I spent a year building an app and failed – The story of Taskwer | Hacker News Reader

I spent a year building an app and failed – The story of Taskwer

buildingwithchris.com

76 pointskrispetek53 comments

"Build it and they will come" is almost never a winning strategy. Of course sometimes it works, you build the right thing at the right time and it goes viral, but most of the time you get crickets even if it gets to the top of Product Hunt or Hacker News (neither of which are of any importance outside of tech circles).

The right way is to talk to prospective customers first in a given niche, listen carefully to their problems, and figure out which problems are worth solving, i.e. you have the skills and resources to solve them and people will pay you to solve them. This is difficult if you don't have a network or experience in specific industries so tech people just wait around for a business person to tell them what to build instead.

Exactly that. "Build it and they will come" is one of those stories only the victors tell. My own approach was to tell everyone to go away who was asking stuff and finally give in to the most persistent person, then reluctantly build something and sell it to them because I couldn't be bothered to deal with it. This gets you a comfortable life but not rolling in cash and you get to retain your sanity, your dignity and your ethics.

Same exact thing for me. Although I built lots of things (and no one came), I also heeded a piece of advice I got very early on, that your career is shaped as much by what jobs you refuse as by what jobs you take on. You are in charge of plotting the trajectory of your future CV and deciding the best use of your time. Steady and comfortable is great, and leaves time for side projects and the occasional moonshot.

It really depends on your definition of "winning." My partner and I decided to make a small game together back in 2020, release it, and maintain it. "Winning" for me meant that it should earn $500 per year and have regular players who got the same joy from it that we got from making it. It was a really modest goal

We kept working on it over the last three years. It has just been slowly, but consistently getting better, with more players. Now it's earning $500/month

There's always the fantasy and the lure of building something that goes viral and becomes a sensation overnight, but there's something to be said for slow-and-steady, consistency, and doing something joyful!

Sure, if your aim is to build something for fun or learning or your portfolio, those are valid goals.

The OP however considered their effort a failure, because they aimed at making something that would be a successful business venture (they are not clear about this, but one can read between the lines).

Fair point. Though in my case it is also a business venture, but with very modest goals and building it consistently because I want it to exist

I guess my point is I just hope the author wasn't too quick to write off their attempt as a failure. Things can succeed after their first year, or even after their fifth

The problem I have with this is $500/month is a lot more than $500 per-month. Hear me out.

If Steam is taking 30% and uncle Sam is taking 35%, $500 is really $175. You need to earn roughly $1450 per-month to make around $500 per-month. Of course, that doesn't count any marketing/domain/asset/license/etc fees.

Everyone pays taxes so I’m not sure why uncle Sam’s cut matters; it’s going to be nearly the same as working in a regular job.

As per your math, you added them together… percentages like that are multiplicative since you wouldn’t get taxed on the fees paid to steam, so it’s really more like $227.50 in your example. Still less than half, but all your additional fees or whatever get deducted out of the big 35% bucket.

True-- but a regular job you may work 40-50 hours a week and have many other benefits (like health insurance, and so on). Most people making games (especially on their own) put in far more hours, zero benefits and a lot less money.

I have nothing but respect for people that do. I've dreamed of it. I could never pull the trigger though. I can't justify putting four to seven years in a game to make pocket change out of it.

Sure... the creative aspect is great. Having players enjoy it is great. But eating and keeping my house is pretty good too.

Sure, but maintaining a video game - depending on the type of game - could be anywhere from a full time job to a few hours a week. Is a few hours a week worth an extra $500/mo? Yea, probably. And with network effect of games, it's possible that $500 grows to $5000 over time and you really can think about replacing your actual job.

It sounds like this was a passion project, not something intended to replace a full time job, though.

> Build it and they will come

Is my exact strategy. My first startup I desperately tried to find any form of confirmation that my product has a need. I couldn't find it, nobody appeared to need what I was creating.

But I was half done and published it anyway and it was a huge success for me. Still haven't met a potential customer since outside of my customers. Also no paid ads, just Reddit, hn, ...

