Ask HN: How Many Startups/Projects Have You Failed At?
How many startups / startup projects have you worked on that have not been successful? Just trying to compare.
1 2-5 6-10 11-15 15+
1 2-5 6-10 11-15 15+
Many of them didn't get off the ground because we couldn't secure the basic distributions. Here is a list:
ProjectPY - a digg/reddit clone but much saner. This was the first project. We failed because we never tested the market. We took too long to go live.
ProjectTF - a derivative market for daily t-shirts. Didn't work because we couldn't work out/secure a deal in the back end.
edgeyo - a marketplace for startups and entrepreneurs, kinda like a public secondmarket + angellist. We worked 3 years on this, but ultimately got to nowhere. A lot of effort was wasted on this. Too much burn out too. We took a break after this. ZOMBIE
SpellTrade - A novel auction for Magic the Gathering cards. Think of options exchange for MtG cards. This was at the height of Jace the Mind Sculptor. This one failed because we needed to bootstrap the market, and tried to talk a few LGSes into doing it. Everyone got the idea, but no LGS was willing to take the risk of holding magic card stock for options. This is an example of waste: we built everything in preparation for the LGSes to come on board (they were happy to come on board)
Strangers for Dinner - This was the first project since we killed edgeyo. Kinda liks zokos, but for dinner parties. Over 2000 people signed up. But planet Earth is really really really big. It was very difficult to match people whose preferences were 5-10km from themselves. ZOMBIE
That felt good somehow. I feel we've learned quite a bit
http://socialstrategist.com/2008/10/28/news-armada-post-mort...
http://socialstrategist.com/2010/12/04/lessons-learned-from-...
Haven't written anything for the third yet; we may still use the tech & assets from it to move in a different direction.
Failure is frustrating, but I've learned a ton from the work each time, and way more rapidly than I have through anything else I've done.
Don't give up.
complete waste of money but taught me what failure tasted like and i learned ALOT about how not to start a business.
This time I have 2 going at the same time, with my partners more on the sales and money side than technical side. I hope to be successful this time :)
Those two things seem to be...disconnected...to me. HelloBar worked, I guess, though...
Working on another. :)