Why my projects keep failing | Hacker News Reader

Why my projects keep failing

adayinthelifeof.nl

183 pointsjaytaph52 comments

This is great. I love it when there’s honest post from a builder.

The explanation for failure is clear to me. None of these products as they are constructed are customer-lead. They don’t start with product market fit. As crazy as it hounds the number one reason startups fail is a lack of customers.

You love building the technical solution. You want to have market success.

But your passion is probably not talking to the customer, gathering requirements, or doing promotional talks and webinars.

You need a product or marketing focused partner to handle that side of things. I’ve always looked at the ideal team as being three roles: ops, product and maker. The details, the customer and requirements and the build team each are critical to getting product market fit and that’s just everything when it comes to this stuff. I would just focus on finding a partner in crime because your are obviously a wonderfully talented engineer.

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur likes to say the trick to starting a successful project is to “find someone who is bleeding and has their wallet out.”

The successful SME owners I've known have worked in an industry for some time, and have found (often by accident) a profitable niche or pain point. If they needed to build something they've done it themselves with a "For Dummies" book on their lap or hired a student or junior dev for peanuts, but the technical side is very much an afterthought. One or two I know started with just an Excel spreadsheet and a Rolodex of contacts (or the modern equivalents).

Sure their "solutions" were a pile of technical debt held together with duct tape and a prayer, but they got profitable to the point they could afford professional developers to build something more sustainable.

An experienced developer should be able to out-compete these guys out of the park - they would be able to build a solid solution, or at least an MVP with a good foundation, on day 1. But it's quite rare to find a developer with both coding experience and the insights and contacts in a specific industry. Often when I see a developer running a successful SAAS, here or on Indie Hackers, they tend to be selling pickaxes and shovels back to the developer industry such as web analytics, IDE plugins, books, etc. because that's what they know.

This was one of my dumbest failures:

http://www.dudefactory.com/

(it has no SSL cert, it uses Flash which is 110% dead)

It was launched at the height of AIM/MSN Messenger/etc. I thought we could charge $1/£1/€1 per picture.

Two things: none of our target market had money (you could pay by SMS as well as card, but no-one was doing that), and the avatars just weren't attractive - the women wanted ones that looked like dolls, not weird cartoons. Tried pivoting to AdSense supported and make about $30 a month IIRC.

This is https://picrew.me which is popular enough.

That's neat, thanks for the link.

You were just so ahead of the whole NFT curve.

Yeah, 20 years later and Paris Hilton would have been showing off her Dudette on talk shows.

Someone posted a link today about the 4 Ps - which dredged up a few synapses from my college days and the realisation that all the post-2000 advice people have been trying to learn has always been known

- Product

- Price

- Placement

- Promotion

as much as the MBA is maligned in tech/startup circles, ~90% of startup "learnings" is taught in business school, mostly in marketing classes, because business is mostly marketing (and the 4 P's are the pillars of marketing).

Came here to say something like this. I’m a tech person. You have to teach/force yourself to love listening to and talking to customers’ problems. The programming comes later.

By ops, do you mean sales vs devops? If so I would agree.

Ops as in operations. That might mean selling, that might mean hiring, that might mean something else, but "the rest of operating a business". COO. "Devops" is a subset of the maker making it work.

I'm impressed most of the projects got to the point of functional application and the problem being lack of customers.

That's a wild success for a side-project IMO.

My side-projects average about a long weekend length in commitment before I give up. There's just not a strong enough need to overcome the effort. Given extra time, I do other things. EXCEPT right now.. I moved to a new city and have no friends and dislike my day job, so I've got some spare time and coding-energy to spend.

Great to see this post on HN front page. Joshua is a technical inspirational guy. I was lucky to meet him several times when he organised meet-ups in Apeldoorn. The problem mentioned is typical for most self employed engineers. Creating a sustainable business requires many years of dedication to just one idea imho. It’s never about the software that is part of the product. But it’s all about the problem your product solves for your customers. Creating a sustainable businesses based on an innovative software product is still not a hard scientific science. But using Problem Solving Methods (PSMs) is key for solving complex problems like creating a viable business. See e.g. https://www.bm-support.org/problem-solving-methods/ for some approaches.

