Ask HN: Should I quit my project and move on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I quit my project and move on?

22 pointsrsktaker42 comments

I’ve been working on a project called Expose Menu for the past few weeks. It’s basically a website that returns reviews that reference a specific menu item regarding a specific restaurant. I’m really close to being done but I’m being plagued by the thought that nobody will use it. Honestly, I don’t even know if I would—I’d have to see what the final product looks like. But building it out would require spending some money and a significant chunk of my time. And I really don’t want to build something no one wants - I’d die of embarrassment and I’d just be sad about wasting my time.

This is my first time doing something like this, I’d really appreciate any advice!

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Just ship the MVP and get feedback. Just one feature, ugly but usable and don’t spend any more than you absolutely have to like free tier level of hosting and storage, worry about scale when you hit those limits and make sure to let people pay you, have a demo period if you want but you must charge money if you want to know if it’s any good or not.

Provided it's not going to cost you a fortune in time or money, provided its not going to "wreck your reputation" etc, I'd say go for it as you're "close to being done" (hahaha - famous last words).

You will get some valuable experience and learn a lot about the process of going to market and about yourself personally too.

Go on the journey, or in your case finish the journey. The next time you get a good idea, it will no longer be your first time and you will have lessons from the is experience to draw from. You will make mistakes and by the end of this you will look back and know what you would and wouldn't do again. If you derive no other value, that by itself is a worthy prize.

Go get your hands dirty and get your first time behind you I say. Nobody builds Facebook on their First Rodeo and you won't either. Consider it an exercise to prepare you for the future.

The decision you face is not about continuing or quitting. It's about being true to yourself. True creation comes not from a desire for success or recognition but from a place of authenticity. The fear is rooted in the need for external approval. The only real waste of time is living a life that is not your own.

Great words.

Depends on the time, money, and effort you think it will take. This is why Vercel, Turso and so many SaaS/PaaS exist to enable you to build and scale... Nobody likes to get locked in, that said getting something working is better than nothing.

In terms of embarrassment, there's no inherent shame in creating something that fails. Most ideas don't work out, that's fine, it's what you learn and what you push forward that matters.

it's some best advice right here, failing is the part of journey of life. It is this experience that makes you who you are today or in future. Think of it in terms of baby steps into development, you fall and get back up again.

People want this, but you probably won't reach most of them because discovery is a hard problem.

That's okay, build it anyway.

Put your ego down and finish it. Set goals about completion of the project, not receiving accolades and making sweet user acquisition graphs.

Ship it.

Maybe this perspective will help-- even if you release an amazing product, it's still most likely the case no one will use it. Getting users (and more difficult, payers) is incredibly hard.

With that in mind, what do you have to lose or feel embarrassed about? You'll most likely fail either way, but you will never know unless you try. By shipping, you'll have accomplished more than 95% of the developers out there.

The only way it can succeed if you are determined to make it succeed no matter what, work day and night, throw away most of it and pivot into any direction after many failures but determined to make it work. If that doesn't sound appealing, then it's probably not worth it. Dabbling in something rarely produces great hits.

> I’d die of embarrassment and I’d just be sad about wasting my time.

Welcome to entrepreneurship!

Doing something hard knowing very well that it's most likely is going to be a waste of time is just part of the game.

Every once in a while, you may strike gold and make it big. But a lot of the times, you strike silver and it's just promising enough to keep you going.

Striking silver is the exact "waste of time" failure mode you want to avoid. I speak from experience when I say that I blew ~3 years of my career chasing after a product idea that hovered just at breakeven. In hindsight, I should have given up in the first 3 months and moved on to something else.

But you won't know until you release something to users. Don't give up before you start, obviously.

I've worked at Yelp and Grab (food delivery) as an engineer on ads and moderation, respectively, but never directly on the reviews team.

My sense is users want this, but no one will pay for it. Yelp does this already. Grab doesn't, but if we did, we'd do it in house and not pay a 3rd party. The human capital within these companies would be excited and capable to build such a project internally, so this would be challenging to sell b2b to review marketplaces.

Maybe, there is use for e-commerce websites that don't have an army of engineers that can diy?

