server can use some DB in the backend. So, again you need have some dataflow between db and server, so you can refine the diagram a bit, and define the data that goes over the arrows.
So slowly you can build up a detailed architecture. Note that it is mostly tech-agnostic, implementation should be possible in most programming languages and you can even make multiple types of client.
Even if you decide to redesign, with this method it is easier to keep your design clean and salvage some parts of protocols/structured that worked well enough.
In a sentence: better understanding of the domain/problem and changing my philosophy from "build it quickly" to "build it right".
To repeat myself a bit, I started off with the tech stack I was most familiar with (which is fairly uncontroversial) (F#/RDBMS/Blazor (okay I'm not too familiar with Blazor, but I know C#/dotnet a hell of a lot more than I know JavaScript)). I was originally following the maxim "build an MVP quickly", and I more or less did - I demoed that MVP in a YouTube video on the GitHub. However that advice is tactical - I eventually realized why that advice exists. Startups launch an MVP quickly to de-risk their idea and investigate whether a market exists. I am positive this market need exists. (The real risk is whether it's monetizable... but that's another topic.) I always intended this to be offline-friendly, but just assumed that could be something I could tack on after launching an MVP. I started to investigate that after making the GitHub video, and it turns out to be a significant technical challenge. This facilitated my move to event sourcing, which (in theory) can sync occasionally offline clients. Finally, I grew extremely annoyed at how long it was taking to build an event sourced system. Taking a lesson from my "tacking on offline-mode is easy" mistake, I decided to investigate how a plugin system would work. It turns out there are fundamental incompatibilities between Blazor and any reasonably powerful plugin system. Hence finally, my switch to a VDOM-less UI framework (SolidJS/Svelte) and TypeScript. This kicked me off the dotnet ecosystem (and F#), so I'm glad I decided to this this now rather than post-launch. I previously thought plugins could be something that I "just tacked on later."
> I would want to have a reasonably clear idea of what you want.
Begin with the end in mind :) For me I let the advice of "build an MVP quickly" overcome my better sensibilities. Now, I'm attempting to do "steel thread programming" - something that proves out the technology, before I even consider adding business value.
> What happens if a user deletes all or most of the flash cards in a collection? ... This would probably make things more complicated.
Yes - I have many thoughts on how to resolve this. Event sourcing is of great benefit here, but let's not get into that.
> It is natural to go for a client-server architecture
Yep, my GitHub video demoed this architecture. Unfortunately since what I'm building is going to have an offline mode, this architecture is insufficient.
Unfortunately the devil is in the details. You can describe all the high level arrows/diagrams you want - but as I found out when trying to do event sourcing, what really matters is the implementation. For example, to respond to, "you need have some dataflow between db and [client]"... this is a tough, nontrivial problem that PostGres and other RDBMses have significant problems with.
My adventures have led me to believe that when building out a project of any significant technical complexity - you should first start with a "steel thread". Don't just build out something of "minimal viability" - tacking on additional features that you know you want down the line should be proven out. Perhaps not implemented for real, but there should exist a technical proof of concept.
If I may, could I suggest Firebase as something to consider? It has automatic offline sync over indexdb, and you can subscribe your app to data changes to sync all devices etc.
It takes about a day to get your head around how it works, and given your use case you probably just need the Hosting, Firestore + Auth modules.
I use it a lot now in my side projects and it has been life changing in terms of taking away all of the boilerplate code and letting my just write app code.
For me, I launched a five projects in 2021 that were a mix of total flops and sorta-flops, and they all flopped for the same reason:
* Saascast.io (https://saascast.io/) -- revenue forecasting for Stripe-based SAAS businesses
* Offramp (https://offramphq.com/) -- Get automatic feedback from unsubscribing customers
* Donel.ist (https://donel.ist) -- like a TODO list, but more motivating
* Sandpiper (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- inventory tracking for people who hate inventory tracking
* Rent Robin (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- automatic rent collection for small businesses
Donel.ist is, arguably, a total success because it got me out of a moderate depression (being fired and immediately going into lockdown sucks) and back into the habit of building things. It actually has a fair number (50ish) daily users, but it's not monetized at all so in that sense it was a failure at launch!
Sandpiper and Rent Robin are spin-out projects from another, not-failed project -- and while they're not setting the world on fire, they see slow-but-steady growth and the folks who use them seem to love them.
The running theme between all of these is that the projects I build where I already had an audience -- even if that was just myself! -- are successful, and the ones that I built because I had a clever idea but no committed users are failures.
The five (six including Price Parrot) are just the failures from this year. I try to live by "fail fast"!
Can you update the link for rent robin? A quick google search points to a property management company from Kansas.
* "Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397720 (222 comments)
* "Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25580637 (582 comments)
* "Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838479 (74 comments)
A private social network (“private” in the sense that is a journaling web app that you share with close friends, not as “e2ee privacy”).
Zero interest on HN or Reddit or wherever. The few people who tried (including friends and family) never came back. The one paid user that I had tried to use the “import Facebook status” tool and it wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to fix (it worked in my machine) so I refunded them.
I used as personal journal for several months but eventually quit. The web app is still up because it’s basically using free tier for hosting, so I leave it there.
Lessons learned
Honestly, idk. Maybe that a new social network these needs a very clear unique spin. Generic “keep in touch with close friends and family” is not enough, any of the big ones can do that. WhatsApp and a closed profile on Instagram deliver that value already. The big ones that tried eventually failed (Path, famously, but also a recent one YC-backed, Coccoon).
”Pay a subscription so we don’t have to sell ads and your data” is not enough of a motivation for adoption.
For those that this would be enough, they also care about e2ee and decentralization (which I didn’t deliver because it was technically hard to do).
Social networks are expected to be on native mobile apps, not web apps, I think.
If anyone likes the UI of it and wants to use the frontend (React) for a web3 or any sort of e2ee backend, get in touch.