Excellent link to be-support. Thank you for sharing that.

Glancing through the project ideas.

The market the author is trying to target in each of their ideas is hard to monetize without sales engineering.

Selling OS and programming language is impossible today and was hard back then without significant moat into a niche field. Think of wolfram alpha.

I suspect timing may have been an issue for Author's e-commerce idea. The craze for drop shipping and operating your own store is recent. You need logistics, manufacturing, etc on demand services to make it possible. Similar situation on payment, tax, etc side. It became much easier and hit mainstream somewhere around 2010.

The primary target for assessment tool is in edu or enterprise. Both of which are hard to get in without competent sales.

Dating and job board do not mix well. Monetizing any dating style app is hard without being a little unethical.

E2E email service is not big of a sell given the protocol doesn't support it and most people will use unsupported mail service. It is not the primary reason people use protonmail or fastmail, may have been a positioning problem.

I personally love being singularly focused on a passion project / labor of love, and try not to spread myself thinly across multiple projects. I have recently given up research-and-development type scenarios where I tinker with new toy languages, frameworks, tooling, etc

I mean it's important to explore and toy with new ideas, but the real quest is to stick with a project and see it out until its death. The caveat being, the project could end up being another ephemeral flash in the pan (depending on what timescale you cast as ephemeral).

I try to build & contribute to projects that will outlive me. Think of all your code commits on Github or other projects: you essentially write code that could last centuries, because you're contributing to something bigger than 'you' or your own pet project. This is why I love open source - it doesn't forget.

The catch I find with using fun new tools on side-projects is that you can confuse excitement in the build for excitement in the project. I can also execute far, far quicker with my preferred toolset, which is a collection of more pragmatic approaches I've collected over the years.

There's room for exploratory projects, but I think if you're taking the actual project seriously you should do it with stuff you're comfortable in.

I like to call such a list a "wall of shame", and I have my own over here: http://jeffrey.io/wall-of-shame.html

What has helped me over the years is that I view tech as art, and so these projects are only market failures. Your growth as a technologist is manifest, and it's important to see side projects as a form of practice.

If you can move past the failure label and see everything as successful at something, then you feel a whole lot better. A discipline that I have had for decades now is to write a postmortem on why I believe a project is a failure because that crystalizes my learning.

My history helped me excel as a principal engineer which put me towards an early retirement where I can now focus on my ultimate side project: Adama ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I am turning into a new kind of PaaS thing.

Here is the crazy thing: I already know that I'm making several mistakes as I have no customers and no one asking me for anything. This is an exceptionally lonely way to start a project as the OP and others have noted, but I'm enjoying it well enough.

I'm sure the name is tongue in cheek, but of course your 'wall of shame' is very much a wall to be proud of, you've been prolific and learned much.

I can relate to a lot of things he said, but one thing i used to pass through that was to dedicate myself to a bigger goal.

I've started a side project that took me some years (at least 4), a lot of perseverance, because there are a bunch of things that are actually quite boring to implement. (You actually need to create some thick skin to overcome those boring tasks that sometimes can take weeks)

Lost basically all of my friends in the process (i'm a social person actually), with the exception of a few who kind of understood it.

No weekends, working from 12 to 14 hours a day, having to mix and deal with already bigger and established codebases.. its the loneliest job in the world and you need a lot of mental balance and good mood to go through it.

But some special spice that actually helped me going on was that there is a social goal in the project and the idea is to provide a way out of the FAANG centralized and controlled world.

People are mostly unaware of where we are heading it as long they have cool gadgets to play with, and governments might only act when its to late. So while everybody is enchanted with this brave new world, the way the things are heading is actually a pretty dangerous one (and i really hope to be wrong on this).

This was a very special reason that keep me going even in the hardest parts (as for instance when i lost my dad to COVID).

Its not really finished yet as it needs some polish, but giving it needs just a little love, at least now i'm able to do interviews for steady jobs (specially now with more remote ones) and get out of this life of doing freelancing work which sometimes is not very fun.