I wouldn’t be embarrassed if no one uses it. There is a certain amount of luck involved anything that blow up big. Not everyone gets lucky every time, regardless of the idea, quality of the app, etc.

I also wouldn’t view it as wasting time. I’m sure you’re still going to learn a lot in the process. To “waste” as little time as possible, I’d boil the app down to the core, what makes it different, and distill that down and release it. All the other features around that which the other guys already have, can come later to round it out if it takes off.

Back in 2011 there was an app called Oink [0] that was kind of like Yelp, but for individual items. It looks like it shutdown 4 month later [1]. A lot has changed in the last decade, but I also like your idea (if I’m understanding it right), a bit better. If you’re surfacing existing reviews based on the dish, I think that gives you the ability to have actual content on day 1. Having to wait for enough new reviews on a per dish basis, like Oink was doing, would take a while and I think it would be hard to hit critical mass, so having that seed data from other sources sounds great.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/kevin-rose-oink-app-store/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-shuts-dow...

Depends on how you will feel if you don't ship it.

Will it remain a thorn in your side, like that idea that actually could have worked, and that you'll finish it later? or will you just be able to move on without second thoughts?

If the former, then ship it now, it'll fail, and you'll get experience in understanding how hard it actually is to reach people.

If the latter, drop it now and move on.

Honestly, no one is going to use this.

- you're in a restaurant, you look at the menu and think "ah I wonder what the internet is thinking about the ragout", I don't buy it for a second, but let's imagine it happens

- then you take your phone out

- then you authenticate

- then you look for that app that you barely use, what's the name again?

- then the app locates the restaurant through GPS, nice.

- then you need a way to tell your phone which dish you're looking at, will you type it? too long. Will you dictate it? in a restaurant? Will you shoot it with your camera, in a dim-light environment?

- then the app connects to other services to compile reviews, this is slow af.

- then you see an ad, cause monetization

- then 80% of the time, the app responds that no review talks about the dish you're looking at.

- and by the time you're there your date is gone. A shame, cause that ragout was pretty good.

So FWIW, I literally do this except by browsing yelp/maps reviews, and it sucks. Maps won't even let you go from a photo of a menu item to the review that included the photo.

Rest of your advice is good. But, regarding

> Honestly, no one is going to use this. - you're in a restaurant, you look at the menu…

IMHO, you’re making a lot of assumptions, the primary being that it’ll be used while in the restaurant. Why not at home, whether you’re planning to go to a restaurant and trying to decide if it’s worth or just ordering a take out. How about planning a party? And so on.

There are several definite use cases, of course that doesn’t mean it’ll be successful, it’s just that it’s not clear but that no one will use it. Only post launch data will tell you.

You don't seem to be looking for advice on whether the idea is viable or not, but I guess I do wonder where it would be relevant. I tend to intentionally characterize a place by all of their menu items; if the fries suck for a reason that doesn't seem to be a one-off, I'm perfectly fine just never ordering there again, and that's also what I look to reviews for. I don't personally look for others' nuanced opinions as much in terms of flavor on a per item basis because I don't think people are critical enough of what they pay for, but I do look for things that are more objectively disagreeable, like consistently poor service, high price to quantity and quality ratio; things that form broadly disagreeable trends or give me sense of what type of place it is, and those are all things people are sufficiently if not too critical of. I do however look for photos of specific items, because I think it's actually somewhat useful to judge food by their book covers, so maybe that's the kind of thing I'd find helpful, but I'd have a hard time thinking of why I'd pay for it, maybe ad supported.

For example, I went to a brunch place recently to meet some friends, and I was skeptical it'd be any good for some reason, maybe I just feel like brunch is a scam for people who don't care. I looked at the reviews, and pretty much confirmed my suspicion based less on the specifics of any particular item, but on the way food was generally presented and priced. So I went anyway and paid too much for not that much mediocre food, and tempered my expectations accordingly. Any comments on the food could have just been "my food was ___", it wouldn't have mattered what I got, it was all arbitrary food meant to capitalize on location and people drinking (what do the photos show me? Is all food paired with a drink? Maybe people aren't there for the food).