But I can see writing for folks with the same interests in tech, business, books or what not. So I am willing to open up my personal journals, but only to complete strangers (anonymously).
The small number of clients I got were—according to them—happy with my work, but the only word-of-mouth inquiry that ever came in was a coke-addled soi-disant "tech visionary" with little money and no plan. Everything else came through exhaustive outreach and prospecting. After a couple years, the whole feast-or-famine freelancer thing went full-famine and sent me running back toward full-time/in-house work with my tail between my legs and—evidently—a stink of desperation that took a couple more years to dissipate enough for me to actually find a job. A job that paid significantly less, had worse benefits, and put me in a much lower, less respected position in a much less interesting company, doing much less interesting (and much harder) work than the one I left years earlier. An objective professional regress from which I've yet to recover.
If I've learned a lesson it's that there must be reasons I'm unable to find good work that are too close to me for me to identify myself, and therefor frequent and informative feedback should be sought in high priority.
I saw a number of my peers take the same leap I did and find enormous and continuing success despite having less experience and, in some cases, what I felt was much lesser work to show. Of course their success has since enabled them to eclipse me, as my development has been retarded by several years of bad or no work now.
I want to move toward self-employment again, but have virtually no professional network after so much failure (again, despite all of my few customers verbalizing that they enjoyed working with me and were happy with what I did for them), and have no reason to believe I'd have greater luck in another venture.
I'm commenting to share my story, but am really here to read about what others have learned that I might be overlooking.
Anyway, I appreciate your candor.
The irony is, I spend almost all of my 'free time' pursuing other things, as my design career has always been the rather practical backup plan to the long-shot stuff I'd really like to do and am more passionate about.
I've often wondered if it's /that/ attitude that's actually hurting my cause, despite my best intentions, efforts, and positive professional demeanor, as one consistent trait among most of my peers is that they seem to live and breathe the biz. Tech design now is a lot different from when I first got into it, and I'm not really on board with the current direction of the industry. I try to 'be the change', but …
Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts. Definitely something for me to think about.
I did what I could for product-market fit and sales efforts, but I'm sure there's a ton more I could learn. It's difficult to fight the impulse to roll over and try to be anything-for-anyone when the work I want isn't coming in, even if I know that makes my offering unclear at best, unappealing at worst.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I did learn a lot from it, and it contributed majorly to every job I ever got, so it's not like it was a complete waste of time.
If I had to share a lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's IP.
To extend this lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's API, either.
Wasted a lot of time learning that lesson.
Although it was a completely different market, pretty much every social media platform does exactly this now with their APIs. First, they open their APIs up to everyone in order to gain marketshare. Once they've cornered the market, they make the APIs private or useless so that competitors can't leverage them.
However, the platform owners recognize the value that some companies using their APIs provide, so they hold those API consumers hostage and milk the best deal they can get out of them, and kick everyone else out. The only way to become a partner after that is to have enough funding to sign a nice deal with the platform owners, assuming those owners don't just copy potential partners' apps wholesale.
You can see this trend on Twitter or Instagram, where there are a handful of "blessed" companies that are allowed to automate and consume content on those platforms using the platform-supplied APIs. Companies that automate or consume content without being blessed are regularly blasted off of those platforms entirely, especially if they can be thought of as competitors.
I’m not a game or graphics guy, but that kind of stuff has always fascinated me.
People loved the idea! People paid for stickers! Profit was reasonable!
But, on the downside...
The equipment is horrifically expensive. Minimum order quantities from 3rd parties means that every idea has to be a killer. They are a novelty, and quite pricey, so you can't rely on repeat custom. Zero barrier to new entrants.
I was glad that I did it - and I learned a lot. Perhaps when I'm a tech-billionaire, I'll work on getting the price down ;-)
More details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/06/building-a-minimum-viable-l...
I had some custom shirts made once (same as the one Marty wears in Back to the Future) by the original manufacturer. I'm glad I only had 500 made because selling the last dozen was a real chore. I absolutely and totally exhausted the entire market.
I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a complete failure!
Even wrote a little post mortem at the time: https://vilva.io/blog/1-year-of-building-reflections.
Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part, growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your users!!
Once I decided I was going to kill the project, I removed the option to become a paying customer to not get more, waited for the last of my paying customers period to finish (it was a yearly subscription). And released an update that made the app work strictly locally, user data does not reach my server (edit: there is no server anymore) and stays in the user's browser (it works like that now).
Kept the data for a couple of weeks in case anyone wanted to recover it to help them use it with in the new "local" version, but enventually no one did, so finally I deleted my db. So right now I have no access whatsoever to that data.
For example, Google Photos would not allow any photo to be dated before the 1970 unix epoch. Picasa required an email address for anyone tagged, which was problematic for nineteenth century photos!
Short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAObvfnDso4 Presenting at the Personal Archiving Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzBkuXvqEo4
In hindsight, I really needed a co-founder, especially someone more of a "hustler". I also should have committed more fully to reaching a GO/NO-GO decision instead of letting the project peter out over a year while I gradually took on more consulting work. Should have bought some ads to determine market appetite.
Still, I'm mostly happy that I didn't pursue it too far. 1000 Memories (a YC company) was also in the space and had an only mediocre exit. I'm relieved that no other company seemed to knock it out of the park. But a little sad that so many old photos (and the stories behind them) are not getting digitized and may not get preserved.
Based on the Robinhood API, I attempted to merge Stocktwits API to create hype stock trend analysis platform. I wanted to combine both the buy side and hype side of these stocks into a very basic analytics platform. After Robinhood shut down their unofficial API my project was dead. Also Stocktwits are quite restrictive with their API use now, I believe.
Lesson learned: Platform risk is an obvious threat to your project. You can never go wrong by choosing freedom. Build something from the ground up and if you are relying too much on other people's product make sure you recoup investments fast as possible.