I think the actual problem with the approach is how much time people spent before they actually test their idea.

It's a full time gig for me, I can afford coding 2 months just for throwing the project. Wasting a year, next to working a normal job, on a MVP that won't sell is a stupid idea. But if you can built 6 ideas in that year it might work out.

Confirmation bias. For your success, how many failures are there? That is why in general "build it and they will come" is not a winning strategy. What I do instead is just find products I like but am frustrated with for whatever reason, and so I make an improved version and release it, run some ads for marketing or cold email sales, it works great because the market is already validated.

In my experience making into the top 10 here means nothing but 10k-20k visitors in the first two days.

Solopreuners have to be better focus on SEO

Unless your product depends on eyeballs, SEO is just another vanity metric.

Nonsense. No sales will convert from 0 eyeballs

With B2B sales in an industry niche it's not about SEO. You need to talk to people in that industry and you know, sell to them.

Yes there’s outbound sales. There’s also inbound too and it would be foolish to ignore them

> This is difficult if you don't have a network or experience in specific industries so tech people just wait around for a business person to tell them what to build instead

This is really not as difficult as it seems. After having done this a couple of times, I recently wrote a blog post to document my process - https://open.substack.com/pub/toluakinola/p/how-to-do-idea-d...

Hey, this is one of the first posts I've read about this that contains real actionable steps instead of bs. Thanks.

I spent a year and a half building a "startup" of my own (actually, a humanitarian nonprofit) that failed. I can relate to the author's painful emotions as he processes his experience. This emotional journey is common in entrepreneurship, but very few people talk about it, so I wrote the book I wish I'd had.

The book is titled "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal", and I mention it whenever these threads come up. It doesn't sell well, so I'm just giving it away for free.[0] I'm passionate about the topic.

Also, FWIW, although you acknowledge the mistakes in execution, this sounds like a brilliant idea.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/arauyfnkwwezbbk0cbvdp/eating-...

Thank you for sharing this

As I learned from the a blackboard when doing my study abroad year for Arabic that engrained my respect for teachers, formal or informal: من يعلمني حرفا فصرت له عبدا. Read your bio and thanks for the book, looks interesting Will download and read when I can.

google translate: Whoever teaches me a letter, I become his slave

My copy literally arrived today. Looking forward to reading it.

Ive done many projects in my life, none took off. I've got my first computer in 96 and been online around 2001. So I think i have seen the internet evolve for the past two decades. And what I have been observing ever since we left the 2010s is the rise of monopolization. The 2010s were magical years. Internet was amazing place where you could find a lot of things, communities, people... you could have made anything and you had good odds of attracting people and making it work. For profit or for fun. But ever since we left those golden year, it no longer is about the idea, or even execution. Now it is solely about how much money you can spend on advertising. The internet is too noisy and too monopolized. All meaningful services are owned by big tech. They either compete with you directly or they own services you will have to use(cloud, maps, translations...) so they will make money off of one anyway. And if you hit a unicorn status, they will give you the led or gold offer(they buy you out or make a competing service and bury you business in no time) so you are f'd one way or another, unless you have a ton of cash backing you up and even then you have hard fight against you. And it will only get worse. So good luck to all.

Same profile. I think what changed is how dependent to internet we became. Our dependency drives our need for reliable services and long term assurance that the services will operate. This need is best addressed by large companies. Make the Internet a less central part of your life and it will become fun again.

While I mostly agree with you and the sentiment (and also a bit sad about it), I want to point it out that parting mainstream, staying explorative still helps you discover cool technologies and services outside big tech.

I kinda _depend_ now on syncthing, organicmaps (openstreetmaps), and maybe even Firefox's offline translation service (just to name solutions to those concerns you also mentioned).

Maybe the common theme here is "offline" (so that you are off the loop of big tech's services), and being offline has other positive consequence anyway.

That's a sad POV. Sure it might be hard to build the next social network without a lot of ad spent (likely always was) but you can definitely build the biggest social network for let's say tee drinkers and grow it naturally within an enthusiast community.