All that said, everyone's a bit different, I'd maybe poll people on Reddit, it's uniquely positioned for people to comment on specific subject matter that's important to them. See what the vibe is.

There's two ways to look at it.

If the wind is out of your sails, and you've learned the "interesting" parts of the problem, then you may choose to move on to the next problem with "interesting" parts.

However, the other side of the coin is that you don't know what it takes to ship something until you ship it. And there's just a ton of detail that happens when shipping. It's one thing to build a table, it's another to level it, sand it, finish it, and wax it.

As they say 90% of the time of a project is developing it, the other 90% is getting it ready for production.

That final part is an important feather to have in your cap.

That doesn't mean this is the project for it, it could be another project. But just know that there's a gap between being "done", and "shipping".

Launch it first and get feedback. Just think it as a preparation for your next project.

If you can solve this problem then you have solved entrepreneurship. Really you need to start to promote the project (as you have done here) and start to gather traffic to your site, while it has a minimal feature set. If you over-engineer and over-develop to get it "perfect" you'll just waste time that could be spent on another idea. Launch the most basic version and get links going to it from blogs, facebook groups (etc) and other established websites.

Even if you publish the best and most useful app in the universe, if nobody knows it exists then does it really exist?

Keep in mind that if you are publishing reviews (or regurgitating them) you should also have some insurance in place for product liability. Other businesses get a bit annoyed if someone says bad stuff about them and in the case of review that's stuff you didn't write, but are still publishing.

It probably won't be successful, such is the nature of these things. If you're trying to pocket some money off this thing, really your only path forward is to get a utility patent and then stir up enough noise that Yelp or Uber or someone buys it off you. It's a long, long road ahead with a fat pay off at the end but 99% you lose your time and money. 1% of the time you walk away with a few million if you created a big enough dirt storm.

Not trying to discourage you, but you should know what you're getting into.

I’m being plagued by the thought that nobody will use it.

If you don't finish it, nobody will use it. If you do finish it and nobody does, so what?

building it out would require spending some money and a significant chunk of my time

Working is the hard part of working on ideas.

I really don’t want to build something no one wants

Wanting to build something is the reason to build things.

I’d die of embarrassment

No you won't.

I’d just be sad about wasting my time

Inefficiency is the luxurious reward of creative work. Good luck.

>It’s basically a website that returns reviews that reference a specific menu item regarding a specific restaurant.

The seems like an interesting concept at least. I think you probably need a better name and some idea how to market it. I think you should use the same data so instead of 'what are people saying about x item at y store' or be more like 'which store has the highest rated y', same concept but easier to market.

You're holding yourself back. Ship a terrible version you KNOW isn't valuable and realized your fear isn't that bad, get experience shipping something, and maybe even get feedback that helps you decide to continue or not.

If you're super worried about "maybe nobody will use this thing" then that's great - next time start with validating that people DO want a thing and that you know how to reach them.

No one uses anything unless you find a way to market it.

If you are building, spending and expecting anyone to automatically use it I would stop. Your product is only one part of a successful release the other part is figuring out how to get people to use your software. Many of us don't care and publish for the joy of releasing. Changing your mindset would make any project you release successful.

Good reasons to work on a personal project – It helps you build/hone skills. The work is exciting for you, and something you enjoy doing. It gives you a creative outlet. The final result is something you can be proud of.

Bad reasons to work on a personal project – You expect it will get tons of users and gain broad adoption, and will consider it embarrassing and a waste of time if it doesn't.

Having tried to start a company and fell flat on my face, it was one of the best learning experiences in my life. I’m back at big corps now and I feel like my scars are a wealth of knowledge. I’ll probably try again some day, blessed with the experience of failure.

I’d go for it. You are better off embarrassed and learning than safe and stagnating.

> It’s basically a website that returns reviews that reference a specific menu item regarding a specific restaurant.

The more fundamental problem with reviews is:

A) People have shit taste in food (grandpa who can't taste salt anymore and the family in BFE where every Sunday dinner is at IHop shouldn't be reviewing food)

B) Food is inconsistent

Health Department reviews of restaurants however, is a great indicator of quality and care.