In 1 week of launching we got around 5000 registered users, 1000s of items listed, and steady flow of traffic.
Made the mistake of using a VPS provider in Australia, a week after launch… bam servers died.
Went to restore the backup only to find out the “backups included” from the hosting provider was not “backups included unless you tick a hidden box”.
They claimed that they paid $1000s to a data recovery company to restore the VM images but I doubt it.
Will never trust someone else to do what I should have been doing on day one.
Started a side project (https://javfilms.com) that aggregates popular Japanese adult videos (NSFW site by the way).
It didn't fail, but it never picked up to a substantial point.
If any undergrads are reading, the short advice is - don't start a PhD unless you are very good or your supervisor is very good. Look at introductory courses for PhDs to get a feel for it. Research is a whole different ball game than studying for exams etc.
Then only to see a month or whatever later a similar idea posted to HN with them saying how they have customers and inflow. Could I have done the same? Maybe. Was it just because they could market well? Maybe. Will I ever really know? No. Cause I never tried. Will I ever learn my lesson? I can only hope.
I'm no founder (never successfully launched anything that has generated financial gain) and have only lurked in the shadows, listened and read what others have tried. Both on the failures and successes.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that there can always be a possibility for a product in a crowded market (it will be more difficult for sure) if it solves a niche problem that OTHERS have as well. It is not enough to assume that others know or even have this problem that your product solves. So first step should be to talk to potential customers before working on anything.
By this point you should also know what it is that you are making and why it matters for others (the value proposition). Start working on that first.
- Don't create a landing page for a product you don't have.
- Don't select colors and fonts for days when there is no product.
- Don't do SEO when you have nothing to sell.
Be ready to have it all fail as most startups do, and try to minimize the amount of lost time that goes into these endeavours.
And keep on trying. It is what I have been doing.
I brought one person in to work on that with me, they proceeded to buy a domain for the top product name we were considering (canitake.com) within the first day. It was wonderful to get that red flag so soon, I stopped working with them, and abandoned the project. Losing the project was a little unfortunate, the data brought good questions someone might want to ask their doctor about; but knowing what I know now about "doing your own research" a lot of people would not have used this as a way to prepare to talk to a professional and would have interpreted the data themselves.
Not working with that acquaintance again was invaluable, they burned their way through the industry for the next decade. They could have messed up projects I actually cared about.
I understand this may be a meme, but did you actually take this as a serious red flag, and is this why you stopped working with them, or were there other factors?
It showed they couldn't communicate well, couldn't work in stealth mode, couldn't focus on building/proving out the mvp.
Other factors are just hindsight/observing them the decade after. Two of those factors might be. 1. Repeatedly quitting contracts (if it's not a good fit fine, if it's never a good fit maybe you're missing skills to complete a project).
2. Comments/behaviors that illustrated they would have been a poor manager if we scaled/inability to be wrong.
For me, other developers and contributors have been one of the most important factors for success/completing projects/keeping clients (in the contracting space). So I consider this an important lesson I was fortunate to learn early. I don't know who I would be working with now if I had failed to keep great talent around me (or for that matter, what skills I would not have developed).
I learned that flashy websites can't quite sell everything.
I wanted to gather cool and unpopular places from a neighborhood, like old castles. I started this project in 2015 and I’m still maintaining it, and from time to time I’m doing fixes.
What I learned?
Technical: SPA got terrible SEO, only a few crawlers executes JS on page to actually read data from the page (or at least show the place image instead the app image from og:image) I tried many times to add some pre-rendering and make it hybrid, but I failed. Eventually, I converted app to NextJS and I added dynamic og:images (using my other project: https://bannerly.io) and number of impressions and clicks increased mostly thanks to sharing places by people on social media. I also plan to use no-code automation tool (probably https://integromat.com it’s cheaper than Zapier and probably more powerful) to post places to Instagram every day.
There is no money/revenue in this project but I like to play around with it anyway. It would be cool earn at least for maintenance costs on it but I don’t have any idea. I was thinking about selling tickets online for places where the tickets are required but no one is interested in this idea.
Non-technical: There is a very small subset of people who would like to use travel apps. It’s easier to use Google or local guides to find great destinations.
I was the engineer (and briefly CTO), and the foremost thing on my mind was marketing and promotion. I was constantly told that word-of-mouth and natural virality was how things worked in the Web 2.0 era, so put it out of my mind and focused on the technical stuff.
I eventually got fired (justly so; I was good enough to get a personal project off the ground, but not FAANG material at the time), and watched as they squeezed out a redesign and an app and eventually sold out as an acquihire. (I’m told that means it’s “not a failed startup” but sure doesn’t feel like it.)
If I had it all to do again, as soon as it was apparent that I had reached the limits of what I could do as an engineer, I would have flipped to being the hype man for the product. Someone should have been hitting the pavement every day making connections at GQ, Supreme, HypeBeast, etc. My partners say we crumpled because we couldn’t build another round of funding; I say we couldn’t get the funding because of dumb naive belief in word-of-mouth.
—
coda: after that, I returned to another side project, a visual RSS reader for graphic designers and artists. Same problem, no plan to promote the damn thing.
In addition to this such an app is very content driven and the lack of being able to use anything other than public domain content really limited me. It's still up in a semi working state https://unchart.io. Personally it achieved my language learning goal as I was able to read most of the first Harry Potter in french so I will probably continue to add more features as a personal project.
The iPhone wouldn't be where it is today if Steve let the focus groups create v1.
1. Not shipping fast enough. This one is standard startup advice. 2. No traction for the amount of time we worked on it. Probably caused by not shipping fast enough and not talking to users properly. 3. No conviction. I didn't really care enough about the problem to go all in. TBH, I just wanted something to work on to put on the resume. 4. No competitive advantage. There are a tonne of personalised news apps out there. We had no differentiating factor. 5. No realistic plan to monetise. 6. Finally too many co-founder disagreements as a result of everything so we called it quits.