I too built things my whole life and have years of 'failure' on my back but I live of income I make on 'niche' sites no major company is ever going to compete for. No unicorns, no million dollar business but honest money for honest work.

This is not strictly true. But if you want to "make it big," it's pretty accurate. However, as a one-or-two-man-shop, you can make a pretty good living off of "commodity software," for which there is still a lot of competition. To make money there simply requires showing up daily and maintaining the service, adding new features, etc. As you show your service to be more reliable, your small customer base will recommend you more and more, and you'll grow.

An excellent way to spot these opportunities is to see what services big companies give away for free. These companies feel threatened by these things and need MORE competition, not less (look at what happened to email hosting for a good example of what happens if people don't compete).

When I see a company offer me something for free, I immediately see what it costs (I want to understand the value I'm getting, at a bare minimum). What I see out there is a thriving economy that I never would have thought to look for if it weren't advertised as "free."

I don't think you failed yet.

I just think it's really hard to start a marketplace application like this where you need to bootstrap an ecosystem.

Read The Lean Marketplace. There's some really good pointers in there on how to over on how on how to go about the difficult task of building an ecosystem around your website.

Just have patience I think stuff like this just takes a little time.

Finally, find a friend who talks way too much and likes communicating with people but doesn't know how to build stuff. Get a business partner.

I think this could really work. I think you should go for it.

I second this. Op might be just 1 or 2 redesigns away from virality. It's a genuinely interesting and novel idea and I can see this becoming a thing, maybe with a sprinkling of a little magic fairy dust or luck. Also op is not exactly alone and screaming in the void - I remember this was posted on showHN not too long ago with lots of favorable comments so there is some awareness that op can build on (the domain name rang a bell in my head) - Im surprised op throwing in the towel so soon given this was only a few weeks ago if I remember correctly. PS: I'd suggest op should hire or partner with a designer or dev with ui/ux chops and have them revamp the site as a concrete first step

This is a classic two sided market. People who need money and are willing to sell services don’t know who you are. And people who are willing to buy services don’t know who you are. And the platform is useless unless you have both of those.

The trick here is to find a very specific niche to start with. Instead of the goal being “let me get this popular everywhere” your short term goal should be to find how to make it popular among a single existing community. Churches, mosques and synagogues are a good place to start. People in those groups already like to support each other and virtually all of them have one or more internal WhatsApp or Facebook groups where people who start a campaign can advertise to others in their community.

Feels like Mormons might be a good group to go after. They seem like they have more of an in group vibe than other contemporary sects, and in-groupier groups probably help one another more freely and more often. Their stories are kooky but I think they aren’t anti tech at all. Localized to specific areas as well.

Also people who have skills that would be best for such platform in marketing terms (stuff really in high demand) are actually front loaded with work so they don’t have need for yet another platform.

My friend thought about something similar in our country - but I told him first he would have to have good plumbers/mechanics available and available exclusively so that if you hire via that page it is actually useful for the customer.

What I have seen was that my insurance has „repair man” service as bonus and when I called them I had someone fixing my stuff in 2 days. Where if I was calling around every professional was busy and could get to me in like a month.

If you have low demand skills like „making web pages” you are not getting traction with such site and you have to burn investors money to keep in demand pros on bench and most likely it will be years to become profitable.

Hope someone find it interesting as it was a lot of writing :)

Always ask yourself as an engineer if "building the thing" is more alluring than "the thing". After you build, you have a thing that needs to be sold. As engineers, it is all too easy to be swept up building the thing without taking a step back to see will anyone actually use this? As painful as it is, my advice to the author or any others out there is if "the thing" is truly what you believe in, then you can test it out without building, anything. In this case, could the author have made fantastic Craigslist ads for a few people offering services first and checked in on the progress first? (I am slightly re-telling the story here of FanDuel than used Craigslist ads to test market sentiment before building anything). Good luck out there, all.

You didn’t need to spend months on an mvp to interview your potential customers at food banks.

I recommend reading the the mom test before you start your next project.

> And one thing is certain; talking to people is never as difficult as the feeling of loneliness when you want to say something and there is no one to listen

Man did this hit hard.