Anyway, my point being, that maybe there's a need for something else, as in my experience, just intellectual curiosity wont do the trick.. (I`ve had some of those too)

For instance even with burnout (which i kind of postponed to the last moment), i'm motivated to go through it all to see this project have at least the (little) recognition it deserves and i don't care to have recognition myself nor i've done it to become rich, as there were much better and easy to implement ideas to that goal, but i just want to see it "on track", having a way to evolve and become a viable alternative road to another kind of future giving us back the power that is actually ours in the first place.

You need to read lean startup my friend.it will save you some years.

“I don’t start projects with a direct goal.”

These are hobbies that fail as “projects” because they aren’t projects (it sounds like they were actually successful hobbies).

Here’s the PMI definition of project:

> All projects are a temporary effort to create value through a unique product, service or result. All projects have a beginning and an end. They have a team, a budget, a schedule and a set of expectations the team needs to meet. Each project is unique and differs from routine operations—the ongoing activities of an organization—because projects reach a conclusion once the goal is achieved.

> Enthusiasm and loneliness are killing factors

Yup, I know this one quite well.

My day job is Not Programming and Not In IT, and I need it that way for my sanity. But my hobby has been coding for...35 years now? It's hard to have a few projects so far "out there" and no one IRL to talk to about it.

Got some nice folks online though. :)

Almost by definition, most new projects in software are failures. The reasons are simple.

1. Incumbents benefit from network effects in users, and integrations.

2. Due to 1, most software markets consolidate around a top player and a list of 2-10 second-tier players. The top player will hold 90% market share and the remainder will split the ~10%.

3. It costs only slightly more for a top-player to keep staying on top as it does for a second-tier player to keep being second-tier.

This all means that if you want to become an incumbent you need to be early for any market, and that market can't be a feature of an existing incumbent. A good example of the latter was the push for "Cloud operating systems" back in the early 10s. As it turned out standard linux distros worked pretty well in the cloud.

You also never know if you are early, late, or if the problem is too big until you try. The more times you try the more likely you are to succeed!

It depends what you are trying to achieve but there are usually niche corners of any market which are underserved or ignored by the incumbents. While you may never become the top player in the market you can make a decent living in many of these if you find the right corner of the market.

Of course, if your aim is to become a silicon valley bro living on ramen noodles and angel investor tears then you'll need to find a way of disrupting the incumbent, and if your plan is to do the same thing but cheaper you are wasting your time.

It's basically always one of the two that's the main problem:

1. No actual customer. You built something you THOUGHT people wanted, but they actually didn't.

2. Bad/No Marketing.

You need to talk to customers to discover a problem first, then work on fixing it. In all my time trying to do side projects I'm becoming convinced this is some sort of innate skill as I have acquaintances who seem to have an uncanny ability to spot an opportunity in just about anything. If you can pair with people like this, great!

As for marketing, this is even more key and possibly even fixes problem 1 in some cases. I've said this before, but take a look at many of these "I started a dog social media website and now I have 10k MRR" more closely. 90% of the time the author already had a blog about dogs or something similar with 50k subscribers.

To that end, I've been focusing on working on my blog :)

> 1. No actual customer. You built something you THOUGHT people wanted, but they actually didn't. > > 2. Bad/No Marketing.

I'd even say it's most always 2. If people don't want it, then your marketing just failed to attract the matching customers. Instead, there is also the case of a poor executed product. It's something people want, but can't use because it's not good enough for what it aims to deliver. I guess everyone knows those cases of software which are 90%+ matching their demand, but missing that one little detail which makes them unattractive as a whole.

I engineered my life to keep working on side projects for the rest of it, getting a low stress job with low but decent pay. These are some points I try to keep in mind when making them:

* Inspiration is the most valuable fuel in the universe: Spend some, save some, replentish.

* It's MVPs all the way up: focus on the most important tasks, prioritize the most difficult ones. If that gets done the rest is easier, but don't waste too much time on that.

* Forget about it: Let the project rest in the freezer for a few days. Revisit what the project should accomplish with a clear mind. Use it daily, suffer from bugs and missing features.