I don't regret the experience because it taught me a lot about what not to do in my current project.
I took it pretty far. My cofounder had a Phd in Computational Linguistics, we had professors from U of M as advisors, I got us into an accelerator, we built a working prototype, and I had several big ad companies interested.
The problem was that Duolingo came out at the exact time. Then due to our concept being immersive / media heavy, it required a lot of funding to build a v1. Ultimately, investors didn't think we'd be able to compete with Duolingo and we couldn't raise the funding.
I started the company almost 10 years ago now.
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SavvyLanguages/
I built a programmable and multiplayer capable way of doing geocaching. I keep it online because I still think it's neat, but back then I didn't think of any reasonable way to monetize or market it. It got some interest from the geocaching community, but IIRC links to it got banned from some geocaching forums because they wouldn't allow third party tools. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I guess: 1) Think about what you build before you do. 2) Make sure the possibility to make money exists at all. 3) Don't rely on third parties. 4) Use what you've learned in your next project
- https://caseconverter.pro/app - was more experimentation than anything else, paste a JSON and get converted keys
- https://getworkrecognized.com - Could never reach market-fit with that. Wanted to really focus on the employee sides with brag documents but no employee will ever pay by themselves for such a tool
- http://linkedium.com - was a LinkedIn Scheduling tool, was just annoyed at some point with that. Might spin it up again this year. So never launched
What I learnt: I am really bad at Marketing and Sales and have a lot to learn there. Will focus on other target customers and trying to niche down with the projects I am working on right now and want to work on soon. Maybe finding someone who is good at it and partnering up might be something to look into.
Also, SEO and content is working to generate traffic. If you can convert the traffic it is a goldmine. The Google Search Console for getworkrecognized looks promising honestly.
I'm actually planning to start working on it a little bit more since it seems that "self hosted video streaming" is still pretty in-demand. I'm probably not going to be spending too much time on the actual features and functionality since as far as I'm concerned that's done at this point. Mostly just packaging it up so it's easier for people to run it themselves and hack on it.
My lessons:
1) Keep your day job, most projects fail
2) Fail fast, 20% effort gets you 80% of the project and that's when you ship it to see if it works, doesn't have to be perfect
3) Don't hang on to failures, move on
It turns out that complaining about team balance after the match is a feature, not a bug, of the experience for most people and our app was just extra work.
Just this week my kids basketball coach is trying get all the parents to "use the app" for scheduling and announcements and its just NOT working so back to email which works for everyone.
As both a player and in the past as a coach, my experience with "sports team apps" has been that nobody wants to be the end user's IT department and on any team with more than X players the odds of someone's phone being messed up approaches 100%. "Oh I have an android and you have an iphone so I can't help you" and its just infinite headaches.
If you could find a way to "do the sports team app" thing but over multiple incompatible messenger chatbots or over a web page it might get more traction.
If apps "just worked", which they certainly do not, it would be nice. An app-like experience over a web page might work.
Just use email and/or text messaging.
So if you're one of the minority of parents smart enough to import a calendar into their google (or other) calendar, they can get the game schedule there, but the less competent (to put it nicely) can continue to get a stream of emails or even plain old text messages of upcoming games. Or they could join a FB group or a different platform.
Or there's people out there whom could never handle installing or using slack, but if you could spam them text messages maybe they could still participate, or even participate fully.
Nobody wants to work in IT, especially not for free.
We went thru an internet era, then a social era, then the era of notifications, and I have a gut feeling the next era is going to be something like smooth automatic operations across semi-hostile deeply silo'd platforms, but it'll have a cooler name. FB wants to replace the internet with FB, but literally nobody else wants that, repeat for all platforms, meanwhile you get 5 users together somehow you'll get 6 preferred platforms, the next era will be anti-vendor lockin. People old as me will remember when Ma Bell provided both your phone service and your physical phone and times were better post-divestment and that's probably how we're going to look at the past once we're beyond the era of the social media silo. Rather than "the world is viewed thru my website for my profit" the future will be something like "the world is viewed thru my REST API or maybe many other API providers" And where the profit comes from is mysterious. Likely the gateway tech will be workable microtransactions. Such that every time Sally Softball Mom checks the team schedule she will get billed and you will get a hundredth of a cent, which isn't going to scare away 10M daily users but would be a nice side gig for you personally. Assuming you get 10M DAU of course.
However, I launched during the 2008 financial meltdown. The only serious investors I could gather would eventually realize the tech could be used to create Deep Fake Porn, which I refused to pursue. VCs thought the tech was science fiction and suspected fraud. (Remember, this was '08 - the term deepfake has 7 years before going mainstream.) Every film studio and music label I contacted, all already familiar with VFX technology, wanted to use the tech for promoting media products, but none wanted to invest to create a production scale studio (because they were familiar with the lack of VFX studio success stories). I got letters of intent from every studio & label to use the production system once a public scaled system was in place, but anyone willing to finance the studio insisted in also producing porn. Once again, I refused.
By 2015 I was personally bankrupt; I tried to pivot to making game characters of real people, so gamers could realistically be themselves or look like celebrities if they wanted. Previously, I'd been on the OS team of the first PlayStation. I know a lot of people in senior places in the game biz. Every game studio and publisher I met, except one, simply wanted the tech for free and refused negotiation. Managed a few clients, continually adding features, but never breaking even. My income was primarily from doing other startups financials, business plans, and software contracts. Towards the end of 2015 I sold the patents to escape bankruptcy, and took a job writing facial recognition software. I'd been principal engineer for that company through three generations of their enterprise FR system until last spring when I quit to return to school and deep dive on machine learning.
The twitter feed is all that is left for the public: https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media I still have all the tech, and I'm working with a new startup to bring all this back to life.