If this story constitutes failure, I think the issue was expectations. Sounds like a decent execution of something that can have real value. It can take years to build sustainable brand and get traction even after you've passed MVP, though.

Rather than shutting it down, why not let it live on? In maintenance mode or otherwise. HMU if hosting costs are an issue.

Don't build a user facing product on a hunch. Definitely don't spend a year on it. Don't base your product on an imaginary community while assuming users will magically come to you over the extremely dominant products in the space.

Do some user research first, make sure the pain point is real, and current solutions are not a good fit. Ask yourself how long it will take your competition to implement your solution. More importantly: why haven't they done so yet? Ask yourself how you will reach your users with the resources in your disposal. Can you compete in this space in terms of marketing spend?

It's good to try and learn. Ideally, fail faster.

"And that’s when a real problem emerged; nobody knew who I was" and "I felt invisible, like I was all alone in this world. I could have had the best thing in the world, and no one would care": Could not agree with you more on this - over the past many years it has been more and more important to build a digital brand for yourself and have many followers - to be networked with people and know people who can provide you with reach - something which is difficult for introverts and challenging to do now since I have crossed 50. I personally have felt this helplessness in trying to promote a couple of opensource Java libraries I released on behalf of my employer (shameless plug here -> https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-jdocs and https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-flowret). I thought I had done something of value which would be readily adopted by people after they saw it - guess what - first I have not been able to get through to a wide audience and second - I underestimated what it takes to get people out of their comfort zone and their traditional thinking. It is so difficult for people to accept that there may be better ways of doing things once they get used to a certain way. Anyway, I don't think you failed - you learnt and it is never too late to learn and do something new. Something will click eventually and I wish you all the very best.

To go deeper on the idea:

Seller wants Y, and wants to do work X to pay for Y.

Buyer has to want work X.

Unless buyer and seller know each other really well, Y doesn't matter to buyer.

So by focusing heavily on Y your growth is limited to the subset of the network that seller already has and can promote to, that also wants X from them.

If you can't bring new buyers it's going to be very hard to entice sellers to join.

Given that you'd need a lot more buyers than sellers to make this one work, it's hard to see the focal point of Y working out.

Market places are very hard. Good luck with your next product! Keep building.

OP found out that customer research and Go-To-Market are more important than engineering. Engineering is (mostly). Finding customers and selling to them is not.

FWIW this was a great write up. You are an excellent storyteller. Also the app execution looks superb, and the idea itself seems pretty good to me (but I can’t say I know much about this niche/market).

Keep building and keep writing!

Sounds like you've learned a lot of what not to do, which will be invaluable when you try again.

It feels like the only areas where a solo builder can gain traction are in B2B products, or B2C if you're riding the latest trend (crypto yesterday, AI today).

Everything else requires an audience or a ton of capital if you hope to capture even a sliver of attention. Patience and persistence may get you there too, but it's going to take more than a year.

Ah, two-sided marketplace, a very hard thing to start.

How do you defined 'failed'. If I were in your shoes, I would pivot, change, test, ask, and tweak a product. First idea usually don't work, you have to find what works, even if it means changing the whole idea. Sometimes it works from first attempt, but usually it doesn't work. It's a matter of not giving up.

I actually think this is a pretty good idea. Sort of the online version of a bake sale.

It took me 3 years before users entered my first successful app. After the first year i made barely a dollar per day. Just dont give up.

just for motivation, facebook went 7 years without selling anything to anybody

might not have been your idea or execution, just your pedigree

Not the most appropriate comparison, facebook was growing in those 7 years. They had users, engagement and daily user activity.

I think the problem is that you picked an idea that requires you to be overly-social for it to succeed, and you are an introvert.

What's an example of an idea that doesn't require you to be overly social? I would probably guess founders and sales in general requires a lot of social skills.

You can do stuff that's pure automated transactions. Stock trading, ad bidding arbitrage, that kind of thing. Of course those are pretty competitive spaces, but there are probably similar niches awaiting exploitation.

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