To count as a startup you:
- You launched a website or - You turned on Stripe payments or - You formed a LLC or Corp - You started paid advertising - You got 1+ paying customer - You raised $1+ dollar from outside funders
2. notion backups service [2]. launched in late 2021, total sales $100k, while still growing ~60% YoY. in hindsight, I should have picked an adjacent niche, since this business is technically difficult and not as easy to sell as a Notion site builder, for example.
3. churn analytics for stripe [3]. got accepted to the stripe marketplace, but still haven't gotten a single customer because I haven’t marketed it much. I use it daily and it is very helpful. for that reason alone, i don't want to kill it.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210515005206/https://tryhexade...
btw, your docs pages look malformed; seems like markdown metadata slipping into the page content: https://boxwatch.app/docs/api/authentication
Failed projects though?
Probably in the 30s-50s number now, including my latest project which I spent 6 months on - almost all my spare time.
Still pushing what has now turned into a pet project, serves many free members, but none that feel its worth paying for.
1. Getting paid to pay for text based on content was extremely difficult, and there's a reason things like Blendle didn't work out.
2. UK investment into B2C startups is minimal compared to in the US, since the former tends to be a lot more... substainable than the moonshot focused investment landscape in Silicon Valley.
3. While I had some experience as a web developer at various agencies, I wasn't really technically skilled enough to implement the kind of features and systems I'd need for a system like this.