My mistake was building it totally in secret for most of its life. I worked on it for years focusing on adding features that maybe nobody wanted without validating the product/market fit or generating any buzz. By the time I was "ready" someone had gained way more steam on their own EV remake, even getting the author of Override to endorse it, so the fact that I had a working prototype didn't really matter, the community that I thought would be receptive wasn't interested.
I learned that you need to build something worth playing first, including some kind of game loop, before you try to get people to play it. Turns out noodling around with a hacky prototype isn't something people find exciting even if the whole community is centered around noodling around with mods and hacking. People won't mod a game they don't love in the first place.
Since this project, I've committed to building smaller prototypes and validating concepts before I go all-in on building something polished and content rich, and thought I haven't shipped anything this big since, I have met my personal goals.
Full retrospective: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/08/flythrough-space-retrospect...
The conclusion: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/04/dont-remake-an-old-game/
ParkShark was a parking space sharing iOS app. The technology was sound but the market timing was a little early. We were even talking to some larger delivery companies about a business-side component. The product failed because the two founders, myself and a friend, are engineers through-and-through. We just didn't have the passion for the business side of things to really make it happen.
Got some buzz when i first announced it but things went cold after that. I still get a few user signups occasionally. Need to do some work on it but my mind is wandering off to other projects.
Edit: lessons learned 1. I probably should have had a mobile version of the webapp at launch. 2. Marketing is hard
1. an 'abstract visual debugger'
2. a new kind of program editor
—and I made the same critical mistake in both cases: I didn't treat the programs as sufficiently exploratory. I reached a point in each where I thought the idea was good enough that with my limited resources I should jump directly to building the real/production version.
Both were far too big/complex for me to build production versions of alone, though I could've iterated on design issues through prototyping and probably attracted investors to build for real.
Looking back I think part of what underlay this poor decision was partly a form of perfectionism, and partly that I didn't know good tech for prototyping at the time.
[1] http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd [2] http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext
Spent about a year building the absolute best text-message short-code system that let you run groups, competitions, surveys, take payments. Kept adding features and yak-shaving and forgot to actually sign up any customers. First month the product was finally "finished" we ran out of money for our connection to the SMS network and that was the end of it.
One more.. does this count as a failure?
Made a torrent site for TV shows. Took $13m in revenue. Law enforcement said "naughty, naughty". Closed site. No more revenue.
Of course, the donations vastly outweighed the actual hosting costs and the excess goes into the pockets of the site owners.
It was designed to use multiple IP communications protocols and to present a unified view of contacts' presence across all the ways they could communicate.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20190528152755/https://www.theme... desktop app for local WordPress development, built on top of a CLI I made. Had a few hundred MRR within a couple weeks. It used Vagrant under the hood (right when Docker was blowing up), app was built on React (in Coffeescript <3). But ultimately I left because of conflicts with co-founders and burnout. Fun project -- probably could have gone somewhere.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20180809151636/https://alpacaget... web app to discover and book pre-planned weekend getaways w/ itinerary. Couldn’t get traction or sales. Probably needed to do content marketing, but my wife and I had just had our first child at the time, so we ultimately shut it down due to lack of time (she did most of the getaway hunting, I automated price discovery.) It was a 5k line index.js Node app. XD
Seeing how big WordPress has become, I think it would.
I originally started it to scratch my own itch. I wanted a notification from my temperature sensor when my new born son's room got too cold (we didn't have AC, so we left the window open).
I knew solutions already existed, but I wanted to get better at programming. Which I did.
Pushback has a little bit of everything and has been rewritten 3 times going from:
- go to rails to hybrid
- puppet to k8s to Ansible
- most react native libraries and their successors
- Hugo to Gatsby
After all of that I thought, hmm maybe I should make this a SaaS. That sparked interest in business development, which I learned a ton. Did startup school 2 times, but still didn't make hardly any money.
Eventually I cut my losses and made something new, Tellspin. I did everything opposite of pushback with my new product.
- landing page first
- didn't write any code of the actual product until I had initial user interest
- chose boring tech
- stopped chasing shiny things
- spent a large portion of time doing marketing rather than building the product.
Tellspin has made way more than pushback in a third of the time. In fact, I don't think I'm even close in terms of hours spent. I'm pretty my hourly rate on pushback's is like $0.001 per hour.
With tellspin, all I did instead was focus on getting interest, talking to users, and distribution.
When a customer gave some feedback, I spent more time on the product. Then went back to marketing.
At this point, I'd say I've spent about 50% time on product, 50% on getting the word out there (blog posts, SEO, guest posts, etc)
Hopefully that's helpful to the ambitious people out there. Your product might be great, but if you focus too much on tech, no one will find out about it.
I wrote a detailed one year retrospective on tellspin's blog if there's continued interest in what I did. Nothing special really, just talking to customers and solving what problem they have.
The biggest learning is business partners -- choose wisely. My business partner is still a friend, but he didn't produce and it ended up me just doing all the code, all the marketing, so I asked myself why should I continue if I'm doing all the work and he doesn't have the time. The other big learning was making sure to do proper validation before building or spending your time on something. I took the word of my friend because he was an expert in the space. We had no problem getting people to sign up and literally give us their API keys (at first), but they wouldn't respond back to emails - which shows it's not a huge pain point.
I'm now working on a few other ideas on the side but making sure to do proper validation before building.
The first is the 3rd party advice is what makes it valuable, and anything beyond basic compliance is economically wasted. Second was security governance people and consultants jobs depend on the flexibility to make their own representations in a narrative. “Ur doing it wrong, fixed it for you,” is simply not the sound basis of a product.