An even more fundamental problem is in trying to judge something completely subjective like how good food tastes.

I assume you believe you have good taste in food and I very well might find what you think is good to be terrible. It is not impossible the majority finds what you think is good to be terrible too.

My experience is that the only way to know if I like a dish is to eat it and reviews are completely useless.

It’s not the actual fact of quitting/not quitting that matters here (so it seems to me).

But your attitude and personal outcome from this.

You can be equally happy or miserable, learn valuable lessons or feel time wasted in either case.

And i bet it depends on whether your decision ultimately reflects your real motivation of starting it.

Think about it.

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Make the information easily accessible to customers. But actually sell the categorized review data to the restaurants themselves. They will appreciate the feedback/info and can afford to pay something for it on a recurring basis.

What prompted you to build the site in the first place? Does that desire and reasoning still apply?

Whether you stop now, or complete and "ship" the project, what will you have learned? That's probably the most important question.

I just think that it’s way too fine grain to be realistic and wouldn’t use it personally. I’d save your energy for something you’re more sure of.

You need to integrate it and sell as b2b. Users certainly wont pay for this, but maybe tripadvisor or food delivery will? It's easy to ask

Quit and move on. Nobody will be using your website to get reviews of a particular item.

Now if it was a mobile app with which you could scan a menu and based on the location it would immediately know which restaurant and through AR show you reviews of the food overlaid on the menu image coming through the camera along with "notes", now that is something people might use.

Edit: for consumer apps, if you cannot get to the aha moment within 2 - 3 seconds, shut it down.

The only embarrassment should be feeling embarrassed.

Focus on what makes your app different, cut out the rest and launch.

Your username is risk taker!

Take the risk!

Actually, seriously, how did you come up with the idea, and did you test it with anyone?

Always see what's out there first. And don't get cold feed because someone else made something similar, or identical, such as Oink [0] made by Milk [1]. This example shows that all these can be true: app is useful, app has some users, app fails, somehow make $15 mil off of it. \_(ツ)_/¯

Build and use stuff for fun. No room for ego with software hobbying. I use Foursquare/Swarm and now none of my friends do but I have a blast with it.

Post your Github repo to get feedback!

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-shuts-dow...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-rose-joins-google-2012...

WineNDine[0][1] was the highest-profile iteration ca. 2016 — around that time the broader trope of "A Social Network for Pet Owners"[2] was making the rounds as various versions of "Instagram for [niche] Influencers"

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170609232551/https://www.winen...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/wine-n-dine-is-a-meal-revi...

[2] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html#:~:text=For%20examp...

There is no shame in building something that doesn't sell. You'll likely build tons of apps which don't work before making money.

It's a nice idea, simple to execute an MVP on tech side - but you need a truckload of money to reach customers and sell it.

Unless you get significant adoption you are unlikely to be profitable.

Do you like marketing and sales? Are you good at it? This will be the bulk of the work that makes or break the product.

If you are not ready to do that, you need to decide if you want to build it for the pleasure of building or for getting into the rhythm of shipping - both are valuable goals.

TL;DR: you won't make money with this.

Honestly, I think you should quit. If you're not excited about it, then you're not going to like working on it anyway — even assuming that it takes off. And you could be spending the time and money on something that you're more excited about instead.

Some reasons I could be wrong: if you're actually excited about it, but the potential embarrassment is clouding your judgment. Honestly, nobody cares if you have a failed project. Or even a failed startup. I've watched people blow seed rounds on things they were passionate about but couldn't get traction with, and they don't have any regrets. And more importantly — nobody else really cares. Try to think about why you started building it in the first place. Do you still care about the problem you're solving?

One more thing — I've been pitched this same idea multiple times over the past 10 years (some seed-funded, some bootstrapped). Not saying that it's a bad idea, but it's not clear what's unique about your iteration that would give it better odds of success than previous attempts. In my opinion, it suffers from the "not 10x better" problem. If I want an awesome burrito, it's not that hard to find an awesome burrito place without going through item-level reviews. And if I want the best item on a menu, I can usually ask the waiter or go through some of the reviews (Google sometimes highlights certain menu items).

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