* Damn! It isn't what people want: The project might need to be oriented in another very different direction. New features might be required that will eclipse the original idea. It's depressing, but is the idea worth it?

* Get better at sales: and this is the part I'm still working on...

Is there a middle ground between the Lean Startup crowd who say you should never write any code at the beginning versus op's view of a fully functional product? I'm pursuing a working prototype but am constantly being told by both camps that I'm doing too much or too little. I don't think wireframes are going to cut it but I don't want to spend every spare hour I have on what others have already said is a lonely and sometimes monotonous existence.

That's an MVP typically, Minimum Viable Product. The most basic form of the product you can come up with, that still provides it's intended core value. What an MVP is to your product will depend entirely on how you need to sell it and how complicated the product is.

A simple product has a simple MVP, so that's easier to get to. Whereas you might not be able to afford to build a more complex product even as an MVP, so you'll want to validate it some other way before starting.

A product with an obvious, unique value add can get away with a barebones, ugly MVP because the people who want it really need it's core functionality. But if you're trying to get people to move away from existing products to yours, you'll have to convince them to switch and exceed their already met expectations. That can mean you'll need a more complete product.

In both scenarios, if you don't think you can meet their expectations yet, you might be better off with a contact form rather than failing to meet their expectations. If you do go for a less-complete MVP, make sure what you have is clean and polished, and have an obvious roadmap. You could still get early-adopters, and the more risk-averse will know to come back later but keep an eye on you.

What do you mean by 'fail'?

If you like something and make a blog about it, well, if there are others interested, they will read it. If not, they won't. Seems like nice contributions to me.

A 'Commodore 64' has basically zero commercial value, but a super cool fun hobby thing to do. Seems like you're very successful in making cool stuff to me.

From a 'business perspective', your projects tend not to be commercial or business oriented, I wouldn't expect them to go in that direction. Maybe, but probably not.

If you solve a problem for a business that's willing to pay you money, well that's a business. You'll need to get out in the world to find out what those problems are.

Otherwise, enjoy the journey of your frankly very cool looking projects.

You might want to find a project partner on the business side with some interesting ideas but you may not like it. Selling 'shoes' or 'delivering food' or 'optimising ad spend' is not always the funnest stuff to work on.

My personal projects fail most of the time, unless it is a side gig where I have to deliver to someone.

I think this is quite common, after one learns what we wanted to learn, e.g. how a tile engine works, then the interest is lost and we move on to the next challenge.

On the positive side, some of them can be used as portfolio for HR.

I've created my share of failed side projects. There's a few things that I've learned (am learning).

1. Test the market as early as possible. This doesn't need to be user conversations. Start testing the basic assumptions with product - it's a bit of an art to figure out how to do this.

2. Traction will take much longer than expected. So don't quit your day job, literally.

3. I won't build anything where the product doesn't market itself. It's too easy to make step one building the product and then step 2 is pretending to market/sell it, but pulling the rip cord after $500. So, it seems worthwhile to focus on ideas that if they work, will naturally spread.

Good luck!

Something I don’t do enough of and that seems like maybe the author might also benefit from emphasizing is getting way out of my comfort zone with my projects.

I tend to huddle in this distributed systems / commodity ML / tight C++ cluster: stuff good for scaling consumer websites but not really dead center for much else.

I need to do some hardware (or at least some embedded systems), some phone app stuff, some web stuff, and a zillion other things.

The author seems to be fairly tightly clustered around PHP/web/REST stuff. All that stuff is useful and important but focusing too much on any area can get stale.

At least for me.

There are coders like the OP, highly technical but makes no money; and then there are people like Pieter Levels, a solopreneur hitting multiple millions of dollars in annual revenue...

Pieter is a pretty attractive guy, which doesn't hurt in starting a community.

The only advice I can give op is to find another person to help marketing/grow stuff.

I also fell into the trap of making products without thinking about sale/marketing (or I thought I could do it myself). Turn out the mindset of the creator and the mindset of the hustler is widely different. I am sure many others out there can do both, but it is better for me and OP to accept that as fact and find a cofounder. You will be surprise how changing the narrative can change how customers perceive your product.