Other related lessons include: Risk is future value and present leverage. Your vulnerable dependency is someone’s optimized business model. Principal/agent problems aren’t actually problems to be solved, they are management consulting opportunities. A cluttered spreadsheet is someone’s job, that is someone else’s headcount, in still someone else’s budget, as part of yet someone else’s opex projection, provided as part of a financing, that yields someone’s commission, carry, and management fee.
Looking forward to next play, which one hopes will be smarter. :)
A very important lesson that I learned during three agonizing years as a management consultant with a large IT outsourcer.
The project consisted of a frame on an alt/az base to hold the lens, arms from teh frame to position it's focal point on can that had been crushed vertically and then slid down a rack on a couple of steel rails. And the whole thing held over a bucket of water to catch the melting aluminum and make aluminum "drops".
Unfortunately, the aluminum oxidizes way faster than it melts and so my contraption basically turned cans into a crushed can with a black dusty hole in the middle!
It wasn't until I saw the King of Random video on making a smelter out of a bucket that I actually had something that could melt aluminum in a reasonable way (at the cost of a few gallons of propane)
Not a regimen I recommend but as vices go it was relatively benign. A couple of years ago I stopped all consumption, and then when started dieting added a '1 per mile walked' incentive program for myself. Very effective at insuring I got all the walking in I needed to in order to hit my goals.
Do you ever get weird stomach aches?
Funny story though, I was rather heavy and a regular blood donor. One of the things they do here when you donate (or used to) was test your cholesterol level and report it back to you in the mail. Mine was always in the "good" range. So I got a call one day from the hospital where I normally donate (it is a research hospital) asking if I would be interested in taking part in a study and I agreed. When I went in for the interview it turns out they were looking for fat people with low cholesterol. They paid me $50 to participate which consisted of a blood test and a notebook. They asked me to write down everything I ate for a week, then came back, got another blood test and another notebook. They looked at what I wrote in the first notebook, asked me to add a couple of things which were different vegetables as I recall. Then sent me on my way for another week. End of the week turn in my second notebook and collect my $50.
The first question from the grad student who collected my first notebook was, "Did you really drink this much soda this week?", answer yes. Second time I turned in my notebook he looked at me and said "You drink this much EVERY week?" and I said "Yup, pretty much."
He was surprised I could sleep at night with that much caffeine but it wasn't a problem for me.
A power user tire search with affiliate links. I did make some money off it but got super discouraged when I realized people were using the site to find tires, then searching for coupons or discounts, and my commission was being harvested by shitty SEO sites.
My grad research was on AI and robotics for elderly. I thought I knew my audience. How wrong I was. I didn't even reach out to talk to my audience, for crying out loud.
10 years later when I was working on a project for smallholder farmers in Mozambique. I made the point of moving myself to Africa and working alongside them for weeks. https://www.quantisan.com/facebook-loving-farmers-of-mozambi...
Our tech was genuinely better. Didn't matter. You can't compete with Steam.
You'd probably have to do the Epic approach to even have a fighting chance: give out AAA games every month. Or the itch approach: lower the bar completely.
Our plan was instead to create a solid client that integrated all of the other platforms into one, without even needing to have them installed. But out of the hundred or so people we asked, I could count on one hand how many actually cared.
If it had been successful wed introduce our own store as just another backend, low dev cut so we'd compete, and then subsidize sales with some investment later on.
It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the market despite having terrible software.
But what software do they need?
Personally I just need to buy, download and play some game
it annoys me when I buy games on steam and want to play it and it tells me to create some ubisoft / epic games account, like what the hell.
https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
If I were making the pitch today it, you’d call it a tightly integrated Schoology + Teachers Pay Teachers.
At the time, I was thinking in terms of a complete product to make the entire public school system better from the lives of teachers at the core. I should have separated the concept into smaller MVPs and we would have beaten TPT to market by a couple of years while having income to fund our other projects.
I’m happy to see that TPT has been able to find success though. I think they fill a huge need and it’s cool that they’re using Elixir now.
Included mobile IDE, run-as-you-type debugger, and an app store.
Google blocked it, for the reason I never got to investigate, because by that time I got rich from other projects.
My original motivation was hearing Chamath speak on Kara Swisher's podcast and I loved him. I wanted to hear more of him but realized the only way to do so was to search his name. This was fraught for one big reason, many, many podcasts include his name in the description, even if he isn't a guest (ex try searching Elon Musk!). So I built a quick site and used ListenNotes.com to create custom feeds. I started with tech personalities since that is my area of interest and everyday I would conduct a search on ListenNotes and add to the custom feeds.
ListenNotes does allow you to track who subscribes but it's inaccurate. I did see people start to subscribe to various feeds. However it was very hard to receive feedback. The other problem is it was really time intensive. I would spend about 30 minutes each morning going through all these personalities trying to find new episodes. Eventually I cut the time down as there are some people that don't go on podcasts very much (ex. Andrew Mason) and some people that are on podcasts a lot (Harley Finkelstein) so I adjusted how often I would search. 20-30 minutes might not seem like a lot, but I have a full time job, a family, other projects. My end goal was to insert ads into these feeds but never got the traction to get there. I eventually stopped updating the feeds and I should update the site to reflect that (although the site doesn't appear to be working right now anyways).
I still think this is a good idea but there is probably a better way for it to be done.
High acquisition costs and high churn meant the unit economics made no sense.
If you have a subscription model and you're dependent on ads for acquisition, it's not enough to believe that with enough optimisation your business model will start to make sense. If it doesn't make sense from day one, it's highly unlikely there's a viable, reliable business there.
It actually works pretty good ( member management for sport clubs), but I'm going to turn it off.
Only 1 club is using it consistently, while i didn't have to do anything for it since 2014 ( except moving it off Azure to reduce costs).
Failed to gain any traction, had an email list of prospects but it didn't have any results.
Sad thing is, sport clubs don't have much to spare. So I gave up on this project.