Isolation is a common problem in entrepreneurship. It takes many forms, in the author's case it was about talking about technical issues.

However, as noted by others, the primary problem he builds first, then looks for customers. It should be the other way around. I'm trying to help build awareness of this by providing a structured approach at my upcoming SaaS: https://cxo.industries

For what it's worth:

My biggest product came just from a random easy project that happened to touch a very large market and a growing user-base with a need. It was quite boring and trivial. But very annoying library and space.

My biggest project that I have spent months and months of my life, that has been very fun and challenging, has made a small pittance.

I've definitely learnt a few lessons these past few years.

The definition of success in his terms is insane I think. The bar is set so high. I would consider my side project a success if I get a ugly version running a basic thing that I designed it to do! By projects he mean actual companies/hard problems. Maybe a person who is good with highly talented people can get some success in a partnership!

The hardest lesson I struggle with is the Pieter Thiel line "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere". It is easy to see something that can marginally be improved or copied to perfection but this does not give you automatically the customer base and history that made the original work as a business.

> "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere"

Never heard this one, what does it mean?

The parent slightly misquoted it and it really needs the context.

The Silicon Valley of Iowa, is actually the nothing of nowhere. He is saying that when you are using the name of the original place to claim yours is the new place, it's more likely what you've got is a nothing of nowhere (ie the new place really doesn't matter, thus you're attempting to borrow reputation in naming in the form of the Silicon Valley of country/city/location).

The same usually goes for products/services as well. The Uber of XYZ is most likely garbage if that's how you're identifying your service. We're building the Airbnb of lawnmowers. And so on. Thiel's quote is essentially about knock-offs, copying, derivatives and how effective (or not) that process tends to be.

Elaborated quote from Thiel (from seven or eight years ago; may be extracted from his book, Zero to One, in which case it probably actually dates back to the Stanford lectures he did):

"There are a few different problems with it, one is that it is not even clear why Silicon Valley works. It is a singular thing, it is one time, one place. It’s very hard to figure out what are the factors which drive it. Is it the fact that it has good weather? Is it the fact that you have this whole network effect of people and some very successful companies which have been built over years? Is it the unenforceability of non-compete agreements so that employees can leave from one company and go and work in another in the state of California?"

"And then I always think that once you have set out to copy something you have already put yourself in somewhat of an inferior position somehow. The something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere. The Oxford of Iceland is not Oxford. So all these – Silicon Beach, Silicon Roundabout – these all sound like inferior knockoffs."

"You don’t want to start with an inferior derivative. The question always has to be, what is it that you can do that is better than elsewhere? In the London context, there is a sense that it is the most cosmopolitan city in Europe and that is probably the strength that London should be pushing towards. There has been a lot of interesting finance innovation in London and so that seems natural."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/04/the-innovat...

Another way of saying this would be "it is harder to copy something than it is to make something". For example try building a successful search engine today, to beat Google at their own game, you need to solve all this technical problems plus beat a heavily intrenched incumbent. You can point to something like duck duck go and sure they did find a successful niche of privacy aware people that want to "degoogle" their lives, but even this doesn't mean that you can just be DuckDuckGo yourself.

This doesn't always hold.. You might argue that google probably aspired to be a yahoo, but I agree itt's bad to market yourself as a konckoff of something else.

Only failing commercially. Looks like a treasure trove of work and learning that perhaps is paying dividends already in your freelance projects.

As others have suggested you might need someone to help find a match between your interests and somebody’s pain point for which they are willing to pay to make the pain go away.

Good luck!

I'd certainly be interested in working on Leita and of course using it (if the author ever sees this).

> I bought the purple dragon and obviously, when you have the purple dragon, you MUST create your own programming language.

Please read a better compiler book! The only good thing about that one is the cover.

"Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide" is much clearer even just for the frontend.

I have a severe form of autism

This idiocy needs to end. If you had a "severe form of autism" you would need institutional care.

Can you tell me how are you able to be very well rounded across the stack?

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