I had the same conclusion working on a motorsport app. Most people in grassroots motorsport put all their money into getting onto the track, and there really aren't any needs they would want solved for ~$15/month on a phone that they can't solve with a spreadsheet.
My second failed project was RingAd.net - an android app which gave you coupons for listening to advertisement jingles as your mobile ringtone. Some media coverage - http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/download-a-free...
My third failed project was a Board/Card game, it also failed to pick up after initial buzz. https://yourstory.com/2014/06/geekybuddha/amp
botrank.pastimes.eu
Parses reddit comments looking for "good bot" or "bad bot" and keeps track of bot score. It's actually quite popular because it spams reddit when you write good/bad bot, where its not banned.
Lessons learned: Gets a few k hits a day, but that drops off if the bot doesn't spam reddit. Very fickle users. How do I monetize this?
stox.dev
A stock screener terminal with auto-complete. you can write things like:
filter profile.industry contains "auto"
filter quote.price < quote.priceAvg50 * 0.9
lowPe = quote.pe < 10 and quote.pe > 0
Lesson learned: No market for this or didn't do enough marketing. It was fun to build a mini grammar parser and learn how to use monaco editor although I wish I built a more formal compiler
chartit.io
Create simple charts in browser with data pasted from excel or csv. Basically typed out and exposed chartsjs and google chart library in UI
Lessons learned: I suck at SEO and marketing. Who actually wants to use this anyway?
deep-chats.com
Transcribe audio or video using aws speech recognition. Charge using credits.
Lessons learned: Again, unable to find customers. Got too far deep into the output editor and should have scrapped or scaled that down
There are more...
RomyLMS.com - same thing here, I built training software that I use to run University level courses for my employees. Employees. I converted it to software as a service, and no one used it.
My lesson from both is that if you are not going to be putting full-time marketing and sales effort into a software as a service, you'll have a very hard time beating established competitors.
I think that the software as a service area now has started to become saturated as people view it as easy money. I think the true easy money right now is actually in the construction trades and manufacturing. Building skills in each of those areas will reap long-term rewards for those who do so.
Next time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to do administration and taxes!
Or marry them (works for me). ;0)
1. weight loss : I seem to have bounced up and down, lost some, then gained, then lost and then gained. Looking back it was a combination of loosing motivation to go to gym and eating clean. The key lessons seems to be "eating clean food - that tastes good and is healthier" that might mean I need to cook more at home. Second factor is consistent exercise, even if I don't go to gym, need to get enough cardio/strength training.
2. creating and shipping side projects around magic/design/code. - Being distracted with too many shiny projects and setting very high standard (aka perfection) before I ship anything led me to endlessly procrastinate. Next year the mantra is 'laser focus on few and ship'.
1. Dating site targeting my community in early 2000s. It started to gain traction but users were purely mean to each others. I could not moderate it and didn't wanted to deal with drama. Shut it down.
2. Craig's List clone with additional features such as social graph using Facebook Connect late 2000s. Idea was to feel safe when buying or selling, but it never got enough users. Should have marketed locally harder but didn't had enough money.
3. Consulting business. Early 2010s. Bad at networking. Unable to sell at high enough markup.
4. Android and iOS apps. Got bored with dev.
The biggest lesson for me is to stop chasing money and find something I truly care about. Focus on one thing. Keep day job to pay bills.
It still gets a sign-up or so a week and 1.5k visitors a month from Google but it’s far from where I wanted it to be.
I think the biggest learning is that trying to work full time at a new job (moved from FAANG to a scale up), raise a young kid, maintain a relationship with your partner, workout occasionally, and work on a side project all at the same time is near impossible. At least for me :)
Basically the idea was to create an app where you would get an article stripped of its title, author, source info, etc. Then you would place a bet on whether the article was from a right- or left-affiliated news source. The goal was to provide an alternative business model for journalists/news orgs, ease the polarization in this country, and have a non-advertising basis for social media.
It failed because it never got users, it was my first project so there were quite a bit of missing features, and I really don't know jack about running... well, anything.
But it was a good programming experience.
To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:
1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.
2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1
3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1
4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.
5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.
6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.
I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!
Which is to say, with the benefit of hindsight, I did not do sufficient product-market discovery and validation upfront before I went "all in" on it.
I/we got sales but it never came within even an order of magnitude of how much FT engineering salary I was missing out on. By some metrics it was a success but by net USD impact on me it was a fail.
Was a great experience and I learned a ton though.
datingchances.com
My job was project management and functional validation.
But I dabbled in UI design and coding as a hobby. I flexed a bit.
I impressed the stakeholders with a good UI mockup. Tech team said that level of UI customization is impossible. I delivered a working prototype of customized site on the same platform. They had to accept the requirements, grudgingly I imagine.
I had a small team to do testing. I went aggressive and did a lot of testing myself. Tech team delivered a lot but did not have top notch tech people who were invested. They did stuff like security by obscurity and I called them out. I logged dozens and dozens of bugs. Resulted in extended timelines.
I thought I was ensuring a robust product that everyone would be proud of at launch. Tech team probably hated me. Product was finally ready for UAT.
Client team had a reorg and leadership change. This project was no longer a pet showcase project for new leadership. It was put on back burner and then shelved. Never launched.
Didn't make any friends.
Lesson: Avoid big-bangs. Launch MVP and iterate. Make friends. You don't have to be a Rockstar - aim for normal success.
You are only allowed to post no more than 5 turtles per 24 hour period.
Learning - no one really needs help doing this :)
I never did anything with the SQL that was generated
An app that would let hospitality workers pick up any shift from any venue at any time. The problem with that is, since its a platform I needed a lot of supply (restaurants) to encourage the demand (workers) side. We even decided to pivot to a 3 staged launch (stage 1, we'd let restaurants come on board for free, stage 2, we'd let them pay their own workers through the app, stage 3 we open the flood gates and let the workers pick up shifts from places other then their own restaurant)
What did I learn?
- Don't work on problems that you are not 100% passionate about. I met the other co-founder through a work/equity deal where my agency would take some $ plus percentage equity to finish the app.
- Before trying to solve a problem, ask if the problem is worth solving or not (product design), being a technical person, its easy to jump straight into the bells & whistles of a product without thinking about _who_ is going to use it, and if there is even a need for it? We can pick the shiniest tools and the best tech, but if no one is going to use the product, none of that matters.
- We ignored competition, thinking was since we are not _just_ a scheduling app, we can ignore the biggest competitor in the space and still make a scheduling app. Turns out the competition just rolled out a new feature that lets venues handle the HR side of their business as well.
A platform that would let kitchen owners rent out their un-used kitchen space for some $$ on the side. Kind of like Airbnb, but for kitchens (I know that should have run alarm bells). I joined the project after it was already started by the 2 previous co-founders (both non-technical). Idea was to let new business owners that were just starting out, easily rent kitchens from other people for a couple of hours, days, weeks at a time.
What did I learn?
- Market research is important, don't skimp over it. I realized a couple months into the work that most restaurant owners don't want to deal with renting their kitchens anyways. There are specific ghost kitchens in almost every city now so it's cheaper/easier for people looking to start their culinary experience to go through them instead of renting a given person's kitchen.
- After doing some back of the napkin calculations, ghost kitchens on their own was a small industry to be in (don't remember the exact numbers, but it was peaking out around 1 million / year)
- You can not steamroll health/safety restrictions, and every state, city, county has their own permits for renting kitchens to handling food. This often times requires the person seeking to rent a kitchen to have their own business permits, to keep track of all those things and enforce them was too much to handle.
- Competition already exists out there, and its mainly catered towards community kitchens. - Don't become partners with people that are not going to have skin in the game. Although I will digress going into details here, but if they don't have skin in the game (even as non-technical co-founders), they will treat it as a side project.
Main takeaway: - Trust your gut, vet ideas, vet people
- An mvp glued together is better than a highly scalable/distributed/serverless/${new_shiny_tech}
I could go on and on about the problems:
1) I (and the two other programmers I was working with) had a job. The pace at which we rolled out features and bugfixes was glacial, even when customers were clamoring for them. And this statement is just about improving the app; it doesn't even consider the other tasks involved in running a business, on which I was even less excited to spend effort.
2) Pharmacy management software is a fragmented market, and almost every player is impossible to integrate with. Since our product didn't do the insurance, billing, inventory management, etc. it meant we had to integrate with them. We started out by telling people to run them side by side and manually make changes to both our app and that of their vendor. Not a great pitch. Looking back, I wish I'd invested in this from the get-go, instead of trying to do it after building the app.
3) The product required pharmacies to change their entire workflow to even realize the benefits. Which is fine, but we sold it as a software thing that worked magically, and didn't invest at all in helping customers use it successfully.
4) Our cofounders (pharmacists) were not interested in running a SaaS company. They viewed the app as their strategic advantage in their own pharmacy, and dragged their feet on the customer outreach we hoped they would take ownership of. I felt like they were actively working against me. This was the biggest issue, and what caused me to finally decide to close it down. Someone else in this thread made a statement of "I went from the prototype guy to the only one who cared." and that statement really resonates with me. In retrospect, I had the opportunity to structure the deal as more of a product/customer one than a cofounder one, and I wish I had been smarter about that.
I still think it was a great idea, and we built a slick app. I just failed on the sales and customer outreach side of the business. The app still exists in a zombie state, and a few customers still use and pay for it. I haven't done anything on it other than renew SSL certs since 2019.
FlowNet (early 90s), a high-speed (500 Mb/s) local area network designed to compete with FDDI, Fast Ethernet, and mainly ATM which was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. Offered QoS guarantees back when that was a big deal. Died because gigabit ethernet happened instead.
IndieBuyer (2003-2006) - a marketplace for independent movies on DVD. The angle was that we would provide recommendations, and anything you bought from the recommended list would come with a money-back guarantee. Recommendations would be provided by an algorithm that matched people with similar tastes in films as measured by the ones they returned. Died because streaming.
Evryx (2006-2008) - reverse image search. We held the patent. Died because the tech founder went non-linear and vetoed a funding round in 2008 right before the crash.
iCab (2008) - a competitor to Uber, launched at the same time as Uber and for much the same reason. But Uber thought of using black cars and I didn't so they won and I lost.
Virgin Charter (2008-2009) - Originally called Smart Charter, it was on-line marketplace for charter jets, acquired pre-launch by Richard Branson. Failed because Virgin didn't understand how the business model was supposed to work and tried to remake the company in its own image as a popular consumer-facing brand. Interesting aside: our bizdev guy was Jody Sherman [1].
Founders Forge (2009-2013) - Like Angel List but with financial services that were intended to be a wedge to launch a digital currency. (This was before BitCoin was a thing.) Failed because I couldn't find a bank that would work with me.
Spark Innovations (2014) - Launched with a product that slurped up large Excel spreadsheets and let people manipulate them like databases using an intuitive web interface. Failed when all three of our launch customers rejected the MVP without telling us why. Tried pivoting with a crypto product (a small cheap HSM), but turns out that's a very hard market to penetrate.
Bonus failure:
In 2007 I decided to diversify my risk by investing in real estate. Got into a New Zealand condo development in Queenstown and learned the hard way that you can lose all your money in real estate if you are leveraged and a historic market crash happens right as you are ready to break ground.
Despite all this, I have a great life. I've met some great people, learned a lot, built some cool shit, and generally had a good time despite learning the hard way that I'm not a particularly good entrepreneur. Main lesson learned: don't let failure get you down. You never know when the odds are going to tilt your way. The only ting that guarantees failure is not trying.
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[1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jody-sherman-ecomom-2013-...